A Great Love

Settled in the twilight of a bar, a friend and I got to talking about our parents.  As we spoke of their unexpressed love and tolerance of each other, he told me of an ordinary man having an extraordinary love.

His father had come of age among the dark firs, blue lakes and iron mines of Minnesota and Northern Wisconsin.  This is country of long winters and sparse population, a place of endless forests, deep snow and small insular communities.  It is the kind of place that affords young men and women a springtime of freedom before the grip of the mines, church and winter bind them into place.

My friend's father was a popular guy, a bartender, who never lacked for money or excitement.  He pissed away his earnings, gambled, rolled his cars, got into drunken fights and generally lived a normal life for his time and age.  But as he matured, the chaos of his life pressed against the ceiling of what was tolerable. In a normally frosty town, the social chill locked up his relationships and his friends found that they had other more important things to do.  His time of freedom had come to an end and he cast about for a woman to settle him down.

This was a perfectly natural course of events and the instant that he realized what he had to do, the town responded and a woman appeared.

She was young, about eighteen, a wisp of a girl employed as a housekeeper for an older couple. She had no family and struggled with poor health but that is what attracted him.  There were no fathers, brothers or mothers to tell them what they could and could not do, so there still was that freedom, yet her vulnerability demanded he curb his nature far more than relatives could, and that is what he knew he needed.

They fell quickly in love, and just as quickly her health failed.  In a matter of months she was diagnosed with cancer and left for a state hospital near Madison.  My friend's father quit his job, moved to be near her and was the only comfort and family that she knew as she faded away.

There was no funeral; just a short church service and he had to borrow to bring her home for burial.

He went back to his old habits for an acceptable period of mourning then the town clapped down again with a match to a sweet but stable and religious woman.  They dated, fell in love, but this time he could not settle.  Together they picked out an engagement ring but he lost the money to pay for it gambling.  He still proposed to her, but that night when driving home from a dance, he tumbled his old buick and she was hurt.  The next morning, bruised and bandaged, she paid for her own ring - then read him the riot act.

That was it, he settled as much as any other man in his era and region ever did.  From there on, he was her project and she made him the ordinary but good man that he was to be -- though there was one thing he did that was out of the ordinary, when he got a chance he would steal away to where his first love lay buried.  He could not endure that anyone who was once loved would be left alone.

Throughout their marriage, my friend's mother would stop by the cemetery to discover that someone had tended the grave.  Someone had trimmed the grass or brushed the snow away from the stone and in season left wild flowers.  This hurt her deeply, not because he had greater love for another because she never believed that to be so.  In many ways, she loved him more for this, for their marriage was founded on bringing out his better nature.  What hurt most is that a ghost of a woman brought out a best in him that she could not.

© Greg Schiller, 2007
Author: Greg Schiller