A Life Resolved

I have always loved the voyage of life while showing little regard for safety or sense of a destination; I was always the sauce on the dish but never the main ingredient. Still there was one dish I wished to be at the very heart of it Sheila was my oldest dearest friend from primary school, who I’d known since the age of eight and with whom I had always maintained the deepest, open yet strictly platonic relationship. “Once you are married, never look over the garden fence” I said to her when we were in our thirties during my second marriage and she had nodded saying, “You are so wise” which was embarrassing, it being the last thing I ever was: I had loved and longed for her since our early teens but such was her appreciation of my earnest monkish exterior I never had the courage to admit my feelings .Life being what it is I married two women over a span of thirty five years producing four children but always, as I fell asleep, dreamt only of “My Sheila!” who, in my waking hours, did nothing but shake her head at the passage I had walked through life. She saw something in me but I don’t know what it is In our early seventies our friendship deepened because her husband Eric, a profoundly decent and caring man who became my dearest friend and football terrace comrade ( how can that be I hear you ask), died in his sleep and in her desperation she turned to me for comfort which I gave without limit, always aware of the boundaries set by kindness .On my eightieth birthday she suggested a joint celebration: did I mention we shared the same birthday, and whispered, one wheelchair driver to another, “Why don’t we get drunk one last time.” I have never reject that celebration so there we were on the veranda of our shared care home sipping from an illicit bottle of port slipped in by her eldest son earlier in the day when she said, “Do you think it’s time we got married?” and I said “Yes,” and who could not love her for the question. She took a lost man and brought him home!