April 20, 2008

• Spring Break Into Romance: A reminiscence

  "Spring Break Into Romance"

  A "reminiscence" by Michael F. Nyiri

  "The First Day of Spring"
  A poem by Michael F. Nyiri
  March 20, 2000 7:58 p.m. mst

  The search is finally over and the bloom is back on the rose
  My tears have fallen ceaselessly and true love has shown me her face at last
  I cannot find the proper words to express the feelings rampant in my wounded heart
  As it heals with an ointment applied only with the most expert of care
  The time it took to find the springtime seems to have taken forever
  I lay my red and rusty eyes upon the face of love, and beauty means more now
  Than ever wast in all lives past, save that when we, my love and I, existed in memory's bower
  Alone together without questioning, but that was long ago,
  And now with birds achirping outside her window,
  I go to a place of perpetual springtime,
  Where winter trees lose the frost
  And the hope of summer's promise is brought by her sweet smile.
  All spring days past are but a blur,
  With resounding music heard only by me
  Yet now Spring's excellent music can finally be heard by all.
  Because my queen bestows upon me now that pure rare flower of her being,
  And fresh tears fall like subtle rain upon the barren fields of memory,
  The lost forgotten pains of love's yearning are about to fade forever from feeling
  The hole is wholly filled and beauty, truth, and passion cry a clarion call for me.
  Words are simply not enough to puncture the happiness and elemental belonging that I feel.
  Words can only hint at the purity with which my muse empowers me.
  I knew her, yes, but we have never coupled till now,
  As Spring bursts forth in a fever of growing, garroulous goodness,
  And as the words fall like rain from my lips,
  Praising and pursuing the pulchritudinous visage which has been shown me,
  I will stop, rest upon the path of perfection,
  And blow a kiss to my Queen.
  SPRING forth and let me love, as never have I loved
  Life has never been filled with as much beauty as now I behold in her presence.

  
  The murmurings of spring turn a young man's heart to feelings of romance. With the budding of abundant floral displays heralding the end of winter doldrums, the ecstatic minds and hearts of humanity burst forth as fervently with love. During Springtime 2000, at the dawn of a new millennium, romance was about to bloom bright for me, and then fade quickly and quietly, during the second year of my "internet lovesearch." The romance was short and intense, and resulted in one of my rare intimate couplings with another human being, and also one of the better vacations on which I've traveled.  In late summer 1999, the first lovesearch had ended dismally, when I found the object of my romantic notions was not really interested in a relationship at all, and wasn't even separated from her husband, and still lived with him, dousing my hopes for a relationship pretty quickly. Immediately after I came back from the two week vacation to Nantucket, Massachusetts where I had thought I would meet my beloved in the flesh, I began again, undaunted, with the second internet lovesearch. Within a month, I'd displayed my personal ad on Yahoo Personals again, and Regina, a divorced artist who lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was one of the gals who answered my call this time.

  I was approaching the age of 47 in 2000. Regina was a bit older than I, at age 53. She emailed me a photo, and though she was a bit older than I had expected, she looked nice enough to meet, after we had corresponded via email for almost half a year, and I felt that we had a connection. The other correspondents with which I connected during the second lovesearch weren't as interesting to me as Regina. Our correspondence never really got torrid, but I was inspired enough that I felt we might have a chance at romance.  At least Regina was unmarried. She lived in a 35 foot long travel trailer in a moblie home park in the middle of the desert with her big dog and little cat. Because of my experience with the first lovesearch, I wanted to make sure that she would be able to move to California if we hit it off. The fact she lived in a travel trailer instead of a house or mobile home was a plus. She said she could attach the trailer to her Chevy Pickup dually pretty easily. She worked as a nurse's aide, but only part time. In the six months prior to our meeting, she sent me links to photos of her paintings online, and I thought she was a vibrant artistic type, with whom I might be able to cement a lifelong yearning for a muse and soulmate. We decided to meet in person in New Mexico right as the first buds of Spring 2000 began to pop into bloom.

  I bought a round trip plane ticket to Albuquerque, and stepped aboard the plane with little hesitation and a lot of expectation, even though I'm always preaching that one shouldn't have great expectations, because if disappointment happens, it will be all the more disappointing. We had conversed on the phone, as well as corresponded via email, and had said all we could to each other without physically meeting, so the meeting was the logical next step in our burgeoning relationship. My first disappointment came when the plane landed, and I perused the small sea of waitng faces at the end of the escalator looking for someone who resembled the photo she had sent. When my eyes caught sight of her face for the first time, she looked like a "grandma" to me. I hadn't really begun to feel as if I were getting old myself in my late 40s, but the lines on Regina's face showed her age. I would find that her life had traveled a lot more rocky path than mine, and it showed in her face. The initial disappointment faded quickly, as we spoke to each other in person for the first time, and then got to know each other over the course of the next week.

