True Love's Heart

For Valentine's Day, a story I wrote years ago.


He never could see why she'd married him. He hadn't had much to offer when they met. He'd been nothing, but a horse groomer, a cattle groomer he told her. He spent years roaming from town to town, ranch to ranch, grooming cattle for wealthy people to put in shows to win blue ribbons. That's what he told her at least. Truth was he was more of a drunk. Roaming from town to town was true, and true he did comb a few tangles out of the coats of the polled Herefords, but basically he roamed from drink to drink, from waking up on one stable floor to another, never noticing the day or the hour. It didn't make any difference.

Then he met her, and things changed. Her love filled up all the empty places. He became a sober man. And, as if to somehow repay her for replacing his futile, stumbling, existence with the key to her heart, he brought her gifts every Valentine day.

My first recollection of Valentine’s Day was when I was about five years old. I always sat at the front window of our green stucco bungalow peering through the lace curtains waiting for the blue sedan which deposited him at the curb every afternoon. On this particular day, the guys in the car pool were more than their usual rowdy selves. They rolled down the car windows in spite of the drizzly February day and yelled out after him as he made his way up the stairs with both arms behind his back.

"Papa, Papa," I cried, running to meet him. But for once he didn't drop his lunch bucket to pick me up. Instead he walked down the hall past the bedrooms and through the dining room, looking for my mother, the velveteen box hidden behind the back of his greasy overalls.

He found her in the kitchen, where, putting his arm around her, he shyly handed her the box. "I love you, Mommy," he said, a forty-one year old little boy.

"Oh, you shouldn't have,” were her first, and as I was to learn through the years, customary words.

I was excluded, for the first time I sensed that. While I would never feel unloved, this love, this day never stretched to include me or my brothers.

That was to be only one reminder of many over the years. Every Valentines day, I knew without fail, that regardless of what our fortunes were that year, there would be some kind of gift on Valentines Day. It might be she didn't have but one new dress throughout the whole year, and when fortunes were really bad, the only clothes she had were those she made herself out of feed sacks, but regardless of what it took, come Valentines Day, there would be his heart and the heart shaped box of candy.

I remember every different one he gave her. In the years when things were really tight, it would be a plain paper box, red with a ribbon around it. And in the years when things were going a little better, it might be a velvet heart, or a satin heart with satin roses on it. One year he gave her a lilac heart with lilac roses on it. It was always my favorite, but then, I was never much one for taste. It didn't matter what they looked like, her heart was taken in them all.

What brought to mind all these past Valentine's days was a mid-morning call from my father. "Cate," he asked, "Would you go see your mother? It's Valentines Day, you know. Could you go buy a heart to take to her at the home? You know I just can't get out. My knees are a little too weak. But it hurts me to think of her being there and not having a box of chocolates on Valentines Day. Just sign it "I love you.""

"Oh, Papa," I started to cry.

"I know,” He tried to cheer me up. "I know it's hard to see her like she is, but even if she doesn't know anything, she still might think I'd forgotten her on Valentines Day, that she isn't my sweetheart anymore. You'll go won't you?"

"I'll go, Papa,” I replied, "I'll go."

Reassured, he gave me further instructions before he hung up the phone. “You know she still loves her chocolates. Make sure it's a Russell Stover heart. That's her favorite kind."

"I will.” I promised.

"Thank you, Cate,” I could hear a tremor in his voice as he hung up the phone, "Thank you."

I put my coat on, walk out of the office and down the street, wondering if I am worthy to be the bearer of his love to my mother. I wonder for myself, what my own marriage would have been like if Charlie had brought me boxes of chocolates during the years when I was unable to see any more love in his eyes than I did, when we had grown so far apart. Can something so simple as a paper box hold something together that is no longer there? What about all these small tokens of love that my father brings my mother, are they the real thing? Charlie gave me so many more things than my father ever gave my mother, yet, in the end it was never enough.

Later in the afternoon, after I’ve once more become absorbed in my work, I look out my office door just in time to see the florist bring flowers to one of the girls that works here. For a minute, a swift second in time, a minute of home strikes me, but then I realize there isn't any one in my life who would be sending me flowers. Certainly not Charlie, that was dead a long time ago. But it is Valentines Day and it brings back memories of better times, memories of my father, and his Valentine Days. I’ve witnessed what it is to be loved and adored. Somehow that erases the emptiness of having never really been loved, for just myself, and replaces it with hope instead.

