By Nick Belperio
The statue was naked, and I was nine, and the first thing I thought was, Her privates are out in public. In the hush of the art museum, I snickered like someone much younger, like a seven-year old. Mom squeezed my hand, nodding at a small plaque on the pedestal.
“Can you read that, honey?” The first word was easy.
“Eve,” I said and sounded out the rest. “Dis…con…SOLE…eight?”
“Disconsolate,” she corrected, emphasis on the second syllable.
“What’s that mean?”
Mom regarded the statue for a long moment: Eve towered over us, her smooth face pitched heavenward, a serpent twining her ankle. “More than sad,” she said.
“Why’s she so sad?” I wanted to know.
“She was thrown out of paradise. Cast out forever, along with her husband. That’s why.”
I looked it up when we got home: Adj., without solace or consolation; hopelessly unhappy. Mom was right: more than sad. Nine year-old me shrugged, filing it away with the other big words I knew that no one ever used.
It came back to me thirty-some years later, during a typically sclerotic Los Angeles rush hour. As I inched homeward on Pico Boulevard, I glanced in my rearview mirror: the driver of the SUV behind me was crying. Really crying. White man in a suit, early fifties I guessed, and in the grip of a strenuous bout of weeping. A woman in the passenger seat offered him tissues and awkward half-hugs, but he looked beyond comfort. This guy was distraught. Keeping my eyes on traffic was nearly impossible.
He bawled openly, his face red and contorted, the mouth gaping; every once in a while, you’ll see an infant wail with such abandon, but a stranger? An adult? Never: It seemed extravagant, to give yourself up to sorrow so fully, a luxury somehow, and also unseemly: this level of sadness usually insists on strict privacy. He’s losing it, I thought. Why doesn’t he pull over? Doesn’t he know people can see him?
And that’s when the word first returned to me. Presented itself, fully-formed:
Disconsolate, in my mother’s soothing voice. Ah, yes. Disconsolate, adj.: illustrated—dramatized, in fact—right here in my rearview. I watched greedily, until I turned my corner and left them. I don’t remember the make of his SUV, or its color, or the color of his hair; but the anguish on that guy’s face, how pure and unmitigated it was, has never left me. That I remember. I recognize it, now that I’m in my fifties.
Aging, it seems, is an accumulation: of years and then decades, of course; of knowledge and experience, sure; of grudges and injustices and mysterious bruises, certainly. Sometimes aging brings wonder—Can you believe we’re in our fifties? my friends and I whisper incredulously. We’re officially middle-aged!—and sometimes a kernel or two of wisdom. Always, though—always—it brings loss of some sort; we know this. Losses come, and sometimes they multiply; adulthood stacks sadnesses and disappointments like firewood out back. Look at your friends. Look at mine. Continue Reading…