“Dear Lord Baby Jesus — or as our brothers to the south call you, Jesús — we thank you so much for this bountiful harvest of Domino’s, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell. I just want to take time to say thank you for my family, my two beautiful, beautiful, handsome, striking sons, Walker and Texas Ranger — or T.R. as we call him — and of course, my red-hot smoking wife, Carley who is a stone-cold fox. Who if you were to rate her ass out of a hundred…”
This was about the point my grandmother got up from her chair and turned off Talledega Nights.
My brother and I — staying with our grandparents for a few days — had made the wildly incorrect assumption that this would be an opportune time to sneak in an all-too-young viewing of the raunchy Will Ferrell comedy.
Grandma Green was having none of it. Dolores Green was Leave it to Beaver, she was Julia Child, she was the prototype for midwestern grandmas everywhere. She was far too wholesome for the world which allowed that movie to be made.
She was from a time when comedy did not contain ass scales out of 100, when family dinners were a sacred event, when people fixed things that were broken — rather than throwing them out. Which probably explains how she and my grandfather were together for 71 years, until he passed away the summer before her.
Now that they’re both gone, their love feels like a myth.
I remember being 22, leaving their house a few days before their 64th wedding anniversary, my dad reminding them of the milestone as we walked to the car.
Grandma nudged Papa and said “I toughed it out, huh?” with that big grin of hers and a characteristic cackle. Papa grunted in usual fashion, and followed it up with “You’re sure getting short.” They poked each other and laughed like they’d married the day before.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around love like that. I certainly couldn’t in my early 20s, and maybe I have a better idea at 30, but 71 years is a long time. It’s almost seven decades longer than any of my romantic relationships, in fact.
It is not a race, but if it was, Grandma Green took gold. She met a man she really loved, she built and raised a family with him, she watched that family grow, she watched that man grow older and fade away, and then she walked out the door herself.
And I wonder — of course, now that it’s too late — what she missed or, maybe more accurately, what she believed she missed. Were there crushes? Flings? Were there days she thought about running away? What made her stay?
If I were to fill in the blanks, I’d wager that there were hard times. Maybe there were even days where she wished she lived in a time that was more accepting of divorce. But I bet when all was said and done, she’d say that the certainty of their life together was its own adventure. That kind of faith in a bond is filled with its own leaps, fears, surprises.
Here’s something I’m realizing lately, which definitely makes me sound more 30 than I did the day before (a disturbing trend): the pros and cons list of commiting to a relationship is filled with contradictions.
Freedom, comfort, obligation, support — words quickly associated with one side or the other of partnership or solitude — but there is freedom in commitment and comfort in solitude, no? I am looking at relationships with more nuance than I used to, and wondering how it all felt so black and white not long ago, wondering if that had more to do with me and the people around me than some objective concept of ”commitment” at all.
I am thinking a lot lately about the black and white, about the cycles of relationships. I’m running myself a bit ragged there, in fact, thinking about timing between things, pacing of new things, and the ways in which everything keeps moving no matter what we do.
I was walking to the G train the week before my grandma passed, dressed and outside earlier than I’d often be awake on a day off — albeit in yesterday’s clothes. There was a small bouquet of yellow and orange flowers in my pocket put there by a girl I was just thinking of calling Baby.
A cover of The Strokes’ “Someday” was playing in my earbuds. It was the last thing on when I stopped listening the day before, and sometimes when you’re distracted it’s easiest just to fall back into whatever the radio was tuned to.
Julia Jacklin did the cover, it’s a soft and sweet version of a song I already loved. It’s a yearning, dreamy cover — accentuating the “someday” part, the uncertain nature of when that might be. It’s a hard song to leave off a mixtape.
I started flicking through old playlists, looking for one in particular I knew “Someday” had landed on, for someone who was more yearning and dreaming than she was ever real.
I had titled the playlist “B-A-B-Y”, after the Carla Thomas song of the same name. I remembered then how often I had called her — the not-real girl, the Someday Girl — baby. Baby, Baby, Baby. It hadn’t been for long, but I remember thinking “Maaaan, I’ll never be able to call anyone Baby again.” Like I’d used the word up whole, given her all of it and left nothing for me or the next person — even if that person might be more deserving of it, might live up more fully to the way that the old singers sing Baby, crooning for a love so dear to be nicknamed for something so precious, so fragile, so ours.
But then there was someone new, someone sweet and kind and trusting and so worthy of adoration. Worthy of doting. And then we began to call each other Baby — almost like a joke at first, and then so seriously, and then so ever-presently that our names felt like stiff, cold, forgotten artifacts.
And then one day, she just wasn’t Baby anymore.
How easy you can forget who Baby was before, the way you crooned, the way you morphed and abused the word into something hardly resembling itself anymore, to match the tone of conversations or the rhythm of inside jokes. How seamlessly the distance is reimagined and a person takes on their given name in stories again, like intimacy in reverse, a stranger is remade.