Silent Night

I wrote the following years ago as part of a fiction writing group in New Jersey.  It seem appropriate to the season.

It was one of those frustrating, last days before Christmas. I wore the wrong shoes to the mall and my feet hurt so badly that I picked up the first thing I saw in the kid’s sizes, not caring if it matched or not. Concentrating on not limping, I was unaware that the ranks of shoppers had dwindled down to an unseasonal few and so was quite surprised when I walked out the door to see that the earlier dusting of snow had been replaced by at least six inches of the white stuff. The parking lot was deserted, so I slogged to my car wishing for once that we didn’t live so far off the beaten path.

Apparently, everyone else was safe at home because the road was practically deserted, peacefully so. Clutching the steering wheel tight and driving slower than usual, I made it home, tense, but safely. The dark house confirmed the suspicion, aroused by the lack of bus tracks down our seldom traveled street, that the children, although they would be highly insulted if I referred to them that way...they were fourteen and seventeen after all, weren’t home from school yet either.

Dropping my packages just inside the front door, I immediately called their school...no answer. Just as I was looking up the number for the bus company, I heard the stomping of feet on the porch and ran to open the door. They were going to be chilled through and through. Instead, when I flung the door open, I was greeted by a tall, rangy, stranger who pulled his blue stocking cap off just as I turned on the porch light. I backed into the house and quickly latched the screen, still holding the door open. Any fear for my own personal safety was quickly replaced by suspicion that he had, or at least had knowledge of the whereabouts of my children.

“What?” I asked, peering through the screen.

“I’m sorry ma’am to bother you, but you see, it’s my wife.” He pointed with the blue cap towards a battered grey car that I hadn’t noticed before, at the end of our driveway. “I think it’s her time.”

“Time?”

“ Yes’m. I don’t think we’re going to make it to her sister’s place in Silent Springs...that’s where we’re headed.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t stand here all day long explaining things with my wife out in that car about to have a baby.”

“A baby?” I asked, slightly incredulous. That someone would stop on our remote road because they were going to have a baby was too much to believe. Convinced it was a hoax, I wanted to close the door, but not before I knew if his appearance had anything to do with my children.

“I’m sorry, I can’t let you in,” I told him through the still shut screen.

“Then, would you just come with me and look at my wife?” he asked.

Thoughts tumbled through my head...they had my children and were going to take me too...”Look, I don’t know what you’re up to, and I don’t know what you’ve done with my children, but you better not harm one hair on their heads or I’ll...”

“I’m not trying to hurt your children,” he said, as my sentence trailed off “I’m only trying to get my own born”. And with that he straightened the cap on his head and retraced his footsteps back to the car.

I waited long enough to see hear the sound of his engine turn over and see smoke appear, signaling that he had started their car before I closed the door and turned inside to call the bus company since no one was answering at the school. When I finally reached them, I was told that every bus was back but the # 4 bus. “Is that the one that goes down Hook's Neck road?” I asked. “Yes, that’s the one. Apparently the radio is out because we’ve tried to reach the driver, but he doesn’t answer. I’m sure everything is ok; it’s just the weather that is slowing him down.”

I hung up and walked to the window and pulled back the curtain to see if the car had left. It was still sitting there, engine running, and lights out. There was enough light from the snow to see, but the windows were steamed over so I couldn’t make out the occupants. Deciding I would confront the man once more for an honest answer, I grabbed my coat and marched down the drive. At my insistent knock, the window rolled down. My glance skipped over the man in the blue cap to the girl in the passenger’s seat. She was no older than my own Lucy, seventeen at the most. Her face was ashen and covered with beads of sweat, yet she smiled weakly at me, and then winced as she clutched at her stomach. “Good Lord, Man.” I cried as I pulled at the driver’s door handle. “You need to get her out of here.”

“That’s what I was trying to say.” I looked at the red, faced man and saw the tears gutting his face. Why, he was not much more than a boy himself. “Here,” I cried, as I ran around to the other side of the car. “Let me help.”

Together, we helped the girl out of the car and half stumbled, half carried her to the house.

I led them to my bedroom and we helped her on to the bed. “We’ll put her in here” I put another pillow under her head, and then gathered up some more blankets. All the time, the young girl was trying to make herself comfortable and whimpering quietly.

"I’ll call 9ll." I said as I started to leave the room.

“I don’t think that’s going to do any good. This baby’s going to come too soon, and beside, we can’t afford no doctor, anyway. That’s why we were on the way to Mary’s sister’s house. She’s a midwife and she could help us out.”

