Ron Singer

Hindsight

 

“Myself, I’d guess that, in most people, hindsight ranges from about twenty two- hundred to twenty two-thousand.” Thus declared Ben. All three of us had ordered the Soup-Salad-And-Club Sandwich Special.

We were sitting at the usual corner table in the usual diner. Only in our beverages, already served, and in who had ordered dessert, did we differ. Ben had a fountain ginger ale; Robert, a bottle of beer; and I, Dave, an iced decaf. 

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When the food arrived, we put the conversation on hold, and tucked in. Within a few minutes, Ben and I were halfway through our sandwiches; Robert, about two-thirds. Since he was the one who had ordered dessert, he was considerately bolting the Special so that Ben and I would not have to look on enviously while he ate his pie a la mode.

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As soon as he finished his main course, Robert took up the conversational thread. “The reason so many people have such poor hindsight is anatomical.” I could guess where he was going. “It’s because their heads are up their asses.” The waitress brought his dessert and two extra spoons.

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Ben and I laughed politely, and we changed the subject to a staple, health woes, which aging men like us sometimes call “organ recitals.” Long since having realized how lugubrious this topic can be, we attacked it with rapier-like wit. Even Robert’s update on his early-stage prostate cancer produced gales of laughter, only some of which was feigned to make him feel good. I’m not sure whether the fact that Robert provided the update with his mouth full made Ben and me more or less sympathetic.

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As usual, we divided the check in thirds. Robert left the tip. Out on the sidewalk, when each of us had stated our intended business for the afternoon, we shook hands and went our ways. Robert was headed for a concert hall to buy a ticket for a future event, which cost less if you bought it at the box office. Ben would pick up a book he had on hold –a biography of Ulysses S. Grant—at the local library branch. With no plans, myself, I declared my intention of “walking off lunch” in the pleasant park alongside the river.

 

As I dodged the joggers and dog-walkers, I tried to maintain a decent pace, for a foolish reason. Slow walking is a sign, I had read, of diminished testosterone. I also revisited Robert’s anatomical quip, the logic of which I questioned. If one’s head were, indeed, stuck up one’s posterior, would it not most likely be facing inwards, which would validate Ben’s estimate that, instead of twenty-twenty, hindsight was twenty two- hundred, or twenty two-thousand? If, however, by some fluke, the head faced outward, twenty-twenty might be correct, although what was seen could just as well be called foresight as hindsight. Like most jokes, Robert’s did not bear logical scrutiny. 

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I came by my nitpicking tendency honestly. Until my retirement a decade ago, I had worked for thirty-nine years as a paralegal. Before you judge me (“why didn’t you go to law school?”), I’ll offer a few facts in my defense. I was well remunerated by both of the white-shoe firms where I spent all those years, and since my late wife also had a steady income (as a high-school Biology teacher), and we were childless, we were never seriously tempted by greed.

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Ten days after the lunch, already gearing up for the next one, which was four days off (“Get a life!”), something happened that got me thinking about hindsight again. It had often struck me that, at least in our culture, old people spend many hours, both waking and dreaming, in the past. How many error-ridden documents has an irate partner flung onto my cluttered desk in my nightmares of this decade? (Or did that dream start while I was still working? Who can remember?)

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Although I have foreshadowed what happened that evening so much that a pandemic or nuclear war might seem anti-climactic, the anticipated event was only a phone call. But what a phone call! You might say it was my past calling. To get to the point (“finally!”), I’ll try to reconstruct the conversation.

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“Is this David Rothfarb?” asked a male voice. I was alarmed, because the only people who so addressed me were telemarketers or long-lost relatives. 

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“Who’s calling, please?”

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“My name is Charlie Esserman. I’m Anita’s kid brother. You probably don’t remember me, but we met at our house when you came to pick her up for a date once. We lived in Bayside, Queens, in those days.”

(He was right: I didn’t remember him.) “I was only four or five, then, and …” I cut in.

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“Well, no, I can’t say I remember you, Charlie. But I do remember your sister. How’s she doing?” 

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A whole relationship flashed before my mind’s eye. Anita had been my girlfriend during our junior year in high school. It was one of those passionate adolescent affairs of the 50’s –i.e. it had gone from spin-the-bottle to my attempts to get my hands inside her underpants. In those days, Anita was “a good girl,” and I was a timorous young fellow, so she had won the battle. By the end of the school year, we had moved on to new partners. 

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My memory of Anita reached its climax (no pun) when, two years later, as a freshman on my all-men’s college debating team, I visited her all-women’s college in Vermont. After the debate, in which I distinguished myself by mumbling (the girls –women-- won), they gave us a wholesome dinner, followed by a square dance. To my surprise, even today, Anita had then pretty bluntly invited me to share her bed for an hour or so, until our bus was due to leave. 

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Despite my ineptitude, that evening marked the beginning of almost a year of bliss. We exchanged passionate letters in which we bared our (uninteresting) souls, and during two vacations, we again managed, in 1950’s parlance, to ”sleep together.” The relationship ended sometime the following year, with a letter of regret: she had found “someone else.” I never learned the bastard’s name, but I assumed he was someone from her hippy-dippy crowd. At nineteen, I had not yet learned to be a good loser.

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This is where the hindsight comes in. By the time of Charlie Esserman’s surprise phone call, my long-embedded idea –my hindsight-- about Anita’s post-college life was a projection of that first wonderful evening, and of our subsequent relationship. After I learned from a third party –I forget who—that she had moved to California after graduation, memory set her up as a flower child and proto-feminist. 

