May 16, 2008

A few rogue curls to tame back

My grandmother is telling me her stories. One of her favorites is how my grandpa was the only one of three men who could persuade her to get married, secretly, while she was still in nursing school at Deaconess in Boston in the 1940s. It wasn’t allowed, and nurse’s training back then was so important to her she watched more than one man walk out, refusing to wait for her until she finished. But when she met my grandfather — she whirling down a ferris wheel at the Penobscot County Fair and he standing down on the ground, leaning against a carnival stand, watching her until she noticed him — she broke it off with her latest boyfriend and knew my grandfather was the one she would break all the rules for.

They were married before he went off to war, less than a year before she finished her training, and they kept it a secret until after her graduation. Even after he came home from overseas they couldn’t truly be together, for years working opposing shifts, one coming home as the other was leaving, only seeing each other a few minutes a day.

But they held it together and they were starry-eyed until he died unexpectedly in 1999. She recalls very clearly, though, that in their early years together he could be on the bossy side and on one particularly bad day she scooped up her two boys, both toddlers then, and left him high and dry for five full weeks. Had he not eventually come to her mother’s house with his heart on his sleeve (and an apology, which didn’t hurt), I wouldn’t be here in that very same house right now, more than 50 years later, to tell that story.

She laughs as she tells it to me in the truck on our way home this afternoon, and says with a firm nod that it was the last time he ever bossed her, and that was that.

Tonight I went alone to his grave, on the road down the hill that heads north out of town. It was just getting dark and the frogs and crickets were out, the moon, too, and while the breeze was chilly when I parked the truck alongside the ruts of the dirt road and got out, it was calm and warm down on the ground on the grass by his tombstone and I stayed there a long time, more than an hour, before a pair of headlights shone over the rise and chased me back home. But I got to say what I wanted to say, which was good thinking, grandpa — giving her a few weeks to miss you, too.

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