However, before I even started down the hall to make the call, the girl cried out. “This is it, Joey” and the tone of her voice made it clear she was serious.

You know how it is in an emergency, a sixth sense takes over and you do what you have to do. I boiled water, gathered blankets, called the hospital for emergency instructions and watched in wonder as a most beautiful baby boy entered the world.-

In the midst of everything, the children came stumbling home. All safe and sound with tales of being stuck in a ditch and waiting at a farm house until the bus was pulled out. “We would have called, Mom”, Lucy, ever the responsible one said, “but the snow was so heavy it knocked out the farmer’s telephone. He had to take the bus driver into town to get a tow truck.”

“Yeah,” Brian, the eleven year old chimed in.” and I think Lucy liked old Tony.”

“Tony?”

“Yeah, the kid that lived where we got stuck.”

“I didn’t either, he was just nice.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s not what it looked like”

They chattered on until I told them they would have to be quiet.

“I’ve had my own excitement tonight.” I explained as I led them to the bedroom door.

I opened the door and introduced the wide jawed children to the boy who sat staring in awe at his wife and new born son.

“Did you really do that Mom?”

“Where did you learn how?”

After a minute of ooohing and aaahing over the tiny baby, I led them out of the room and closed the door so we could all tell our stories in more details over a cup of hot chocolate.

Finally, around midnight, I realized that it had stopped snowing. I slipped on my coat and walked down to the end of the driveway to put one of my old quilts in the back seat of the car in case they needed it in the morning. The furious snow had been replaced by a clear sky and a full moon that turned the silent snow to silver. A lone window shown from my house where inside my children were all safe in their beds and the girl Mary and her new baby lay sleeping. I found myself humming as I walked back to the house....”...all is calm, all is bright...”

I Hope You Dance

We had a visitor at the community chorus practice last night. She was a choral professor at Julliard for years and took the time to address the choir about performing. She was heartened that, here in the rural midwest, the pursuit of classical choral singing is still alive, but she took us to task on our attitude. 'Singing is dancing,' she said. 'You have to express that flow and grace and joy while you sing. You have to be in love with what you're doing.'

I was reminded of that this morning as we read our daily C.S.Lewis. It was not what he wrote, but how he wrote that struck me. There is a flow and a grace and a joy in his writing that lets you know he really loves the subject. And those of us reading his works, experience joy in the reading as well.

There have been times in my life as well when I have felt that flow and grace. It's when I'm doing something that I love. Not necessarily something that people expect me to do, or something that is in vogue, or even something that is easy for me. But when I'm really doing something I love, sometimes I feel that joy and grace and I think others notice it as well.

Oh, and Happy 91st Birthday to my Mother.  She's still baking and dancing!

End of an Era

My favorite uncle, Arthur Berrier, died this week at the age of 106.  I just talked to his granddaughter, Jamie, and she said he went very peacefully.  A fitting end to a long steady life.  Steady, that is what he was, steady, reliable, faithful, true.  Attributes not much in fashion these days, but they served him well and perhaps lengthened his years.  We laughed that he was like the Ever Ready bunny.  He just kept going and going and going.  Actually, he was probably more like the tortoise in the story of the tortoise and the hare.  He was slow and steady until he finished the race.  It's pretty amazing if you think about it.  After his wife ,Esther, died in the mid 90's he continued to live in their apartment until just two months ago.  The last year Kelly, his granddaughter-in-law, came in to help prepare his meals and make sure he ate, but other than that he took care of himself.  Ironically, Kelly gave birth this week to another Berrier, as if to make up for the hole he left.

I loved Uncle Arthur and always knew that he loved me as well.  I know I amused him.  Up until the very end, whenever he saw me, he would smile, laugh and remind me of some story from my youth that I would just as soon forget. Like the time I missed a turn and drove my family's car into his country store.  But he always was laughing with me, not at me.  He was too gentle and forgiving for that.

For the past ten or so years, the celebration of his birthday has become the central family get-together.  Friends and family came from all over the country and even the world to celebrate.  Every year we would tell him we would see him next year at another birthday celebration, and he would shyly say that he might not make it.  But he always did, and so we would gather to celebrate another year.  We will be gathering once more tomorrow.  To celebrate a life lived long and well, and to mourn a man who did not change the world, but made the world a better place to be by his presence.

