LABYRINTH

It's a funny thing, getting older. It just sort of sneaks up on you. I've been 55 for a few weeks now, and every once in a while it occurs to me how weird that is. 55. I mean, that's pretty old. But somehow the me that's really me, the me that sees out through these eyes, the voice I hear in my head when I'm thinking, it's the same me, the same voice that was there when I was 25; when I was 12, for that matter. But once in a while I'm reminded that time has marched gaily on, like when I catch a glimpse of my naked body in the mirror and notice how old-mannish I'm starting to look; or when it takes twice as long to shave now because I have to figure out how to shave around all the wrinkles without losing a pint of blood along the way. But it's more than just the physical. The more the years pass by, the more overcrowded the storehouse of memories becomes. Some memories get pushed out forever, some get jostled and bruised in the fray, and some lie in bits and pieces on the floor. And sometimes, what were once memories begin to look like dreams, and what were dreams begin to look like memories, and the older you get the less clear it becomes which is which.
So it is with this one memory I have. I was only 34 or so at the time, so it was over 20 years ago. I had been living here, in this same old farmhouse in Stonington, Connecticut, for a while. Hugh had been gone for about 3 years by that time.
I should probably tell you about Hugh. The easy thing to say would be "the love of my life", but somehow that doesn't really manage to tell the whole story. We met, quite by accident, on vacation in Fire Island when we were both 25 years old. We were at a party at some investment banker's house and everyone was inside snorting coke and trying to get laid except for Hugh, who was outside by the pool with a cat in his lap. A year later we were closing on an 1880 farmhouse, this house, in Connecticut. With him there was never any doubt. This was love: blinding, torturous, gut-wrenching love; the kind of love where you'll give it all up, put your furniture out on the sidewalk and just move away to be together, because that's pretty much exactly what we did.
Unfortunately, in our relationship, it was never really just the two of us. There was always something else, this virus, this HIV, lurking about in the shadows and in the corners. Until one day, about six years later, when HIV decided to collect its due, and then it was just one. Just me.
It was pretty crushing, as you can imagine. I felt angry, I felt cheated out of all the years we were supposed to have in front of us. I felt sorry for Hugh, for the suffering he endured, for how helpless we had both become. But by this day, the day of this memory, I had worked through most of that stuff pretty well. I had begun to reach the point where I could remember him, and think about our time together, with incredible joy instead of grief. I had begun to accept that I had been unbelievably lucky to have received a gift as rare and as precious as absolute love.
Anyway, it had been a stressful week, for some reason. Probably money, or clogged gutters, or some other triviality had me tied up in knots. That's another thing about getting older: these problems, these roadblocks that pop up in our paths which at the time seem so insurmountable, eventually they become so insignificant in our memories as to be forgettable. I had decided that a nice long walk through the woods would do me a world of good, so I had planned to take Sparky through the Labyrinth.
"The Labyrinth" was my private name for a path through the woods near my house. I stumbled upon it one day shortly after Hugh and I had bought the house, when Dylan, our Golden Retriever at the time, dropped his tennis ball  as we walked along Ridge Road and it rolled under this split-rail fence. I climbed through to retrieve the ball, and I immediately felt like the little girl in the Secret Garden, like I had stumbled into a world that nobody else knew about. I called Dylan in after me, and together we walked the length of the trail. The path was fairly wide and clear, and it seemed to have been there forever, probably since the tribal days before the white settlers came. It meandered through oaks and pines, past a beautiful pond laden with water lilies along its edge, and after about an hour and a half, deposited us back out on Ridge Road just a couple hundred yards down the street. I have walked that path every so often, ever since Dylan and I happened upon it that day. Especially if I'm feeling stressed, or sad, or off-center somehow, and if I have the hour and a half to spare, I'll grab the dog and a tennis ball and walk it; and I usually feel a lot better coming out than I do going in. At some point I just started thinking of it as The Labyrinth.
Most people today think of a labyrinth as something like a maze. But actually, they are quite different. A labyrinth has one clearly defined path, one entrance and one end, like life itself. In medieval times, walking the labyrinth was a time for prayer and spiritual reflection, representing the hard path to God in the center. One was meant to exit the labyrinth a changed person, spiritually improved from the person who entered it. 
Anyway, I had grabbed the leash and I was making sure I had everything I needed for the walk. I stopped in the bedroom, and as I was grabbing the keys off the dresser, my eyes rested for a moment on Hugh's picture, the one from his sister's wedding where he looked so handsome in that dinner jacket and he's smiling that smile he only got after a couple of glasses of champagne. Whatever had been bothering me that day had nothing to do with Hugh, or with the lack of him; but somehow when I'd been feeling bad it always ended up leading back to him anyway. So I regarded him for a moment, and I remembered a silly habit we had gotten into. He would be heading out the door, always before me and usually running late for a long drive into the city, and he'd kiss me and fix a stray lock of hair, and he'd say, "See you in the future!" To which I would unfailingly reply, "See you in the pasture!" and I'd pull him down (he was three inches taller than me), and plant a kiss on his forehead. 
"C'mon, Sparky!" I yelled, "Lets go for a walk!" I heard Sparky's tags rattling as he made his way down the hallway towards me.
I kissed my forefinger and touched the picture with it. "See you in the pasture," I said.
I grabbed Sparky's leash and head out the door. 
We had been walking the Labyrinth for about fifteen minutes or so. We were about to come up to a beautiful old oak tree, with an enormous, gnarled trunk and a canopy which spread out and dwarfed everything around it. Sparky ran on up ahead, and I was absent-mindedly watching him as he began to sniff around the roots of the old oak, and just as he began to raise his leg I noticed that he was about to pee on a person. There was someone sitting there, dozing off, apparently. 
