MaDlY dEEpLy

It may sound silly, but the last episode of Mad Men’s 4^th season felt unbearably poignant to me.

The story arc was all about the lead character, Don Draper, tumbling headfirst into love.

First of all, it transcended the tired old adage of executive marries secretary, or rather, 

as most people parse it, secretary traps rich family man.

The point was firmly made that she did her job efficiently and well:- there’s that thing about good assistants: they have to be all at once a formidable gatekeeper, an astute diplomat and a borderline parent.

The woman, Agnes (double points for being from Montreal and speaking the most lovely French and dressing like an exotic, way hotter Doris Day) was just so smart and eager and engaging, you couldn’t (obviously he couldn’t) help but be drawn in.

One night, working late, they had sex. 

Now, this had happened with one of Don’s previous secretaries and she made the very female mistake of thinking they’d become a couple (please don’t stone me and trust that I know whereof I speak… when a woman tells you she doesn’t want anything serious, RUN.) and causing an embarrassing scene once she realized no trip to Cartier was forthcoming.

So Don’s initial reluctance was conquered by the following:

1. She made him to understand that she was a big, hardback woman, and that

2. Tomorrow she would know her place and morph into a secretary again, and further to besides,

3. SHE really wanted this, all for herself, that trapping was neither intended nor implied. She was merely a woman freely and happily indulging in her carnal.

But then evil ex-wife Betty granted fate a boon: she fired their long-time housekeeper/ nanny of donkey years for an asinine reason: the housekeeper had let the neighbor kid, fat and with no discernible antecedents, talk to her daughter. And so, brittle Bets, who needs to be medicated stat, took the ultimate, petty revenge.

Agnes, of necessity, stepped in: Don was going to California on business but bringing along the kids and she went along to help. 

For me, the moment that stays with me, that caused me the most emotional havoc, was when he walked into the hotel restaurant one morning.

Agnes was already there, with the kids. 

He stood, from afar, and watched them. 

And I could so clearly see on his face the awakening, like, “this here, this is a real family, and it's MY family..”

Further compounded by how she handled a spill at the table. Calmly, with no heated blowup at childish ineptitude.

His response was amazement: again, I could see him going through the inescapable motion of enfolding this woman into himself, comparing her with Betty and what her reaction might have been.

His face, brimming with these thousand calculations his mind was making all at once without saying a single word, was my face, then.

My face in the face of my own love.

My face as she couldn’t see it when I slid my arms tight tight around her waist and pulled her to me and grazed her neck making her shiver as she finished dinner.

My face as I made love to her in our bed shrouded in the silent cherished Brooklyn night, then ran my hand over her belly, fraught with/ full of/ emotion as I imagined my child there.

Forgive me.

I know I’m blathering on and on, but you have to understand that in the last scene of a television show, for crap’s sake, I saw myself as I once lived.

Just a made-for-tv drama, pure fiction, but what I really saw, saw with my own two eyes, on that day, on that screen, was someone standing in to show me, live and in glorious color, the moment in my life 

when the earth shifted 

and the most beautiful part of me 

was born.