October 10, 1987

 

Carey Ann came last night.

I was lonely. So things worked out all right.

I sat her down on my new used coach (thanks to Vinnie).

Earlier in the day, my car got fixes which set me free to wander again – although I won’t until I find out what my next day off is.

Pauly wants to see me. So does my daughter.

Carey Ann, however, was troubled and was quiet for so long, I knew it had to be serious. She is never quiet even making love (and one of the reasons I like her. I don’t have to fill in spaces with small talk.)

But she’s been down in some ways since her father died last June. It’s just taken this long for it all to come down on her.

I recognize in her signs of depression.

Part of the problem is that she has tied herself down to a boyfriend that is very much like her father. She got engaged around the same time as her father’s death. But I’m no shrink so I’ll refrain from over analysis except to say she claims her dreams connect her boyfriend and her father.

One dream she told me about had her being with her father one moment only to have her father replaced in the dream by her boyfriend in a dream that ended with her searching for diamonds.

She says her boyfriend was seeing another woman – not romantically, yet spending a lot of time together in a number of activities he does not engage in with her.

She feels the distance growing between them over the last few months.

“It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even stand for him to touch me,” she said. “And sex…”

She had other complaint, too, which I won’t go into here.

Then, she started to talk about how she never got a chance to say good bye to her father, and about how he ignored the symptoms of an impending heart attack, and how even her brother warned him that he might drop dead mowing the law.

She even saw a ghostly figure in white along Route 17 the day her father died and is convinced it was an omen.

She is convinced that her father wanted to die because he knew his wife was dying and he couldn’t bear to witness that and just had to die first.

But in some ways, Carey Ann kept asking him in her own way: “Why are you doing this to me, Dad?”

The transference to her boyfriend is obvious, real and dangerous.

She has tried to break up with him several times. Once she went as far as to remove the engagement ring from her finger. She has cheated on him (sometimes with me) and he seemed not to mind.

Last night, she said she is pregnant – possibly with another man’s child (with me wondering if it might be mine).

All this might sound like a soap opera, but it is how people actually live their lives, and how we struggle to overcome pain, and how we need something more to sustain us than what we often find – and when we find people we can depend on, they let us down or they die, and we are again cast out in search of hope and we struggle to find something else to cling to, even if it is driftwood like I am – which is why she keeps showing up and I keep letting her.

I’m her piece of driftwood, and she is mine.