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Over the decades since then, I had pictured Anita moving from relationship to relationship (with partners of both genders), and earning a bare living as a teacher of yoga or dance, and/or as a school-bus driver or car mechanic. Meanwhile, I imagined her pursuing her passions, such as radical politics, assisting battered women, and/or unionizing farm workers (which, by the time we had graduated college, 1962, was already under way). I went so far as to picture her with long hair, and dressed in billowing flowered skirts, sandals, and worn-out flannel shirts.

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My guess as to why Charlie Esserman was calling me now was an extrapolation from this imagined history. His improvident sister must be in some sort of trouble --probably health or money trouble-- that he could not handle, himself, and somehow I was on his list of people whose help he might solicit. If that seems like a wild guess, even before the call, my hindsight about Anita’s life had been a shaky edifice, resting principally on the foundation of the single night of the square dance. Twenty two- thousand.

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As soon as Charlie hung up, it occurred to me that my speculations about Anita’s adult life were a projection of how different we had been, even during the halcyon days of 1958-59. Perhaps, I had romanticized her biography because mine was so conventional. At least, I had not imagined the poor woman as a terrorist or mass murderer! 

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To return to the solid ground of the phone call: 

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“Mr. Rothfarb, I’m sorry to say that I’m calling with some sad news. I’m afraid that, last night, after a long bout with lung cancer, Anita passed away.” 

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I sighed, but did not reply. He proceeded to add a few details –recurrence, brave resistance, etc. Then, he informed me that a memorial was scheduled for the following afternoon at his house in Mamaroneck. 

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My reaction was to think of an excuse. Why? Obviously, I had not seen or heard from Anita in more than half a century. As I mentioned, I also dislike the fact that many old people (myself, included) spend so much time in the past. Possibly for this reason, over the years I had declined several invitations to funerals or memorials for friends and relatives. 

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Having run through these ignoble thoughts, I sensed that I should not keep Charlie waiting any longer. I could imagine him glancing anxiously at the time on his cell phone, and calculating how many more dotards he still had to call. 

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“I’m sorry, Mr. Esserman, but I won’t be able to make it.” I trotted out my favorite excuse. “I’m afraid I have an appointment with my oncologist tomorrow. She’s so booked up that I probably couldn’t get another one for several months.” 

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“Oh, I hope it’s not… Well, I’ll …” 

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I owed it to him to make the closing easier. “Please don’t worry, it’s just a routine check-up. I appreciate your having thought of me.” Before I could sign off, curiosity interrupted. “But I would like to know something about what Anita was doing all those years. I mean, we’d been out of touch for...”

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He obligingly replied that he would send me the link to an obituary in a local California newspaper. After I provided my e-mail address, we finally signed off. About an hour later, the link arrived. The obituary was, shall we say, surprising. In fact, it confirmed Ben’s joke: my hindsight about Anita had been twenty two-thousand. I will summarize the obituary, which, like the life it depicted, was very dull. 

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Anita Phyllis Esserman-Bates had been a successful realtor married to a ditto plastic surgeon. The mother of two blah-blah children, the grandmother of six blah-blah grandchildren, she had spent her “spare hours” at many blah-blah activities, which included gardening and (yes!) yoga. She had been an active member of the local Welcome-Wagon team for (fill in the number) years. And, of course, she would be missed by her blah-blah family and the colleagues and friends who had been blah blah enough to know her. 

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That would teach me to guess how people turned out! And I could not even blame my misconceptions on an old man’s muddle, since I had maintained them for so long. The only, threadbare silver lining was how funny I would make them seem to Robert and Ben over lunch, in four days.

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“You know, Dave,” Robert said, when they stopped laughing. “I don’t think you should call your illusions about your old girlfriend ‘hindsight.’ Now, if you had claimed that the obit confirmed what you had guessed about her all along…”

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This time, for whatever reason, all three of us had ordered dessert, which we were now eating, with various amounts of guilt. Ben disagreed with Robert’s analysis, asserting that my misconceptions, whether or not they included the obit, had nothing to do with hindsight. Since I’m a peacemaker, by nature, their disagreement prompted me to point out lamely that contradictions added spice to our conversations.

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“On second thought,” Robert persisted, “I think Dave’s imaginary biography of his old flame was already a case of hindsight. It was based on his remembered image of her, especially from the night of the square dance. Do you remember any more details about the dance, Dave?” Is this the place to mention that Robert had been a psychotherapist? He still saw a few long-time clients. 

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“Well,” I replied, “now that you mention it, I do remember. It was a mess! I had never tried square dancing before, and I absolutely couldn’t get the hang of it. I kept do-si-doe-ing my partners when I should have been swinging them, and when the call was ‘grand right and left,’ I would go grand left and right.”

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“What’s your point, Robert?” asked Ben, his mouth full.

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“My point is that the dance, and what …er… happened later that night, was highly charged for Dave. Not to be judgmental, but the episode must have been both delightful and mortifying. Is it any wonder that, in the years to come, he carried forward an inaccurate imago of his first love?”

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We let that sit for a moment, and then steered the conversation toward the safe harbor of politics. I brought even that topic back to hindsight, by saying that we should have anticipated, when we elected him three years ago, what a disaster the Tweeter-in-Chief would prove for American democracy. This produced sage nods of agreement: I was preaching to the liberal choir. 

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Then, Ben surprised us. “Speaking of twenty two-thousand hindsight, I have another high-school story. You see, some of my friends and I decided to skip the graduation ceremony and go bowling, instead…”

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Ron Singer’s three most recent books all involve aging. They are The Promised End (Unsolicited Press, 2019), Gravy (Unsolicited Press, 2020), and Weld Tales, Long, Short and Tall (Akorin Books, 2020. Singer collected and edited these stories by residents aged 70-95 from a hamlet in western Maine.)

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