Hopeless

I am hopeless.

I do not mean for this to sound similar to the meladromatic opening lines of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, where:

'Just exactly what that good life was—the one I expected—I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between. I am no longer married to X, for instance. The child we had when everything was starting has died, though there are two others, as I mentioned, who are alive and wonderful children...

'Twelve years ago, when I was twenty-six, and in the blind way of things then, I was offered a job as a sportswriter by the editor of a glossy New York sports magazine you have all heard of, because of a freelance assignment I had written in a particular way he liked. And to my surprise and everyone else's I quit writing my novel and accepted.

'And since then I have worked at nothing but that job, with the exception of vacations, and one three-month period after my son died when I considered a new life and took a job as an instructor in a small private school in western Massachusetts where I ended up not liking things, and couldn't wait to leave and get back here to New Jersey and writing sports.

'My life over these twelve years has not been and isn't now a bad one at all. In most ways it's been great. And although the older I get the more things scare me, and the more apparent it is to me that bad things can and do happen to you, very little really worries me or keeps me up at night. I still believe in the possibilities of passion and romance. And I would not change much, if anything at all. I might not choose to get divorced. And my son, Ralph Bascombe, would not die. But that's about it for these matters.

'Why, you might ask, would a man give up a promising literary career—there were some good notices—to become a sportswriter?

'It's a good question. For now let me say only this: if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

'I believe I have done these two things. Faced down regret. Avoided ruin. And I am still here to tell about it.

'I have climbed over the metal fence to the cemetery directly behind my house. It is five o'clock on Good Friday morning, April 20. All other houses in the neighborhood are shadowed, and I am waiting for my ex-wife. Today is my son Ralph's birthday. He would be thirteen and starting manhood. We have met here these last two years, early, before the day is started, to pay our respects to him. Before that we would simply come over together as man and wife.

'A spectral fog is lifting off the cemetery grass, and high up in the low atmosphere I hear the wings of geese pinging. A police car has murmured in through the gate, stopped, cut its lights and placed me under surveillance. I saw a match flare briefly inside the car, saw the policeman's face looking at a clipboard'.

If only I now knew what hope was, or what to hope for, or if I knew what to hope for, could only reach it, like a child reaching out of its crib towards some object clearly seen but completely out of reach given its current capacities.

Please, no arm chair psychiatrists. I meditate. I pray. I am gluten and dairy free, I eat organic vegetables, and yes, even then, if I want, permit myself a glass or two of wine or bottle or two of beer, so not stuck on perfection.

But these are my feelings, and right now, it is my wish to record them.