When you’re young you’ll walk barefoot across lakes of ice. When you’re young you believe love will stay, like a pet. But the older you get, the more you discover how little you know, until finally you wonder how you survived and you pick up the pieces and retrace your steps and you see that back then you had lost your damn mind.
Not much online on the origin of that phrase. It’s a curious one. Usually a thing’s either lost or it’s not. If you lose your car or your keys, they’re somewhere. You would never say so-and-so is losing his car keys, the way you might say he is losing his mind.
In our high school days, Adam and I would cruise around town in his ’64 Impala, a cream-colored car with red leather seats. I wore a thrift store leopard skin coat. Adam would wear his black leather jacket. We sure thought we were something. Lily, Adam’s mother, was once movie star pretty and he had her looks. I used to tease him and say he was prettier than me. They lived in the suburbs in a white frame house with a fireplace in the living room and a large round table by the window in the kitchen.
We were all there one day; me, and Adam, Alan and Andy, his two older brothers. Lily, of course and the radio was playing. We were all eating barbecue, all drinking cokes and a song came on called “Family Affair”.
From ’71, it's a song by Sly and the Family Stone. A song we all knew and a song we all liked. We were nodding our heads in time to the music, lip-syncing along:
…and you can’t leave ‘cause your heart is there
and you can’t stay ‘cause you been somewhere else
you can’t cry ‘cause you’ll look all broke down
but you cry anyway ‘cause you are broke down…
it’s a family af-fair…
it’s a family af-fair…
When the song was over, Adam’s mother looked up with a puzzled expression and Lily, ever-so-earnestly, asked:
Why were they singing about a family of bears?
Coca-cola spray came out of our noses, burst from our mouths and misted the walls. We laughed so hard that it actually hurt. It became almost frightening. As if we might be not be able to stop, or we might laugh so long we’d forget why we started.
Andy pulled himself together just long enough to explain it to Lily. Andy was the oldest, Alan was in the middle. Adam was the youngest, the baby of the family. By the time he was born, the other two boys were almost in their teens. Sometimes people thought Lily was Adam’s grandmother.
We loved each other the way teenagers love, and we broke up and made up countless times. It was more like a habit than love at the end, and Lily was less Lily as the years went by.
I decided to call him when I heard Lily died. I was always fond of her. I wouldn’t tell this to just anyone, Adam said, but much as I miss her, it’s a relief, in a way. He said that she wandered the halls late at night, talking to ghosts, or to someone, at least, only she could see. Crying and laughing and no idea why.
As I listened I remembered when I was eleven, when my uncle died, my father’s brother. A violent death. A suicide. I’ve written about it before, many times.
I remembered my mother walking through the door. My father telling my mother what happened. Both of them crying, heaving great sobs and I stood across the room, watching and thinking, there’s nothing I can do.
There was no magic word. No joke I could tell. I couldn’t even…you can watch people suffer, is all you can do. People you love more than anyone in the world, and you stand and you watch and you know in your heart how small and unnecessary and useless you are.
You’ll walk barefoot and backwards across lakes of fire. You will hold onto hope as if it were a pet, when you know that it won’t take a second away; I wondered sometimes. A family of bears. Still you try not to cry ‘cause you’ll look all broke down. And you cry anyway, ‘cause your heart is still there.