  Regina's life had been hard. Her father was a sailor who was seldom at home. Her mother had been an artist and painter who died young, and her father remarried a cold natured and strict woman who believed that artistic endeavors were ungodly. Regina and her sisters stood in a circle watching her stepmother burn the family's and her mother's art in order to cleanse them of sin. Regina was betrothed in an arranged marriage, and her husband was cruel and abusive toward her and their children. She eventually divorced her first husband, and met another man, who turned out to be a drunkard and layabout. Her art was her escape from her reality, and eventually she and her second husband were divorced as well. She bought the travel trailer and moved many times before settling in New Mexico, to be near her father, who had retired from a life at sea and wished to get as far away from the ocean as possible. He had passed away the year before I and Regina began our correspondence.

  I wrote Regina many poems, even creating for her a website dedicated to our romance. I composed "The First Day of Spring" for her one afternoon while slumming in her trailer while she was at work. She had been quite a beauty in her youth, and yet she had been somewhat hardened by her life's circumstances, and seldom smiled. She confessed to me that she had not in fact painted anything in a long time, and was really very lonely. We spent a lot of time together, visitng downtown Albuquerque, the Sandria mountains, the Tinkertown Museum, and the Petroglyph National monument. When the week was up and it was time for me to get back in the plane for the flight back to Los Angeles, I cried profusely. The spring had claimed another victim. I felt I was in love for good, and missed my Regina before I left sight of her.

  In the ensuing months, we made plans to live, if not together, at least near each other. She had never been to Southern California, but she was willing to take up stakes, inflate the tires on the trailer, hook it up and head to someplace to which she had never been, because she loved me, even though we had only known each other online for a little less than a year, and had only spent one week with each other. It was decided that in May I would take another flight out to Albuquerque, but this time on a one way ticket. We would pack her up, straighten out her finances, and head out on the road to California. Since we were going to travel across Arizona, I suggested that we vacation for a bit at the Grand Canyon and Painted Desert. Because of my enthusiasm for both this new relationship, and the chance to see the Grand Canyon, I didn't realize Regina's growing disturbances concerning the move. I lent her a lot of money to get her things in order. We had to fix her truck, which had been disabled for a while with a bad transmission. We had to insure that the trailer was able to go across three states. We had to pay her back rent for two months on her trailer space.

  I was flush with cash during the time, and started to see my savings disappear, but this didn't bother me. I was in love. I treasured Regina's company, and felt that as soon as she got to Southern California with me, the financial problems would go away. To work as a nurse's aide, one has to be certified in the state in which one works, and Regina had neglected to obtain certification in California. I still don't know why she did not do this. In the few months between March and May, when I flew out to prepare our move, I was to make sure that she had a place to move into, and she was going to make sure she had a job prospect in California. I rented the first month on the trailer space in a small mobile home park in Long Beach, where I work. There were no spaces available in Torrance or Lomita, where I live. When Regina told me she still didn't have a job prospect, I shrugged off this minor setback. "You'll be sure and get work when we get you settled," I told her, "There are lots of hospitals and medical centers in Long Beach. I'm sure you'll get work right away."

  The trip to California began. I had brought my ever present video camera, and while shooting video of a lone hawk flying over the painted desert, Regina noticed that I always seemed to be looking through a camera lens. She knew about my barely two year old website, of course, and "met" me online. I'd never been across this part of Arizona, and there was plentry to keep me interested in the scenery. The trailer was unwieldy, and we managed to have a flat tire sometime before we got to the Grand Canyon. We waited in the trailer while a replacement tire was driven up from some out of the way town. Although I still don't own or use a cell phone, I had purchased one before leaving on this trip, and it came in handy when the tire blew in the middle of nowhere.

  The Grand Canyon is really nothing but a big hole in the ground, but it's the most majestic big hole in the ground on the earth. Regina didn't really want to stay too long, and didn't want to hike at all. She began to get a bit upset and testy. For me, I was on another adventure, but she was having a life crisis. She felt as if she were alone with the trailer on the road, without a place to call home. I figured that she was driving her home, but she really had grown accustomed to living in Albuquerque. We had a conversation, while parked in one of the trailer campgrounds around the Grand Canyon, where she asked me if I loved her, since I wasn't acting too romantic. Truthfully, although I was very happy to be in a relationship, I still was a bit worried about our age difference, and was possibly projecting more excitement about being on vacation than concern about moving her. Of course I could see nothing wrong, and I'm not really the lovey dovey type. Neither was she, but early relationships take a while to grow, and perhaps a "vacation" isn't the best place to embark on a journey to get to know someone. I was a bit taken aback that Regina brought up the subject that I seemed to be "unromantic" because truthfully, I was beginning to have doubts that our relationship was going to work out, and yet I knew it was too late now to do anything about it, since we were half way to California.

  My plan was to move her into a mobile home park near to me, so that we could see if our relationship would work. Regina seemed to abide by these plans, but got more homesick than she had planned. The vacation part of the trip ended quickly, because I could sense now that Regina was feeling rudderless. I took as much video footage as I could from around the rim of the canyon, and then we checked out of the KOA Kampground and headed on toward California.

