***The Moment–For Laura, Class Of 1968 Somewhere  

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

 

A while back, a couple of years ago, my old friend, Peter Paul Markin, my old merry prankster yellow brick road “on the bus” 1960s summer of love, 1967 version, friend came over to Cambridge to visit me. While we had met on Russian Hill in faraway San Francisco and had spent plenty of time on that blessed coast getting to know each other (and learning to stay clear of each other’s love interests of those moments) we were both New England boys, he from North Adamsville on the other side of Boston and me from up in Olde Saco in Maine. We additionally were    both rough and tumble working-class guys and so had drifted after what seemed a lifetime of roller-coaster rides back to eastern shores.

We had in earlier times lost touch for a while, although we never really lost contact for any extended period, but since we now had the time and the inclination to “cut up torches” we have met often lately to speak about the old times. At the last meeting Markin told me (I never called him, and I do not believe anybody else did either except his mother and maybe his first wife, anything but Markin foregoing the pleasure of paying deference to that three-name Mayfair swell moniker he tried to hang on a candid world back in the days) that he had recently gone up to my old home town to take “the waters.” He had been going up to Maine periodically when he was on the East Coast since I had introduced him to Perkin’s Cove down near York in the summer of 1969  (where he met that first wife) so that was no surprise to me . 

Of course any reference to Olde Saco automatically brought back memories for me of Olde Saco Beach, and of Jimmy Jakes’ Diner where my old- time corner boys and me hung out looking, well what else do corner boys do, looking for girls. Especially girls who had a little loose change in their pocketbooks to play Jimmy Jakes’ be all to end all jukebox with all the latest platter from Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, and Bo, Bo Diddley don’t you know. But that is not what I wanted to talk to Peter Paul about just then, although I said we might get back to that subject, the subject of what is now called, if you can believe this, classic rock and roll, some other time. What I wanted to discuss with Peter Paul, why I had asked him over, was how he had, happily, stayed with Laura, his soul mate, all these years. (Laura, decidedly not being that first wife met up in tourista York which is really not Maine but a suburb of Boston if you want my opinion.     

Now this was no abstract question to him on my part for I had just completed the final proceedings on my third divorce. (I won’t even list the number of other non-marital arrangements that I have been part of over the years. I only count the official ones, the ones that cost me dough.) So I was frankly jealous/perplexed that Peter Paul and Laura had survived through thick and thin. And here is what he had to say on the question to the best of my recollection:

 

“Josh, you know as well as I do that in the old days, the old California care-free days that we were nothing but skirt-chasers. Yah, we might have been “on the bus,” might have been hip, might have seen “the woman question” a little better than most guys what with the divvying out of equal work on the upkeep of the bus. Might have been down with Captain Crunch and the “new age” and all that stuff, But I don’t remember a time when a good-looking woman passed by, young or old (old then being maybe thirty, as we both laughed), that we didn’t do a double-take on. And wish we had been fast enough to come up with a line to enhance, enchant, or whatever it was we thought we had in those days. I don’t know about you but I still do those double-takes and I bet you, you old geezer, do too.  [Josh laughs] Jesus, remember Butterfly Swirl when you and I first met and how you “stole” her right from under my nose, Or that high time drug night when the Captain “married” the pair of you and gave you the electric kool-aid acid test as a wedding present. [After the Butterfly Swirl incident, fast New England boys friends or not, we both agreed to avoid future turf wars.] You just never got over the rolling stone thing. And before Laura I was strictly a rolling stone too.” 

“I have already told you a few times about how Laura and I met, met in high civilization Harvard Square, down in some lowdown cellar bar when I was in my vagrant lonesome cowboy minute and we connected from the start. From the Ms. Right start I called it. And about that first handshake that sealed, sealed maybe for eternity, that we were going to stick. Stick like glue. You know that part, that ancient history part, so unless you want me to repeat it I want to talk about sometime  more recent that will give you a better I idea of what I mean. You’ll like this one too because it involves that last trip up to Olde Saco”   

“As you damn well know ever since you brought me up there when we drifted back East after the bus broke up every once in a while I have to journey to the ocean, back to our homeland the sea. It’s part of my DNA, just like yours. It is in the blood and has been since childhood. Usually, over the last several years, I have headed farther up to Olde Saco for a couple of days at a time alone as a change of pace. When I announce that I am going Laura usually asks, “Is it a retreat or a vacation (probably meaning from her, and the cats)?” We usually laugh about it. This time I was going an extra day since we were not going to take a week’s vacation in Maine this summer.”

 

“You also know that Laura had just retired so I figured that she would appreciate the time to collect her thoughts (in between playing 24/7 duty playing house servant to the cats). A couple of days before I was set to go up she said she wanted to come up for a day. I don’t remember whether she said it sheepishly or not, this short-haul Maine thing being “my time” but I said, straight up, “come on up.”  And she did. No big deal; we walked Olde Saco Beach which she liked (new to her since we usually went to Wells together on Maine trips), went to have a seafood dinner and then had our traditional ocean ice cream.”

“That last stop, that ice cream parlor stop, was at Dubois’ on Route One. Was that there when you were a kid? [Josh: no]. Do you know what the place had? It had an old jukebox that played all the old tunes from the 1950s. So naturally we had to, or rather Laura had to, play a few memory lane tunes. I don’t remember them all, except some dreary Rickey Nelson thing, she insisted on playing to rekindle some school girl crush she had on the guy.”

“And that experience, or rather one moment in that experience, explains why we have stuck, stuck like glue, all these years. There we were sitting in some white plastic chairs eating our ice cream (frozen pudding, good frozen pudding for me, butter pecan for her) Laura, looking like a school girl, swaying gently back and forth to the music with a great big winsome smile on her face, a relaxed smile that said it all. I ask you what guy in his right mind would give up that smile, or the possibility of that smile, short of eternity.”