There’s a lot going on these days. No time to breathe in a world that, quite frankly, is leaving me breathless. From a coming trip west to my plans for the east, from the romance of direction to the direction of romance, it’s all been good.
Even better.
It is, then , a time to be grateful.
“Harriet’s remarkable,” I was told just this Sunday. (With that, floodgates opened, and memories of years gone by, stories of a distant but vivid past were shared):
…Of the night they’d met at a Columbus J.C.C. —he was living with Dick and me back then—of my middle-aged father, frustrated by the sight of teen-aged hosiery hanging from a kitchen sink, hurling his shoe through a wall…
A pivotal time in not only my Dad’s life, but mine as well, it was anchored not by one of the guys from his card game, not by one of my friends on campus, but by a woman that barely played gin yet always hung in.
I’ve been thinking. Not only of Harriet…but of others that’ve graced my life. Women, all three, who through circumstance married my pals, acquiesced to my nonsense, buttressed my journey, and became true friends.
And hung in.
‘Met Marilyn first, or so it seems. Stopping Stuart’s world on a dime, she put an immediate dent on what had been a standing dinner with Fenton, Longert and myself. Dorm kitchens closed on Sundays, we were munching pizza at Roma’s in the alley behind SBX or doing Chinese at Jong Mea down on Broad Street until…
And a friend she’s been. From the time she survived the scare of me taking out her sister to the times I’d go to Stuey for counsel. Like they used to say about the Super Bowl and Pittsburgh, the road to my buddy Stuart goes through Marilyn. And always—always—she’s had my back.
Rita Lena? Can’t quite recall the start. What I do remember is that all of a sudden Brother Bruce was in Columbus and she was there. Then, when it came to law school, he was there, and she was there. Still yet, as we had our children, we were all there. Always.
I see snapshots. There’s a brutal snowstorm. It’s January, ’78, and Rita’s mom’s working at 9th and Euclid. Me? I’m driving her home, two miles per hour…safely. We were young then. Alive. Then a Saturday night, years later. Many years later: Bruce, Rita, some kids, me…and her father walking out of “Schindler’s List”. You could hear a pin drop. And my favorite picture—not a snapshot so much as an audio…a recording.
“When you going to stop over?” she’s asked…endlessly…for nineteen years.
No one, male or female, has so often made it clear to me I was welcome. Always.
And Lana. As I rode her husband’s coattails up our lodge’s ladder, she, the Pride of Philadelphia, inherited me. The dynamics of my kinship with her Michael being what they were, ‘tis safe to say that no one saw my mishigos closer, or from a better angle than she. And she hung in; she always had my back.
I am thinking of these ladies today NOT with reverie for times gone by, but with gratitude for times so good.
Like today.
To one I am “B” and another I’m Bruce. (Heck! To Lana, it’s… simply …“Bogart”). Matters not! How well I know that had they each in their own way not been there for me all these years, I might well not be standing today.
And I am standing today…on the threshold to a future…smiling.