Four Years

Today is our four year wedding anniversary. Life is really busy this week, so our anniversary is in danger of being totally overlooked. But because it was such a beautiful day four years and because it's been such a blessed four years, and because last night our son kick me so hard while I was hugging BJ that he felt it on his own stomach, I can't let that happen. I don't have the time or energy to write a long sappy post about us, so I'm going to let a poet do it for me. Here is a poem that reminds me of you, BJ, and on the second to last line, replace "Carol" with your own name.

Neponset Circle
by Jack McCarthy

for my wife Carol

The Quincy Group liked to let Charlie drive
on their commitments. He was a careful driver
who stayed a mile or two under the speed limit,
and he liked to leave a little earlier
than other people would. But he never
missed a turn or had to ask for directions,
and he always got the group to the meeting on time.

Sometimes a newcomer would ask
why they had gone from Quincy to Brockton
by way of Neponset Circle—
there are back roads into Brockton, short cuts.
An old-timer would whisper, “Shhhh.
We know that there are quicker ways.
But Charlie likes to drive.
And he can get us anywhere in the world—
as long as he starts from Neponset Circle.”

Most of us see the world as spiderweb,
all sorts of intricate connections,
alternate routes. A good sense of direction
and a roadmap and we’ll always find our way.
Charlie saw the world as a bicycle tire,
spokes crossing each other here and there,
but all of them running straight
to and from one heart.

Over the years a lot of people got
too impatient to put up with Charlie’s ways—
he wouldn’t even take the Squantum Street cutoff,
they’d complain, and you could almost
see Neponset Circle from both ends.
Sometimes they’d maneuver themselves
into the front seat to make suggestions:
“Charlie, this right goes straight to Hancock Street.”

“Yup, I know,” he’d reply, and cruise right by
while the oldtimers puffed serenely in the back.
“Insane,” the dissidents called Charlie, or “anal,”
if they’d had Psych 101; “compulsive.” As though
we all weren’t. But he drove them crazy.
Eventually they’d take their own cars,
thank you, trust their own internal compasses.

And for awhile, they would look good.
They’d leave a little later and be
sipping coffee smugly when Charlie’s cadre
of oldtimers and newcomers sauntered in.
But sooner or later they’d get lost
and a commitment would go by the boards, unmet,
and if it was a prison or a hospital,
there’d be no meeting there at all that night

and that was serious. The oldtimers
knew that it would happen because all
the alternate routers had to go on
was their own sense of direction.
Charlie had Neponset Circle.
Carol, my love,
you’re my Neponset Circle.