Love, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #173

June 6, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

(The following will be presented this Wednesday at Linda’s memorial service in Norwalk, Connecticut.)

Several months before we got married, Linda and I took the first of a great many car trips to the Midwest, this time for the wedding of my niece Heidi in Detroit. It’s usually a great experience – we control the music and the food and, in those days before cell phones, the level of sanity in the car. Nobody could bother us. A calm, wonderful time to be together.

Right.

It was a very dry day in the middle of a lengthy dry spell. I was driving in the left lane next to the median strip, passing a car with vehicles ahead of me and directly behind me. The, ahh, gentleman in the car ahead of me tossed his lit cigarette out his window, and the dry grass on the median immediately flamed up. I couldn’t change lanes and I couldn’t slow down, so I floored it and bolted through the fire. Linda could feel the heat on her side of our car. I honked the idiot off the road adding some choice language that would make David Mamet nervous, and drove on.

We scheduled an overnight stop between Norwalk and Detroit, but the motel was sold out. We methodically searched each motel at every other exit on I-80 from Oil City Pennsylvania to Toledo Ohio, which was damn near Detroit anyway. The folks at Holiday Inn were able to call ahead and find us a place in Toledo, but they forgot to tell us there were two off that highway so we went to the wrong one. Great.

Finally, at 2 AM we got into bed. Well, that was after the toilet exploded. It got jammed and the slick, wet porcelain tank cover slipped from my fingers and broke into a million pieces. I got pretty cranky, and Linda started to seriously wonder what her future life with her fiancée might be like.

The next morning – four hours later – we got up to go to Detroit for the wedding. It was blissfully uneventful, except for the fact that my mother went to defcon one after the party emcee forgot to introduce her and my father. She ran screaming into the bathroom, to be calmed down by a great many women: the bride, her mother… and Linda, who barely knew my mother at that time. In fairness, she had heard a lot of the stories.

We left Detroit a day or two later, and as we passed Toledo going east we encountered approximately three-dozen cows on a large farm. These cows were of varying sizes but were all brown with large white spots. And they were all standing, patiently, in a straight line, tail to nose, as though they were waiting for a bus to pick them up.

I told Linda that this was pretty much the way my life worked. For some inexplicable reason, she married me anyway. She presented me with a mostly-fully grown 17 year old daughter who is the apple orchard of my soul. And she presented me with the most wonderful 18 years of my life. I say this without fear of cliché – our love grew each and every day. We worked hard at it, and it was the best investment I had ever made in my life.

Alfred Lord Tennyson famously wrote –

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Ol’ Alfie was right on the money. I would not have traded a minute of my life with Linda.

Our friend Patrick Bower co-owns a store called Challengers Comics and Conversation in Chicago, and they opened a special section of their store in tribute to Linda. In tribute to her life and wonderful spirit there is a new section in the store. In the dedication, Patrick wrote “The ‘Linda Gold Memorial Selection’ is a designation we will give any book we feel brings as much wonder and joy to its reader as Linda gave to our lives.”

Wow. Linda wouldn’t have believed it. Nor would she believe the response we’ve received online, by email, on Facebook, and in person. We are blessed with so many great friends, and Adriane and I thank you.

Media metaphysician and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.