FOREVER

Mozart is forever.

Delacroix is forever.

Swan Lake is forever.

But for we tick-tock mortals who are not permanently housed in a museum or waiting in the wings to perform, forever is not forever.

For us, forever is a romantic notion that comes with a prescribed- in-concrete expiration date.

Without forever the ladies would be shopping at “21.”

And yet the reality is, ours is an inescapable turntable existence where, no matter how rapturous the sound, the end is needle accurate, certain and circular. Sooner or later our talent for flipping the record to the other side becomes challenging and ultimately impossible.

Now there is a good kind of forever and a not so good kind.

The not so good kind is the one fancied by children, irritated teachers, exasperated parents and neighbors whose vocabulary features words like: constantly, continually, indecently, endlessly, persistently, repeatedly, non-stop, morning, all the time and morning, noon and night.

The stubborn get “until hell freezes over,” which the Eagles have proven is perhaps not so steadfast.

For we professional and committed optimists, who work in the happily ever after business, we get: forever and ever, eternally, forevermore and until the cows come home. (Living in New York, should the cows in fact ever come home, beyond having unlimited milk, that is a kind of forever that might present all kinds of challenges including neighbors who would no doubt complain, well, morning, noon and night).

Depending on where or how you live can dictate how you feel about forever. Those in the Bible Belt for example, prefer their forever be intact forever as they tend to have an aversion to change or evolution of any kind because it threatens their Christian way of life, which lately they feel they have the right to defend with the kind of automatic weapons that could end approximately 600 people’s forever lives in one minute (An AR-15 can fire ten bullets per second at the rate of 2,000 mph).

Lately, it has been reported by a few religious zealots and TV evangelists that should the current president/cult leader be impeached it would ignite a bloody, bloody civil war and that is because he has provided Kool-Aid and southern comfort to the tired, poor and the huddled rally attendees. Now we have long seen what inevitably happens to cults and their leaders so I’m not expecting a happily ever after end to that particular extremist brand of forever.

The only kind of change that part of the world craves is the quantum leap kind that comes packaged in the form of miracles, lottery tickets, a mythical figure who is as real as Harry Potter , from the pages of that other children’s fantasy “The Art of The Deal” or the dream that someone with an oversized check from The Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes will suddenly appear like the genie in Aladdin, which to me is one very sad Beverly Hillbilly elegy.

I could go on about that, well, forever, but let us turn to that other state of perennial optimism: romance.

None of us enter the kingdom of the heart with any kind of preparation or professionalism. You don’t even have to take a road test to get your license. And yet most marriages wind up a car wreck.

The entire concept of forever and ever love is forged in childhood which places it on the same level as hoping for the aforementioned genie to show up with a dowry check.

Love, the kind that most of us clamor for, is not any kind of practical magic.

Following our very early Snow White formative years, we go through life programmed/bombarded with the promises of love songs, novels, movies, poetry and plays and hold our collective breath waiting for Cupid’s arrow to strike the bullseye of our hearts.

Public school crushes reinforce the possibility that it can come true and love hits us with all the subtlety of an Acela train rushing for Boston.

Young love is our first opioid and from that point on, we are all strung out junkies until high school which is ground zero for getting dumped.

That is the first time we question the efficacy of love. Getting dumped is going cold turkey and there is simply no version of the Betty Ford Clinic to get us through that particular withdrawal.

And what do we do when we are rehabilitated? We do everything that we can to score again. We are not back out on the street for even 30 seconds and just like that, our heart to genitalia radar system is up and running again, in search of the next lust fix.

During the college years, love is a 24/7 lab experiment where failure is all that we can learn from. We become sloppy scientists and mix volatile fluids including alcohol in the last gasp effort to try to see how far we can push the limits and break the rules within the walls of an aptly named institution.

Once we are released from that asylum, that is when the entire concept of love tilts on its axis. Young women, who are not career-obsessed, tend, for the most part, to be little girls , who still dress and think like little girls, who feel the magnetic pull of the womb, while Young Men are all little boys until they die, who, for the most part are trying to reach the womb by any means necessary.

And then it happens. You are featured in the Vows section of the New York Times where you tell the tale of your magical meeting that has guaranteed all forms of ecstasy,, destiny and fate.

Weddings as a rite of passage are never, ever that. Ever. They are a three-dimensional recreation, not unlike Disneyland, of every single child-like forever and ever fantasy that we have ever had, which is why we are all so scrupulous in their detail.

When women plan a wedding, they are writing the ultimate children’s book version of love where they are the enchanted princess who more often than not, years from now, watch the coronation sobbing on the couch while breathing in a carton of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.

Now while it is no longer true that 50% of all marriages end in divorce (researchers have found that the rate of divorce in the U.S. actually peaked at about 40% around 1980 and has been declining ever since. Estimates show that three-quarters of those married in the 1990s would make it at least 15 years (compared with just 65% of those married in the 1980s). And if that current trend continues, the vast majority (about two-thirds) of marriages will never divorce), we never enter it with any kind of reality.

Despite what any competent emotional accountant would say to us about the long term, we are rarely, if ever, in the market for shares of sense and choose instead to invest our entire life savings in the potentially volatile business which celebrates and reinforces our own, personal, funhouse mirror version of sensibility.

And that is because the dividend is called forever.

Forever just makes us feel wonderful. Taken care of. Protected. Invulnerable.

We tend to hold on to that concept for as long as we can. We who stayed perhaps too long in a broken marriage become resolute and as stubborn as anyone who, despite dire warnings, chooses to stay behind and protect their homes from he ongoing killer Hurricane.

And when the bough of forever finally breaks, so do we.

Some repair themselves and go on to marry again and again and again, endlessly willing to ride the carousel, hoping beyond hope to grab the brass engagement ring of permanence while others become bitter and crushed because they have been cheated out of forever.

In the end I think we all have to come to terms with whatever our own interpretation of forever is and teach ourselves to become skilled, self-determined and self-reliant alchemists who instead of trying to rather turn that lead ring on our fingers into gold, try instead to turn ourselves into a form of our own gold standard.

And there are things that can last forever deep inside you.

The tender memories.

The life-defining moments.

The one love that made you feel that you could love yourself as much as they love you.