O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
We were somewhere in Oklahoma in a cheap motel off I-40 in the middle of nowhere, the type of nowhere place that most people from the East Coast don’t know about unless they’ve been to nowhere.
It was August, and the air conditioner in the motel room was roaring like a jet engine, pumping so much cold air so that there was a chill, and we wore hoodies packed deep in our bags.
It was Jen’s birthday.
This was more than a quarter of a century ago, but if I close my eyes, I can still see the television on a plywood stand in that dark motel room, the remote control bolted to the nightstand. I can still feel the vague sense of unease that I felt about my latest impetuous decision as Jen walked out of the shower, combing her long brown hair.
I had only known Jen for about two weeks at the time. We met at a bar near the apartment where I was living in Las Vegas. I bought her a drink from across the bar, and we went home that night. Jen never left, and I didn’t want her to leave.
My time in Sin City, however, had its expiration date. After teaching high school in Vegas for a year, I had already accepted a job back East, in New Hampshire, before I met Jen.
There were numerous reasons that I took the job, but one of the bartenders at that bar where I frequented put it most succinctly: “Some people need a last call,” he said to me when I told him that I was moving back home.
But there was only one reason that I would possibly stay, and it was the pretty brunette who I fell for fast, and she—inexplicably—had fallen for me. And when I asked Jen—a California girl who had never been east of the Mississippi River—to move East with me, she agreed.
Now, on her birthday, as we walked a barren strip of Oklahoma highway, looking for a bar where we could celebrate Jen’s birthday, not wanting to drive around in the U-Haul, we found nothing. Whatever the name of the town, it was barren, the land flat and dark, only a mega-church shut down after 9 p.m.
Eventually, we found an all night truck stop with a diner, where we ordered greasy meals and convinced a worker behind the counter to put a single birthday candle in a Little Debbie brownie, and then we grabbed up a six-pack of beer at the adjoining convenience store on our way out and walked back to our motel where we drank the beer, made love, then went to sleep.
The next morning, before barreling out of that nowhere Oklahoma town, we had breakfast with biscuits and gravy and chicken-fried steak at the same truck stop diner. An hour later, we both felt ill and had to pull over.
It was certainly an inglorious birthday for her.
Last Sunday would’ve been Jen’s 48th birthday, and each year I try to remember the date, August 17, and remember Jen, who loved her birthday and would start the day with the song by Cracker.
The truth is that I don’t know how Jen died in 2007. I stumbled upon her obituary when I Googled her name one day. We didn’t exactly have an amicable parting. It was one of those tumultuous relationships that many of us have in our twenties as we try to feel out what it means to be in a committed partnership—a question ever still pertinent as we age.
But I never bore Jen any ill will, and I’d still like to think that I loved her in some imperfect way. More importantly, I try to remember Jen because when I remember her, and some of the little things, such as a birthday candle in the Little Debbie brownie, I can visit her in the graveyard in my mind, and in that sense, I keep her alive.
I’ve lost far too many friends too soon for a guy who is only 50 years old, and each of these friends has a headstone there, in my mind, and I can visit them at any time—like I recently visited Jen. This is important stuff. We’ve all heard about a person’s second death—not in the Biblical Lake of Fire sense—but the second death being when your name is no longer spoken by anyone alive.
I try to say all of their names—from Jen, to the roommates I’ve lost, to The Captain, who cancer took in 2022.
On Sunday, when I was home alone, I put a birthday candle in the corner of a cookie and lit it. “Happy Birthday, Jen,” I said and blew it out for her. I wish I would’ve been better.
Contact Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com