Which speaks to how possessive it is to pet name someone — not in the demanding, freak-your-friends-out way we talk about possessiveness so commonly, but in the soft wanting ownership of desire. A yearning to have something that’s just for us, a name that belongs to no one else, despite film, song, and a walk down the sidewalk suggesting that there is a Baby on every corner.
How impossible it seems to think of anyone else as Baby in those warm, sweet intimate moments. It speaks to long-standing comfort, to care. It sounds like calling after the person at the bar asking them to grab you a drink too, it feels like brushing the hair out of their face and tucking it behind their ear, it looks like warm light on soft skin in a park you both love.
And then it feels criminal how simple it is to say it to someone new.
So naturally it feels beyond decision, it comes back to my lips that morning — laying in her bed for only the third time, still finding how the shape of our bodies fit together and the way her pillows fit my neck, I look into the eyes of this woman I could see myself loving and I almost say it, almost without thinking as we roll around her unfamiliar sheets wrapped in increasingly familiar scents, I almost tuck her messy brown hair behind her ear and whisper “Baby.”
And that scares the shit out of me. It scares me how easily I can fall for someone, how easily they can fall for me. It scares me that I am loving again, thinking again of calling someone a soft, sweet name.
And scared of what? How bizarre to recognize a good thing right there in my hands and have this haunting spectre of an old me (still me?) who says “Woah woah woah, again? You’re going to do this again? What happens when you disappoint this person? Who’s next?”
How boringly self-deprecating. How very 22 of me.
Back then — 2017, fresh out of college and with what felt like no tethers in the world — I started on the road to Pittsburgh with “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” blasting on the stereo of my 2005 Subaru Outback. I was seeking something new: new city, new friends, new opportunities.
But there was an inherent contradiction in my plan. All those things require some level of commitment. And as the Velvet Underground were proudly declaring on my behalf (as I yelled out the window, I-5 wind blowing in my hair) I didn’t have anything at all. And I didn’t want anything at all! And a whole lot of nothing doesn’t really lend itself to a foundation for much.
And here I am still grappling with the idea of foundation at 30. The loss of my grandmother feels like a final blow to a generation who didn’t raise me but shaped me still by the roots. Bittersweetly, it seems to be through losses like these that I am realizing what my foundation is and how impossible it is to live a life worthwhile without something that resembles one. How young and arrogant it seems now to think I could grow without soil.
Instead of living footloose out of my hatchback, I find myself more and more surrounded by things that matter to me — surprised by how easily I begin to care, how quickly I might start calling someone something more intimate than their given name.
And now I sit here wondering what my grandmother and grandfather called each other when they met, if it was all sirs and misses back then. How long before they thought to dole out nicknames, make jokes? Did they ever call each other Baby? How long before those names and words felt like they’d never be tied to anyone else? How long before they belonged to each other?
I think I ask these questions because I’m curious, because I miss my grandmother and wish I’d known her better. But I think I am also asking selfishly, like she might’ve had a manual to loving like that — and I think I just haven’t ever really believed I could too.
I have been trying to give myself a break lately. I am trying to recognize that somewhere between being mad at myself for not single-mindedly seeking deep loving attachment and for falling in love too easily I am creating absolutely unfit living conditions for my romantic brain.
On the worst days, I am giving up. I can hear that 22-year-old yelling out the window, hoping to scream away possession, relations, and foundation.
But on the best days, I hear my 30-year-old self speaking confidently and honestly about the way I feel to people I care about. I hear myself still not always knowing what I want, but at least telling people that, and truly striving to figure it out. I hear someone who loves easily and is okay with that, someone who has a hard time with the word hate. I feel pretty good about this guy.
And I feel pretty good about love. I am starting to believe that it provides a greater escape than any 2005 Subaru Outback.
Because in love I have found a place where these fears and anxieties can’t go. The fears I describe do not exist in the bed of a beautiful woman who makes me laugh, who is kind to me, whose body fits so effortlessly with mine.
How easy it is to forget these fears in the face of that warmth. How easy it is to want that simple, good possession again — something which is not just mine but ours — pet names and inside jokes, ground we can both stand on. Something that doesn’t have to be everything, doesn’t have to last 71 years, but could make you believe some days that it might.
How easy it is in that bed to forget the heartache that possession can inflict, how easy to dream of a good life it can bring, even just for a while — a familiar elbow nudging into your side and drawing familiar eyes, and someone calling you a name that’s just for you.
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Cooper Green is a writer based in Queens, New York. He left journalism for a career bartending and writing about his feelings. He loves mountains, the Portland Trail Blazers, and good soup shared with good friends.
© 2025, Cooper Green
Halfway Down the Stairs 