"Sparky! No!" I yelled, which seemed to startle the man. He jumped up and it looked at first like he was trying to figure out an escape plan. He looked right, he looked left, and then he looked right at me and seemed to resign himself to the fact that, well, there we were. "Umm, hi," he said. Then Sparky jumped up and started to lick his face.
"Sparky, get down boy!" I said. "I'm sorry, man."
He laughed a little bit. "It's OK. No problem," he said, smiling at Sparky as he ran off after a butterfly or a stray leaf. 
"I'm Matthew," I said.
"Jack." he answered.
"Hi, Jack," I said. "And that," I said, regarding my dog who was now trying to uproot a sturdy birch tree, "is Sparky. We love these woods."
"Do you?" said Jack, his eyes flashing. "So do I, Matthew. So do I."
"I have a place nearby, over on Millstone Court. Where are you from, Jack?" I asked.
"Here," he said.
"Here, like Stonington, or here like Connecticut, or..."
"Just, here," said Jack.
I left it at that.
We had already begun walking together. Anyone who walks a dog will inevitably come upon these situations, when someone will decide to walk along with you uninvited and all you can think about is how to ditch this person without coming off as totally rude and antisocial. But, this was not the case with Jack. I felt genuinely comfortable with him right off the bat, and we talked about the dog and about the weather and about the woods. 
He seemed to know everything there was to know about those woods, and as he talked about the various flowers and the birds and the actual ages of ancient trees, I stood back and regarded him. It was no surprise that I hadn't seen him at first, as he lay there napping among the roots of the old oak tree. He sort of blended with the environment, if you could say that. Like, he was wearing jeans, just like anyone else, but when you looked really close they weren' t really blue, they were kind of green, like the sunlight that reaches the forest floor. It was probably a trick of the light, but it seemed that shadows falling across his face always gave him a sort of dappled appearance which could easily fade into the background. His voice brought me back to reality.
"How old do you think it is, that old oak tree back there?" he asked.
"Geez, I don't know, 150 years old?" I said.
"Close, but no cigar! That tree is 284 years old. It's the oldest living soul for miles around."
"284 years old," I said, genuinely impressed. "That's pretty old."
"I have known that tree for a very, very long time," said Jack. I looked at him again. He looked younger than me.
"You said you love these woods, Matthew," he said.
"I do," I said. "I come here a lot, especially if I need some time to think, or to meditate, sort of, you know? I like that I can be alone for an hour or two. Well, usually," I added, and we both smiled a bit. "I feel like the air is just a little cleaner in here, like I'm on a walking tour of the Oxygen Factory. I like that you don't have to have silence to have quiet."
"That's very wise," said Jack. "There is a lot to learn in the forest."
Wise. I thought that was kind of an odd thing to say. "Like what?" I asked.
"Here," he said, "being successful in life doesn't come from killing or competing with everyone else. Here, it means having strong roots, and spreading out and embracing the sunlight as much as you can. It means sharing the bounty, and living in harmony with everyone, with everything around to create a place where everyone can thrive."
"Yeah, I guess it does," I said, turning that thought around in my head for a bit. 
We kept walking the Labyrinth. We talked about the birds, and the conversations they were having above the treetops. I began to ramble on about the colors, about the hundred shades of early-spring green you'll find in late April, about how some of the leaves were so young that they weren't even green, but came peeping out in shades of orange or crimson, perhaps foreshadowing their fiery exit in the Autumn. I talked about how it all looked like a beautiful Monet, an Impressionist masterpiece, when you see all the colors and the shadows and the splashes of light; the stark tree trunks embracing a diaphanous halo of young green. Jack really seemed to like it when I talked about that, like he took it as a personal compliment.
"Wow, that's awesome," he said. He looked like he was about to say something else, but just then we heard the sound of a car, whizzing by in the distance on Ridge Road. Jack stopped dead in his tracks. 
I had already taken two steps before I realized Jack was no longer walking beside me. I turned to face him. 
"This is as far as I go," he said.
"OK," I said. Sparky was forty feet down the path trying to eat a giant rock. "Well, it was nice talking with you, Jack," I said.
"Yeah, I don't know a lot of people," he said. "Not a lot of people, well, see me, I guess. But I'm glad to have met you, Matthew."
We shook hands, warmly. "OK, well, take care, Jack," I said, and I turned to go. Sparky had managed to get the boulder into his mouth but now couldn't seem to dislodge it.
"I see him, sometimes, in here, you know," said Jack, his voice behind me now. 
I turned and looked at him again. Already he seemed to be fading into the background. "What? Who?" I asked.
"Hugh. I've seen him here, too, walking the Labyrinth. He says he'll see you. He'll see you in the future."
I struggled for something to say at that moment, but all I could do was stand there, silent, my heart pounding in my chest, until finally the tears found their way out of my eyes and began rolling down my cheeks. By the time I had wiped them away, Jack was gone. 
Sparky, on the other hand, was now trying to pursue a squirrel up a giant pine tree with the rock still stuck in his mouth. 
So now, you'll understand why, at my age, I begin to question whether this encounter ever really happened at all, or whether it's something I dreamed up and have begun to believe as fact. 
The thing is, I have marked the occasion every single day since that encounter along the Labyrinth. Since that afternoon, every day, before I leave the house, I stop by the picture of Hugh which sits on the dresser, the one of him in the dinner jacket. I kiss my forefinger, and then I touch that picture, right on Hugh's forehead. And, ever since that afternoon, I say, "See you in the pasture."
And I think I probably will.