When I was young, I was tempted once or twice to love boys with bad hearts. One of these boys was driving me home one evening and we came upon something dead in the road. In the headlights, piercing the night, I could see fur and a crumpled mess. I didn’t think much of it until, in an instant, the boy hit the gas and ran over the body with a grin and a whooping holler. I was startled but giggled away the criticism that was about to show on my face. I pushed the animal and the gunned engine to the deep recesses of my mind with a reminder that he didn’t actually kill the animal. It was already dead. He only ruined it further with pleasure.
To my 16 year-old exploring self, something way down inside started to solidify into clarity about a good-hearted man. I desired kindness; but, sometimes, to learn what you really want and need, means feeling the opposite first. It means knowing a cruel heart or, a careless heart, that won’t know what to do when real suffering comes except to run you over. It’s not that I wanted a boy who would stop and pick up the animal and put it to the side of the road or bury it or whisper blessings over its wrecked body. I wanted what my husband does when he sees death on the side of the road: an expression of grief or a quiet moment of sadness because sometimes we get what we don’t deserve.
In San Francisco, we ride the trolley through a crowded street of souls of such variety that my eyes rove in every direction. The vibe is full and deep like a festival even though it’s a plain old weekday. My husband, Chris, is living out a childhood dream inspired by a Rice-A-Roni television commercial. Truly, all the best dreams of Generation X and our great knowledge of the world have been built on tv ads: our first childhood stories teaching us to consume the world if we could get close enough to all it offers. Chris is standing on the running board of the trolley with our oldest son moving through a street lined with Victorian houses, skyscrapers, and drugstores; a citified village. The business of life is on display everywhere in San Francisco.
We arrive on a corner that I will never be able to name or find on a map again unless it is the map we make of our stories. A woman came up to us as soon as we hopped off the trolley as we gathered ourselves and the kids together on the sidewalk. She looks at Chris and says, “you need to buy me a sandwich.” Her face is deep sienna colored and scarred and her eyes are a bit wild and she seems in motion though she is standing still. She does not exude calm, but she isn’t erratic either. She just seems a bit unmoored.
My husband looks her in the eyes and speaks to her as if she were his co-worker asking him to pick up some lunch on his way out of the building. Chris thinks she wants to walk together to the sandwich shop, but then she begins a complicated request for gift cards. Hearing his inner alarm starting to sound, he takes out his wallet and gives her twenty dollars. Her smile blurs her scars for a moment and she raises her arms in ecstatic celebration. She turns to our oldest son, Jack, and with fervent authority says, “you have a cool ass Dad.”
She says it with a little accusation as if Jack were harboring thoughts that his dad was something other than amazing. She could see Chris’s good heart blinking like red neon from miles away as he got off the trolley. I guess I could always see that good heart blinking too which is why I always kept coming back to him.
In college, I always drifted back to Chris. He was never a drinker during those years but on his 21st birthday, he went all out. We were both on campus but we weren’t together as a couple anymore. We talked some and hung out a little when we wanted the company of home and the comfort of shared stories that went way back. We were each other’s best nostalgia, instant throwback and black and white photographic retro love always.
I wanted to believe we would be each other’s favorite forever no matter what else we found or explored. Late into the early morning hours of his 21st birthday, he called me on the payphone in my dorm and told me to meet him on the steps of a nearby academic hall. He was newly drunk and very sweet, all emotion and impulse. He said things to me that I wanted to believe about our future and about our shared destiny. He was all poet and Romeo at the balcony. He was an 80s power ballad and MTV video. He was Andrew McCarthy coming through at the end of the movie to be the romantic hero.
I knew that morning I would wait for him and marry him. It’s like we both knew we needed to date other people, so we would never wonder and wander inside the long years of marriage. I am so grateful to our younger selves, stumbling towards “till death do us part.”
And just like that, a landmark is made in life on the steps of a college campus. A late night declaration to stretch out and wait through wild oats and new experiences; to look for each other on the other side.
Which is what we did. We all have these landmarks, places pulsing with personal meaning on the maps of our lives, wonders not of the world but of our own making. Street corners and plain buildings where we take new shape.
We have lots of pictures of us from our travels in front of famous landmarks and natural wonders, but we are voyeurs and consumers of sites that don’t belong to us like the Golden Gate Bridge. When she comes into view for the first time, I am immediately impressed that she looks exactly like she does in pictures.
The bridge is quickly transformed from architectural wonder to memory card for us. The mystic in me believes we will leave a part of ourselves in the bones of the bridge like we do in all the places we walk and pass through. Like an Aboriginal version of the Dreamtime but on a manmade structure instead of a path through earth. The Aboriginals believe that the first ancestors walked out across the meaningless, blank earth and with each footfall, knowledge and memory were released from the newly created paths. As we walk in the footsteps of others, we release their stories and ours.
The bridge keeps the love of a father. The bridge holds the hope of a pilgrim, the traveling wishes of the searcher, and of course, the anguish of a jumper as well which cannot be denied in the lure of these rails, these heights. The bridge must also keep the bad hearts of boys who have crossed it and scattered their stories afar.
When we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge on that warm summery, sunny day in July with the neon heart of my husband gleaming like the bridge itself, we left a track of goodness.