I'm just an old guy.

My move is over, just now, and I want to say the truth. Seven days and more of daily lifting and pickup trucks, Deborah and I, and our two girls, both in high school. This meant help from their exalted, standup boy friends, looming and pumping boxes on one fifteen-hour day. And a day each with a fine pair of fellow 50-somethings...

Ah hell. It went on and on. A day with licensed pros, another very long day with two earnest engineers from Mohonk, near-humunculoid-action-figures in their physical abilities. Exuberant.

OK, one last aspect then I'll get to the truth part. (I mean it is all true but, well, you'll see.) My wife got cancer and we lost the house, then, in the last 18 months? Six surgeries for me. Three of them emergencies, one without anesthetic. All unmentionable. Some with lasting effects. Three months down for the count, total. Six months and counting on recoveries.

Many things not recoverable. Sigh.

And hot damn: I kept up with everybody for this move. I did it. I am still strong enough to keep up, on little sleep and maximum effort.

I'll mention here: we are 75% thru the most important project of my career, due in 12 days: a complete new imagining of, and myriad tools for, Yale's Climate and Energy Institute.

Truth now. Ten days ago someone spit venom in my ear. I didn't rise to it. I had compassion for him. I wanted my family to be safe. I simply said his name to him. "o name". This enraged him more, I guess. Hate crime poured out of him.

Ten years ago I would been enraged, too, and gone toe-to-toe. Instead, I felt nothing but compassion for this terrified man with his black river of hate. Just "o name" from me.

Later that night his wife emailed an apology and she and I now have good communications. This is an astonishing and very good outcome.

I didn't blow it. I didn't make more combat. I didn't add to suffering. I let compassion take me, on winged horses in the electro-blue sky. I gave up. I didn't win. I won.

Eight days ago we signed on a house to rent. Tonight we are here.

Ah geez.

OK, the truth truth. About my wife.

See, we didn't take a bath yet, in 5 nights here (the first few on mere mattresses). Deb and I, we were gonna do it together, the first time. It's a bigger tub, with a whirlpool thing. (Always rent from decent, retired Jewish people. Such a nice place. Beautiful.)

So anyway, understand, it was last loads today, one to the dump, one to the new house. (Green porch chairs. A trampoline. The hammock.) And my oldest, Molly, staying over tonight, after yet another helpful day (off) from her, cheerful over boxtops.

Shit: OK: Here it is: I went in without her. Arthritis in my hand...I just did it.

She was downstairs making our first home cooked meal in 8 days. (She always makes a good dinner.) What's more, last Monday she was at an annual conference, on the Jersey shore, getting a gold and a bronze for her marketing at SUNY Ulster, her dramatic enrollments success  under her belt, too. She had to go, despite the move. I am so proud of her.

She came home early Tuesday morning, driving all the way from New Jersey sick, with a fever. Hit the mattress for a few days while we added boxes, clothes, chairs around her in our room.

That's what a heel I was. I went in the water first, on our first Friday here, while she made me crispy-crusted, hand-rubbed turkey thighs, garlic mashed, peas 'n corn, with cranberries. And lemonade. Because I asked her to.

It filled up half way... then we ran out of hot water. The breaker has to be thrown, the sitzy deal didn't start. Ha. Sitting in the dimmed light, the hot water soaking off thousands of leg lifts in the last 200 hours, I realized the tub takes two fills.

And it came to me:

I love you Deborah. Our marriage is sustained in classic style: by a trio of vacations taken when we were young, and a great deal of sacrifice for our kids. In a better world our eyes will light up a little to see the other in any comfortable place, sitzy or no, and we will be happy, often enough, together and apart, day after dreamy day, and I'm sorry I am lying here in this still and cooling pool without you, nursing this barbwireache of a  hand under the last trickle of the hot water, without you. I love you. I knew you would forgive me, and did it anyway. And I feel so good.

In that better world we will wheel around each other like febrile cantatas, vine each other in tendril'd embrace, o best beloved, and lie in fragrant, rose-strewn pools. There will be the clinking of ice in glass, and laughter, and fresh fruit, and everyone will know our story and see the world with  our eyes, know our works, and be radiant, too, like us.

At dinner I told her, with Molly and Eli sitting there. I checked myself: am I lying? It was so damn hard: I opened my mouth and equivocated, like an 8-year-old who just can't say. I checked myself, and I said it straight:

"I took a bath. I'm sorry. But I didn't use the whirlppol. It was broken."

She smiled, was irritated, a little hurt, and she didn't make too big a deal about it. It being me, the cheese.

It took me 54 years to allow a lost man to rage at me, to see compassion have such good and practical results. To keep my heart and family safe. To understand how that man gave me an exalted gift:

I know, in the marrow of me now, I am no longer the angry 17-year-old lost boy I once was. Me peaceful.

Deborah is the best woman for me, and at last, at last, I deserve her.