A Good Recipe

I baked a quiche today, ham and gruyere, with crust entirely from scratch, something I haven't done since the first few years we lived in New Jersey back in the late 80's.  We were so poor then, that we seldom went out to eat, but we ate very well at home.  Groceries were cheaper in New Jersey than they are here, and things that we can't find here, like lamb, were more plentiful.  That was also before the age of the internet, Food Network and so many sources of recipes that it is almost impossible to choose.  All I had then, was a couple of trusty cookbooks.  But that was all I needed.  It seemed like every Sunday for a year, I would practice making pie crust after Sunday Dinner.  I finally figured out the secret, which fortunately I still recall.  The first time I took a pie somewhere and someone said, 'that's real homemade pie crust,'  I knew I had arrived.  I remember the years of cooking in New Jersey with fondness.  We had friends over for dinner frequently, and solved a lot of the worlds problems over those meals.  Most of the meals were certainly not what I would term gourmet, but they were good and the fellowship was even better.  Something was lost along the way as we became more prosperous.  We were not the only ones who got caught up in fancy french restauraunts and gourmet coffee.  And we are not the only ones who, now that the economy is cooling ,are finding ourselves resurrecting some of our old skills and habits, and even resurrecting some of our old cookbooks.  Not the fancy ones, but the ones with the ingredient stained pages.  Once the quiche was in the over, I made a pecan pie with the other half of the pie crust dough, and showed Corina how it was done.  Now she knows that there are no secret ingredients.  Just a little time, a few ingredients and a good recipe.

There's no such thing

It's the day after Christmas and the three of us are glad to have the holiday over.  It started out when we woke Christmas morning to near blizzard conditions.  There are those who sing of "dreaming of a white Christmas", but the truth of the matter is a different thing.  The weather conditions by themselves made for challenging holidays for most of the people in the plains, but our Christmas was of the Garrison Keillor kind...straight from the shores of Lake Wobegon.  My husband started shoveling out, coming back in every twenty minutes to warm up.  His cheeks were so rosy he looked like Santa Claus.  I thought it was going to be a merry day, so I started preparing our Christmas dinner, thinking about "Julie and Julia" the movie which we watched the night before.  I was thinking how much I resembled Julia Child, not because of my cooking, but my propensity to make such a mess that I have to mop the floor after preparing for any major meal before the guests arrive.  In the middle of the stewed tomatoes, the phone rang.  It was my 90 year old mother from next door, hysterically crying..."Felix is dead", she wailed.  "What?"  I asked.  Felix is her ten year old cat who has always been the picture of health.  "I went down in the basement and he was just lying next to the washing machine.  I don't know what to do."   That was the beginning of Christmas day.  She's sobbing because we can't bury him in the back yard...obviously not because there is over a foot of snow on the ground which is frozen solid because the temperatures are hovering around five degrees.  So I yelled at my husband to stop shoveling because Felix was dead.  That woke Corina who came running down stairs to see what was going on.  Anyway, Phil went over to mom's and did the only thing possible with a dead cat on Christmas day...he put him in a double trash bag and put him in the trash where his frozen corpse remains,waiting for the trash man who comes on Monday.  That crisis averted, Phil kept shoveling and I put in a load of towels because we kept having to mop up all of the snow we were tracking in.  The next thing we know, the washer is overflowing because the drain from the washer has frozen.  Fortunately, I was doing a load on the hot setting and after only dumping a couple of gallons on the floor, it began to drain.  And on it went...My brother managed to make the 100 mile trek down from the city, only because he is a truck driver and they are used to any conditions.  My mother insisted on coming over to our house even though she has to use a walker to get around and they don't work very well in ice and snow.  Her care worker last week had a cold and passed it on to her, as if a 90 year old woman with a failing heart would be immune to any germs.  She comes over without even her face being covered, but she's stubborn like that.  While we were exchanging presents and there was none for my brother, I ran upstairs and found I had forgotten to wrap his.  I wish I could say it ended there, but later that night, just before I went to bed, the toilet upstairs stopped up.  I had to wake my sleeping husband, and after searching all over the house, we finally determined that the plunger was next door at mothers, and it was definitely too late to wake her up so we could only hope that no one would wake up during the night and use the bathroom without thinking.. 
This morning the toilet was still full to the brim, but with some work once we got the plunger, it is now it's normal self.  We had more snow during the night, but nothing that could not be handled.  We took mother to the emergency room and it seems her cold has turned into bronchitis, but with modern medicine, she is back home in her cozy house next door.  I finally laid down to take a nap this afternoon, exhausted, and thinking that this would have been described as the 'Christmas from hell.'  But then it occurred to me, there is no Christmas from hell.  Hell would never have and never will give us anything to celebrate.  And that is what this day and this season is all about.  It's not the gifts, it's not the decorations, it's not the food, it's not even our families.  It is "The Gift"  the one thing, the only thing that makes our lives worth living.  the only thing that enables us to be givers ourselves.  That's it, that's what we celebrate.

