We Got By

She was the prettiest girl in the whole fifth grade. Had a smile that made you smile just to see it.

At least, that’s what I thought when I saw her for the first time. December of 1966, this would have been. My family had just moved to Watts and I had just started classes at 111th Street School.

I wanted to talk to her, but I was awkward and shy – Charlie Brown was James Bond compared to me – and could never work up the nerve. Then, I lost the chance. That May, my family moved again – we moved a lot in those days – and just like that, Marilyn Pickens passed out of my life. Forever, I thought.

I would go on to have other crushes – I was the king of unspoken and unrequited love – but she was the big one, the one that got away. As the car pulled off from the curb, I scanned the schoolyard, nose pressed to the window, hoping for one last look. I was crushed to think I’d never see her again.

But God’s got jokes, doesn’t he?

Flash forward fourteen years and there we were, getting married in a little chapel in Hollywood. June 27, 1981, this was. Forty-five years ago, Saturday.

This anniversary will be a little different, and not just because it’s a milestone year. In February, you see, Marilyn was diagnosed with leukemia.

Needless to say, life has changed. We haven’t had a date night in four months. Instead, we spend quality time consulting with her doctor as he monitors her lymphocyte numbers (still good, and thank you for asking) and sitting together in the chemo suite as poisons drip into her veins. At home she needs my help going up the stairs, a walk down the hall leaves her gasping with exhaustion and – may Heaven help us both – I do all the cooking now. Which usually means I do all the microwaving and ordering of takeout.

I’ve been praying a lot (“God, please help her to kick cancer’s butt. Amen.”) and I’ve been fielding calls and texts and meal deliveries from our family and friends. I’ve also been visualizing the future.

Before we got this diagnosis, we put a deposit on an Australian cruise that sails in the spring of ‘27. I see us sitting on deck chairs – her healed and whole – watching the South Pacific as it flows by. To quote a line from a Bruce Springsteen song that comes to mind a lot these days, “Tomorrow, there’ll be sunshine and all this darkness past.”

But as I contemplate this milestone and challenge in our lives, another song has also been intruding itself upon my thoughts. It’s called “We Got By” and it was composed and recorded by Al Jarreau. Singing in the liquid tenor that was his signature, Jarreau recounts the rising and falling tides of a lifetime, the sometimes choppy journey from then till now, from that to this.

It is, in other words, a song about the things we endure in our years together. To live, after all, is to go through things, and if some of those things wound the heart and pummel the soul, well, that’s just the price we pay for admission to this party. That’s why “We Got By” is a song you can only properly sing – or even understand – when you’ve been together for awhile, when you’ve got some miles on the odometer of your relationship, when you’ve gone through some things.

Jarreau sings of struggling days and walking for miles “singing a song shoo-be-doo, while birds and rich folks flew right on by.”

“But we got by, we got by
… Lord knows we got by.”

Forty-five years. How many times did birds and rich folks fly right on by Marilyn and me? How many times did I sit there with notepad and pen, trying to figure out rent, water and groceries? How many times was I moody and ill-tempered? How many times was she? But how many times did I open my suitcase in some city far from home and find that my bride had slipped a note inside to remind me that she loved me and to be careful and get home safely? How many times did those children make us crazy? How many times did those children make us proud? And Lord, how many Christmas trees did we buy? How many Christmas Eves was I up till 2, assembling a bicycle or some insanely complicated gadget, all so that a child’s face might light up with magic four hours later and Santa Claus get all the credit? How many times did Marilyn’s eyes meet mine and she gave me that little wink she gives and I grinned like a fool because in that moment, everything was good?

Hurricane Andrew blew us away in 1992. I got white supremacist death threats in 2007. A fire burned us out in 2019. The following year, we both got COVID. It’s always something, isn’t it?

And yet…

We got by.

For four decades and a half.

You wouldn’t believe how short a time that is. I mean, if you’ve spent that much time in some cell marking the walls to keep track of the days, I’ll grant that it likely doesn’t feel short. But if you’re just living life, just paying bills, raising kids and trying to survive, it rushes by like a bullet train. Ferris Bueller warned us about this, remember? “Life moves pretty fast,” he famously said. “You don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” And in case the point needs underlining, be advised that the movie in which he said that came out in 1986, forty years ago. And that Matthew Broderick, the actor who brought the cocky teenager to life, turned 64 in March.

So yes, 45 years is a long time. And yet, it also goes by before you know it.

Forty-five years ago, I got the girl of my dreams. Forty-five years later, I’ve still got her. I count that as a win.

And if our time together has delivered us to a cancer diagnosis and a chemo regimen, so be it. Just know that I hold it as an article of sacred faith that by the spring of next year, this moment will be just a bad memory recalled from deck chairs overlooking the warm waters of the South Pacific. We’ll hold hands. And I may even sing a song, shoo-be-doo.

Lord knows, we got by.

Lord knows, we get by, still.