William Henry Millais: Steps in a Garden (1860)

"This wholly unlikely story is absolutely true."

The Invisible Husband

"It’s late. I’m going to sleep.
You’re still awake in an airplane seat.
I’m here, holding fort,
the cats are tended and the house is dark.
I’ll see you late Friday night,
too late for supper, I’ll keep the bed warm,
let yourself in if I couldn’t keep my eyes open."

If any of my songs have proven emblematic of an era, this one certainly managed to became that. It reliably induces the feelings The Muse and I carried with us throughout our grand exile. I wrote this song as a birthday poem two years into that exile, when an unsettling sense of permanence had settled into our separation. Bankruptcy had torn us from our home and we felt the absence as if it filled the guest room in the tiny house we were renting for big bucks, clear across the country. We felt uniquely incompatible with our surroundings, aliens struggling to survive, heads down, working hard to maintain ourselves. We lived on a then unlikely dream. While The Muse dedicated herself to her pop-up career, doing work uniquely unworthy of her, I kept house, or held fort, as I describe it here, largely invisible to both myself and the alien world around me.

"It’s early, you’re still asleep,
I killed the alarm clock so you could keep dreaming.
Paper’s in, your coffee’s on,
I'm thinkin' 'bout writin' you another new song.
This one describes you and me,
I’ll be invisible, you’ll be on the Metro,
and we’ll be bound together by some texting in between.

"Some dreamers pass in the night,
Others keep on scheming, regardless of the daylight!

"Like an Invisible Husband, like an impossible plan,
some day we’ll settle into a garden
and never see this city again.
If someone can get there, well we’re the ones who can:
An invisible husband, his immutable dreamer,
and one impossible plan."

The seeming impossibility of us ever leaving that city behind us fueled an impossible plan. I'd learned that plans should strive to be at least possible to achieve, but the exile offered the opportunity for me to learn different. The utter necessity of that impossible plan very slowly dawned on me. If we could not (yet) attain our heart's desire, we might instead create a placeholder for it, one within which our true wishes could take up temporary residence, or even permanent, if really necessary. One never knows. We knew the garden into which we dearly wished to settle, but circumstances prevented us from living there. We didn't know but what our separation might well be permanent, as we could not see the end of our exile for most of its eventual twelve year duration. For ten of those years, this song reliably elicited the tears of longing that never once left us during that interminable period. It also seemed to spark the determination necessary to keep us going, encouraging us to never give up pursuing that impossible objective.

"Weekend, you’re sleeping in
I’m up writing as the day begins.
Cats fed, I finally read
the rest of that story you’d recommended;
It got me thinking again,
of all the good we did back when we were working,
when changing the world was our daily routine."

We were exiled from more than our garden, but also from our life's work. Before we went bankrupt, The Muse and I were business partners. We traveled the world plying our trade. After, we set aside that part of our lives. She managed to reconstruct a follow-on career, but I had become a hard-core unemployable by then, seemingly suitable for nothing but writing and keeping house and yard. I was very, very good at keeping house and yard, but felt that work well beneath my earlier efforts. My writing became more prominent, but my primary focus fell on maintaining The Muse's focus. I'd drive her to The Metro in the morning and fetch her home for the supper I'd make each evening, and make sure the larder was adequately stocked, so she wouldn't have to attend to that maintenance overhead. She sustained visibility in that world for both of us. My job involved being just as invisible as any butler, there only when needed and otherwise absent. My work included maintaining the impossible plan which fueled our peg-legged existence. Even through the darkest days, that impossible plan never once left us. It sustained us.

"Some dreamers pass in the night,
Others keep on scheming, regardless of the daylight.

"Like an Invisible Husband, like an impossible plan,
some day we’ll settle into a garden
and never see this city again.
If someone can get there, well we’re the ones who can:
An invisible husband, his immutable dreamer,
and one impossible plan."
© 2011 by David A. Schmaltz, all rights reserved

We returned from exile nineteen months ago and settled back into that garden, hoping to never see that city again. Our sense of surprise and delight that our impossible plan actually came to fruition has not left either of us for a moment, nor has the certainty that this was and now is that garden of which we longed for so completely that it manifested. I some days miss those exile days. Time separated and aspiring can prove inspiring. To be the holder of such a dream seems ennobling in ways having achieved it does not. On the other hand, though, I now hold prima facie evidence that impossibles do, indeed, sometimes come true, because The Muse and I once achieved a truly impossible plan. This fact now underlays our entire existence. Where we were once suspended upon the thinnest of imaginary air, we now reside upon the firmest of soil, that of a garden at the end of the rainbow where the seemingly absolutely impossible finally comes true.

This wholly unlikely story is absolutely true.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #SetTheory, #PureSchmaltz