The Free Spirit

Reflections; 1976 (Part One)

The year 1976 started out as most other years, with New Years' Day. We spent it at home celebrating with Margaret, who was happy to be involved with our family the way she was. Occasionally, she still had her judgemental moments, but most of the time, she caught herself and apologised. Some of them I just let slide simply because life was short, and as the saying goes, it can be difficult to teach an old dog new tricks. The kids went back to school shortly after the New Year, in what would be the second half of Elton's last year of school. It was definite - he would be graduating from high school that year. It was strange, really... my son, my seventeen-year-old son, would be graduating from school and taking his first steps into the real world without us by his side. It was bittersweet, really. Elton came from two very determined parents who stopped at nothing to achieve their dreams, so we had confidence that our boy was going to do great things. It sometimes feels as if just yesterday, he was a newborn, born four months early and resembling a slightly uncooked chicken inside of a big glass box. He surprised me with motherhood, but he was perhaps the greatest gift I had ever received.

Phil's thirty-seventh birthday came, preceded by little Pippa's fifth, and I called on both days but was left to leave them a voicemail. He never called back. And then on the first of February, Don's thirty-ninth birthday came, and the children and I surprised him in bed with a cake and birthday breakfast. "Here's to your last year of being in your thirties, love!" I said to him playfully. We had a fun day for Don's birthday. Because it was a Sunday, we were able to spend the day with him. A storm was brewing and it was a bit windy and chilly, so we stayed inside and watched old episodes of The Twilight Zone and had a fire in our living room fireplace. Later that evening, when the kids and Margaret had gone off to bed, Don and I lay on the living room floor together, waiting for the embers to burn out.

"I can't believe I'm thirty-nine," he said suddenly, breaking the silence. "I feel like just last week, I was twenty-nine. Where the hell did my thirties go?"

"Same place mine went, my love. Time just ate them all up," I said.

"Just feels weird... I ain't so sure I like it much. All this time movin' so damn fast... Real life needs to slow down." I couldn't help but chuckle.

"Tell me about it. My youthful days were spent making a difference in the lives of women and young men who were going off fighting a war they didn't want to be in, now I'm sitting here lying on the floor while my eyesight deteriorates and my bloody hips get bigger."

"You did great things in your youth, honey. And your hips ain't gettin' bigger. I'll bet ya still fit in your weddin' dress," my husband said to me, and I turned my head to look at him.

"Dare me to try?" I asked him, and he smiled.

"Well, if you don't put it on, I will, and I'll probably tear it," he told me, and we raced upstairs to the closet, where my wedding dress lived hanging inside of an old plastic case. I pulled it out and glanced at it, a dress from an age that has long since passed us all. That dress was created before the Great Space Race really took off, and before the Vietnam War began. It preceded four children born in the span of twelve years, and witnessed many major events in mine and Don's lives. It was a relic of the summer of 1958, the year of the Space Race, the bell-style 1950's skirt, of Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers, Wham-O's Hula Hoop, South Pacific and Gigi, Panorama, the year my son was born, and Dion and the Belmonts' 'Just You', the song that Don and I danced to at our wedding. As I held the eighteen-year-old wedding dress up against me in the mirror, I suddenly heard the distinctive saxophone in the beginning of the song as Don played the old 45 on the portable turntable we had. "What are ya waitin' for?" he whispered to me.

I quickly slipped it on and he zipped it up for me in the back, and I was amazed that it still fit me. On the dresser beside the mirror was a photograph of myself and Don on our wedding day eighteen years earlier. I compared it with my reflection - the bride in the photograph was young, glowing with vitality, round cheeks, eyes glistening with innocence, a smile full of hope. She was twenty years old, and she had everything she could possibly want. She was a midwife, married to an incredibly handsome man who was a rockstar, didn't know that inside of her, a tiny human life was starting to form. The bride in the mirror was much older, with aging eyes peering through circle-rimmed glasses and wrinkles beginning to form at her eyes, her cheeks were no longer round, and her eyes no longer glistened with innocence. The bride in the mirror had birthed four children, had become a world famous singer, had become a protestor who preached the word of peace and spoke against inequality and war, had been shot at a protest, and witnessed the downfall of the man she loved's career. She was thirty-eight years old. The bride in the photograph would someday know the woes of the bride in the mirror, but she was lucky she was so young. "I look so... different..." I said finally.