Starting Over, Again- Forever Young- A Bart Webber Saga   

By Fritz Taylor

 

Jack Callahan’s old friend Bart Webber a guy he had known at least since back in high school at old Riverdale High where they first hung out together at Jimmy Jack’s bowling alleys over on Beacon Street looking, well, looking for the heart of Saturday night, Friday too and in summer most every night never could draw a break in the love game, in the until forever do not us part anyway. Bart always envied Jack who had stayed with the same high school sweetheart, Kathy Kelly, ever since despite battle royals when Jack was younger and as a high school and college football hero had the pick of whatever he wanted come three touchdown Saturday evening. Bart, well Bart had just struck out for the third time, third married time and a slew of kids to show for his efforts if not much else after a fairly long term for him marriage to Linda Evans, the mother of his last two of six children.       

The way that Jack knew about Bart’s new found “single” condition since they had not seen each other for about a year as Bart had been in a deep freeze over the burnt embers of that last marriage was the night a few weeks ago when they met at their old watering hole, The Dew Drop Grille and Bart laid the latest chapter in the Bart saga. Naturally Bart, being Bart and always something of dramatist in dealing with his various love affairs whether they led to marriage or not, had to retail every sordid detail of his three marriages starting with the first ill-advised marriage to his own high school sweetheart, Diana Nelson, whom he married in a rush once he got infantrymen orders to Vietnam and he did not want to face young death without having been married in his short sweet life. All that produced was the mandatory two kids and endless infidelities by him once he turned anti-war G.I. when he got back to the “real” world and he, in his turn, could have his pick of any “hippie chick” that he wanted.

Onward. As Jack knew the Bart litany on wife number two Mellissa Loring who in her turn other than producing those two kids had her own endless infidelities at just the time that Bart was slowing down in the skirt –chasing department (although never completely what are you kidding he was organically incapable of such righteous behavior). And then the seemingly happy longest marriage to Linda. What Jack did not know but that Bart was more than happy to fill him in on was that Linda could not take Bart’s change in behavior once he started having a whole series of medical problems the past few years, was taking a slew of pills for about seven ailments stretching back to Vietnam and was having trouble dealing with the onset of his own mortality. Moreover Linda who was prone to try every New Age fad the denizens of the alternative health cabal in Cambridge could muster up at prices that would shock the shock-less Western medicine guys and gals had drifted into her own netherworld. Her parting words were that she had to seek “something” on a journey of her own to reach a new spirituality level wished well Bart and that he should take stock of his own journey as well.    

Some guys never learn, never learn in the love game and Bart Webber was and is prima facie evident for that proposition. A few weeks after the Bart soul-bearing at the Dew Drop he called Jack on his and asked his “advise.” Should he acknowledge his actual age, three score and ten, seventy, or clip a few years off that raggedy sum. Jack listened but he knew in the back of his mind that Bart was on the love trail. Jack told Bart to tell the truth about his age and take what comes. Why? Well it seems that Bart, having lost some of his edge in the dating game and having no ready women friends to console him had decided at seventy, goddam, seventy, that he would join a “senior” dating service and see what came up in the local area. What Bart had noticed was that most of the women on the site, women between fifty and sixty which was his meat, had their own cut-offs at sixty-five. Like seventy was just too old. Jesus, some guys never learn. Step up to the plate, brother, step right up to the sorrow plate.