Try a Little Tenderness

And today Maine steps into the oven. Here on the northern coast we'll reach 90 today and tomorrow, which is probably not as terrible as where you are, but is terrible enough.

It's my 28th wedding anniversary today. Long ago, in 1991, Tom and I were married on a torrid morning in the Saylesville Friends Meeting House in Rhode Island, and then had a small reception in my parents' front yard. Our entire wedding cost $1,000, which even then was dirt cheap. We were 26 years old-- friends since we were 19, partners since we were 21.

My older son turns 25 next week, so these ages all seem especially tearful to me now.

But today, here we are, still together, in sultry Portland, Maine, in a small hot shabby-sweet midcentury house, peering toward the American dream of what? I'm sprawled out now on two chairs in the gravel-weed side yard, trying to soak in the only possible cool of this coming day, wondering what dreams even mean. That sounds grumpy and pessimistic but isn't meant to be. What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that dreaming turns out to be secondary; the what is finds you and there you are. And if you're fortunate, and I don't know why I have been, the what is has become a habit of care and companionable elbowing, comic talking about the cat, happy-sadness about small beauties; and it all seems to get more precious and poignant as breasts sag and memory spools.

I've been working on a poem-letter to Otis Redding, and yesterday I listened again and again to my favorite Otis song: the live Monterey Pop Festival version of "Try a Little Tenderness." The lyrics are a thin reflection of the performance, which you should listen to, and cry over, and dance to, and cheer, yet even in their inadequacy they are a lesson in the push-pull of what if and now.

Oh, she may be weary.
Those young girls, they do get weary
Wearing that same old miniskirt dress, yeah, yeah
But when she gets weary
Try a little tenderness

You know she's waiting
Just anticipating
The thing that she’ll never, never, never, never possess, yeah, yeah
But while she's there waiting
Try a little tenderness