First Day of Winter

Today would be Aunt Myrtle's 93rd birthday.  Sadly, she has been gone from our lives for almost three years.  I wrote the following in February 2005.


We went to the Lied Center in Lawrence last night to see the baritone, Jubilant Sykes. I have been a fan of his for two or three years, ever since Phil gave me his “Jubilant” CD for Christmas. It was announced in the spring that he was going to be in Lawrence as part of the concert series but we had to wait until August to order tickets. On the first day, we got them, center seats, first row back, and what a performance!

Although he has sung with the Metropolitan Opera and in various venues throughout Europe and the United States, it was not a sell out crowd. Most of the audience appeared to be season ticket holders and unfamiliar with him, but after the first song, they were mesmerized as well. The first five songs were in Spanish with only a piano for accompaniment, and no microphone, not that he needs one. Then he moved into the more familiar classics and spirituals. Although there is probably nothing he can’t sing, the spirituals were the audience’s favorites. One thing I admire about Jubilant Sykes that he doesn’t wear his faith on his shoulder where it can easily be knocked off, but in his heart. That makes a difference in the audience response to some passionate statements of what he believes. He spoke briefly about the personal heritage of some of the songs, of hearing his grandmother, Paul Robeson and Leotyne Price sing them as a child and how they affected his life and his career. Then he sang "Deep River” acapella and the audience fell silent.

The only down side to an otherwise extraordinary evening were two instances when I saw younger women helping elderly women to their places. Both times, the care and concern was genuine, and so appreciated that I was reminded of my favorite aunt, all of the concerts and operas we attended and how we can no longer do so.

Aunt Myrtle meant almost as much to me as my own mother. With three younger brothers, one of whom was developmentally challenged; my mother didn’t have much time to invest in me so my father and my aunt shared their lives with me instead. My aunt gave me my first sewing machine, taught me to sew, showed me how to garden, how to cook well, and how to be a lady. She gave me an appreciation for the arts, took me to my first museum and to my first opera. For years, we shared the season tickets to the opera where I learned not to fall asleep during the most boring arias. I took her to see Star Wars where she fell asleep when Luke Skywalker was flying through the canyons of the death star being chased by the minions of Darth Vader.

Even though she grew up a hardscrabble farm girl during the depression, she was refined, cultured, and talented. She had a wonderful, artistic eye and was a dress designer before she married my uncle and never worked except as a volunteer, again. She was the most giving person I have known. You learned not to say you liked something in her house or something she had on because she would give it to you on the spot. I once saw her stop what she was doing to take off the dress she was wearing and give it to the person who complimented her on it.

Like Jubilant Sykes, she was proud of her heritage and not afraid to tell you what she thought. We had hours and hours of discussions about my grandmother and grandfather, what it was like growing up in that era, and how many in my generation were not living up to the standards of previous generations. All the while, she encouraged me to be the best I could be. I know she was proud of my success in the business world. Although I would sometimes run to her for advice when I ran into difficult situations, she wouldn’t let me quit or take the easy road. She always reminded me of the heritage of earlier generations.

Now that is all lost to Alzheimer’s. I remember the Christmas a couple of years ago when she came to dinner in an outfit that didn’t quite match. That was the first time I realized that something was wrong and knew that she was slowly leaving us.

I’m thankful I was able to take her to the Metropolitan Opera at Kennedy Center in New York when she came to visit us when we lived in New Jersey. For years she listened to it every Saturday afternoon and it was a joy to be able to share a live performance with her. I remember her commenting that she always heard ‘the lights are going up’ on the radio and didn’t understand what it meant until she saw the lights recede into the ceiling as the performance started.

Those days are forever gone. Instead she doesn’t get out of bed until noon and has worn the front of her head bald from pulling at her hair. Her caretakers try to keep her active, but she continues to go downhill into that long sad goodbye. I miss her. I wish I could dote on her as she did on me, as the two young women with their elderly charges last night.

There comes a time when all that is left is the heritage, the heritage that Jubilant Sykes lives up to so well in his concerts. I only hope I can pass some of my heritage on to my niece as my Aunt Myrtle did to me.