Vienna Waits for You
Atlanta, GA
Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return.
– Laurence Sterne
Slow down, you crazy child, And take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while
It’s all right, you can afford to lose a day or two. When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?
– Billy Joel
On another Labor Day weekend, we recall that life’s too short to toil, and (we hope) too long not to.
Old-timers say that youth is wasted on the young. Youth think wisdom is wasted on the old. Children hurry to be teens. Teens rush to be adults. Adults often act like kids, and pine for youth.
Our older son has moved away, and started college. His younger brother is not quite three years from doing so. Time wastes too fast….
It seems like only yesterday that our sons’ father flew the coop.
He started college two weeks after he finished high school. He enrolled every summer but one, and graduated three and a half years after he started. It was a blur. He graduated, spent a week skiing in Colorado, then moved immediately to Sacramento (where his mother introduced him to Steven Tyler). He lived there a year, then settled in San Francisco.
Like most twenty-one year olds, he couldn’t keep still. It was as if he couldn’t finish what he started, couldn’t wait to be done with it, and was unsure why he was doing it. He didn’t know where he was going, but knew he had to get there. Any planning was always spontaneous. He enjoyed himself, but missed a lot.
Music went unheard, places unseen, roses unsmelled. People passed unmet, experiences unexperienced. He was carried by the current, but rarely caused it. After a few years, it pulled him to Philadelphia. There, thankfully, he met the woman who’d become his wife. He’d found his anchor.
Not that he didn’t continue to drift. But he at least had a port, and knew where he belonged. He was finally certain of something, and of someone.
He returned to San Francisco. He got married, and his wife joined him in California. They lived in several homes, sampled countless restaurants, sipped a lot of wine, made good friends, and were happy.
But, for whatever reason, he needed to keep following his unmarked path to no place in particular. His wife patiently supported and followed him wherever he wandered.
He started graduate school at the University of San Francisco, then decided to finish at Georgia Tech. When done, he suddenly decided he wanted to return to northern California.
Only so much patience can be expected of any person, no matter how loving or tolerant. His wife was both. But she was not about to sell a house they’d just bought, rent another U-Haul, lose another cat (that story requires another post), and return to San Francisco. Who would?
Her foot came down. Atlanta was their home, whether her husband liked it or not. She hadn’t even chosen it. He did. She followed him, not the other way around. At some point, decisions have consequences.
His wife was right, and they’ve been in Atlanta since. He always considered San Francisco his adopted home town, but can no longer imagine living there. After what its political leaders have done to the City and to its state, more and more are coming to the same unfortunate conclusion.
Among American cities, San Francisco was always the favorite child. The cool kid the other towns wanted to be, and be around. Looks, style, charm, a quirky irreverence, and a misty mysteriousness attracted a crowd, and the envy of others.
The City could be stupid, blow all its money, sleep late and miss work, yet somehow land on its feet. Sycophantic friends would always be there with aspirin, coffee, and a cold shower when the sun rose.
But beneath the stylish persona and enigmatic glamour, irresponsibility and arrogance bred rot. The infection now looks lethal.
Years of over-indulgence, spending too much, and partying too hard left it a homeless, debt-riddled, drug-addled derelict. Lately it seems it’s been playing Russian Roulette with a bullet in every chamber, just to be sure. This year, it pulled the trigger.
A few days ago, I saw images of the Financial District, and was as livid as I was heartbroken. Sidewalks devoid of pedestrians, streets starved for traffic, underground wires sitting silent, abandoned by absent cable cars.
In the distance, we find the missing traffic on lower deck of the Bay Bridge, headed east. Many of the vehicles are U-Hauls and moving trucks. One of the world’s most enviable cities is being left behind, as one of America’s more deplorable. I never thought I would say that, and it hurts to now.
Earthquakes, wars, depressions, and even previous pandemics have plagued San Francisco. But none could destroy it like its modern politicians have.
To invert Talleyrand, what they have done is worse than a blunder; it is a crime. I’m glad I had an opportunity to know the City before they committed it.
Many of us never go places we long to go, do things we want to do, or see people we rarely see. Those of us who can should, as soon as possible.
As we’ve seen, the activities may suddenly be unavailable, the places may quickly lose their appeal, and the people won’t always be here. And neither will we.
When I was a child, my mother had a close friend with a lifelong desire. If memory serves (this was more than four decades ago, so it might not), Pat always wanted to go to Paris.
Years passed, but something always intervened. An obligation here, other plans there. She kept putting Paris off, knowing she’d eventually go.
She never did. A tumor took her at a young age, probably no older…and likely younger…than I am now (I was a kid, so anyone my age would’ve seemed ancient).
One night not long after Pat died, we were at home. My mother usually played music as she made dinner or unwound. Many nights, the needle fell upon a new Billy Joel album, The Stranger (still his best).
On it was a song that has always stuck with me. Vienna, as Joel himself described it, was an observation that you have your life, and you have it to live it.
We all know there are professions we must pursue and work we must complete to enable us to do so. As Robin Williams put it in Dead Poets Society, medicine, law, business, and engineering are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But beauty, poetry, friendship, and romance: these are the things we stay alive for, if we’re wise and lucky enough to make time for them.
One evening not long after Pat died, Vienna was playing. It moved my mother to remember her friend, and to explain the song’s message to me. I have always remembered what she said, even if I’ve not always acted on it. To her credit, my mother always did, and does.
The rest of us should do likewise, and mustn’t wait. We have one life. We should enjoy it. Savor it. Live it.
Vienna waits. But it won’t wait forever.
JD