  Such was spring and the budding of romantic ideas. The love that might have bloomed did not really have a chance. Regina backed her 35 foot trailer into a back space in the small mobile home park in Long Beach, and we started our life together yet apart. Regina still had to find work. She had begun to paint again after meeting me, which was positive for her. So she had a hobby to keep her busy when I wasn't around. She met a few of her new neighbors in the Long Beach trailer park,nice people who welcomed her with open arms. Because she wasn't working, I had to borrow money in order to pay her trailer space on top of my rent. After a couple of months of financial and settlement problems, she was eventually forced to prepare the trailer for a final move back home.

  The major hurdle to our happiness proved to be Regina's lack of employment. It seems that nurse's aides in California are paid lower than in New Mexico. Without certification, Regina finally got work, but for low pay and only part time. I work early in the day, and get off at 3pm. I began a routine of eating lunch at Regina's, and spending a bit of time with her when I got off work in the afternoons, but I ended up at home, leaving her alone in the trailer park almost 20 miles away from me. I introduced my new lover to my friends and workmates, and Regina and I went out on dinner and movie dates, but for the most part, until she could get full time work, we had to really cut corners. My ideas of separate living arrangements for each of us while we formed a better bond between us wasn't working out at all. By the end of her second month in Long Beach, I was borrowing more and more and she was finding it more and more difficult to stomach living in Southern California, where she felt she was being rebuffed at every turn. As an artist, she even tried to get work as one of those portrait painters at Disneyland, but her artistic style was much more individual than what Disney was looking for.

  One Sunday morning, I called Regina to ask if she wanted to go out to breakfast, and over the phone, I was met with sobs and erratic behavior. I drove over to her place right away, and Regina regaled me with problems she was having paying her taxes. She implored me to help her. I didn't know then that she owed over $10,000 in back taxes. She was not organized financially at all, and as the day wore on, I began to think I had shoveled myself into a hole from which there was no escape. We had our very first real quarrel. I accused her of not telling me the truth about her situation. There was no way I could afford to help her with this latest financial burden. I might have been too blind to the idea of romance, and maybe spring had clouded my eyes to the facts for too long. I left her after a few hours, confused and abused. I had no idea what steps I was going to take next.

  Monday I drove to work as usual, and called Regina prior to leaving for lunch. When I arrived at her trailer, she told me to sit down, and she admitted that she had not told me the whole truth. She was planning on getting the trailer back in traveling condition, and going home. Our "experimental" relationship would have to end. I commisserated with her, and though I knew this was the best solution to both our problems at that time, I was hesitant to let her go.

  I cried rivers of tears, but I saw clearly through them that things for me and for her would be better when we broke up and got back to our individual lives. She promised to pay me back the money she had borrowed from me. With the prospect of her having to pay the government so much, I doubted that she would be able to get to me, and I told her I wasn't expecting anything in return. We parted friends, and I still felt bad that the rose bloom had fallen from the bush before the full effect of it's power could be realized.

  Spring finally faded into summer, and the days got longer and hotter. My relationship with Regina really never had a chance to fully bloom, and the petals shriveled up in the heat. I still have great memories of this confused talent however, who at least was able to rekindle her artistic spirit while we were together those few short months. She was in physical pain from sciatica. She complained a lot. She didn't make solid plans, and wasn't forthrightly truthful. She really didn't have anyone at all and I failed to be her savior, and really didn't want to throw any more into her money pit when I saw what was happening. The tax situation was the straw that broke the camel's back, and that was the last straw for me, so it was brave of Regina to decide to sever our relationship before common sense told me she was only really using me for what she could get. And she had lost her home by moving out to California.

  After she moved back to New Mexico, I lost track of her. The phone number failed to connect. Her websites were taken offline. Two years ago, I finally heard from her again. She called me and told me she should be able to begin paying me back the money she borrowed soon. I never received another phone call or further contact after that. Another spring came and went. And another. I wish her all the luck and happiness in the world, and bear her no ill will. In fact, I still shed tears when thinking about the Spring of 2000 and the fair Regina.

  ---

  The photo of Regina is the one she sent me before I met her. She didn't like to have her picture taken. The other two images are some of her paintings, "Portal" and "The Cup." She gave me "The Cup" and this hangs above my bed to this day. This reminiscence has been written about at other times on this blog in other entries, but not this comprehensibly in one entry. I wrote this to satisfy the topic posts for both The Featured Grownups blogring topic "Spring" and the Kween of the Queens blogring topic "Best Vacation". The relationship began to bloom in Spring of 2000 and while driving back to Cali, I had one of my best vacations seeing the grand canyon. MFN/ppf  EDIT: 6:35am. Even though this is a long entry, I feel remiss in not providing a couple of links. HERE is a video cobbled together from footage taken in Albuquerque. HERE is "Painted Desert Dreams" which was only my second "internet movie" from 2004, utilizing footage shot in Arizona and New Mexico. Lastly, HERE is a link to the final poem I wrote for Regina, "Confessional" about our breakup. It puts into words exactly what I was feeling as we parted ways.  MFN/ppf.

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