Roads not taken

Gosh, while I'm posting old poems from Marie (like this one), here's one she wrote during our first vacation together, back in the summer of 2016. (That was the vacation that I describe here.) She wrote it there, but she was too shy to show it to me at the time; so she emailed it to me after we had both returned to our respective homes.

The story behind the poem is that she had been lamenting that things turned out the way they did for us, in the sense that our first attempts at romance failed so badly. Also, neither of us did anything academic after our promising undergraduate careers, and wasn't that a waste? (Marie and I were both selected for ΦΒΚ, for example. So was Wife, for that matter. Sheesh!) I replied that nothing is pre-ordained, and that while maybe things might have gone better than they did, they also could have gone a hell of a lot worse. Here and there, over time, I discussed some of the options that we might have taken, and didn't. On the plus side, there was always the fantasy that we might have married and wound up both teaching at the same school somewhere. On the other hand, we each contemplated suicide when we were young, because we each (independently) felt trapped by our lives and despaired of anything ever getting better. So there were always lots of possibilities, and our job is to make the best of whatever we've landed ourselves in.

She mulled this, and then turned it into a poem, as follows.

In the same vein, please note also another poem that she wrote here: Hosea's Blog: It never happened (hoseasblog.blogspot.com).  

    

Roads not taken

two professors, distinguished in their fields

a dumpy housewife and a hack

a techie and a techie, one honed to hurtfulness, one alone

an eccentric, bitter recluse

and a grave

two graves

stop mourning what never happened

and rejoice in what is here