The Ever Present Three C’s

Those who have read my latest book, Tennis Talk of a Nobody, will know it weaves life’s three C’s: chance, circumstance, and connection.

This photo was taken on March 4th at Dallas-Fort Worth. I arrived there from Southern California’s small and manageable Santa Ana airport.  Not so at Dallas with its speed train and multiple terminals. And the gate for my flight to Richmond kept changing: A to C, back to A, again to C. At one point I stopped to consult a big board above my head and heard a woman’s voice behind me. “May I help you?” A tiny woman in a volunteer ambassador’s uniform said she could check my flight if I gave her my boarding pass. Which I did. I thanked her and left.

What I needed to do was let husband Mike know I’d reached Dallas. Before the first flight I’d shut down my “simple” Consumer Cellular phone. But when I turned it back on, flipped it open and hit “contacts,” I got a message about airplane mode.  I knew my husband, the pilot, would say, “Did you troubleshoot the problem?”  Yes, I fiddled around until I gave up, unable to make a call. That’s when I remembered the kind ambassador and scuttled back to her. 

 “This is supposed to be an easy phone for seniors,” she said. So they say.  She fooled around with it, then said, “I’ll ask someone young!” She flagged down a young woman in the busy corridor.” Ah, youth. She met the challenge and proudly announced, “I’ve turned off airplane mode.” We both thanked her. That’s when I looked at the ambassador’s name tag.

 “Lee Lee, if you don’t mind me asking, what is your country of origin?” With delight, I heard, “Malaysia.” I told her that I’d lived in Kuala Lumpur on Jalan U Thant from 1987 to 1990.  I asked when she had left, and then learned she had accepted a contract as a mid-wife to the U.K., later accepted a position as a nurse in the USA. That’s when she met her husband, an airman from Hawaii, who was stationed at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio.

            Really? I’d lived there in 1968 after marrying a USAF student- pilot. Had he fought in the Vietnam war? she asked.  Yes, and so had her husband. At that point she sent a text to Mike, then showed me a photo of her two daughters. One named Michelle!  I dug out an actual photograph of my Michelle, and said that I, too, had a second daughter.  Why had I been in California, Lee Lee asked?  To talk to an old friend’s book club about my latest book.  Really? I learned she is in a writing group and hopes to see her memoir published this year. At this point in our conversation, she flagged down another woman and asked if she would take a photo of us.  She already had Mike’s number and sent the photo to him.

            I did not tell Lee Lee about the multiple connections with a woman in the book club I’d attended days earlier. What were the chances I would meet someone who had done business for years in Venezuela and Colombia, mined gold in Peru (three countries where I’d spent a decade)? More than this, she has a house in the Napa Valley (my haunt for another decade), and her nephew, a retired Major General, is someone my daughter knows from the U.S. army.  Best of all, this woman and I are USC graduates. There is even more related to the South for both of us, where she worked for 15 years and where I’ve lived since late 2004.  

            What’s my point? That I am renewed by each encounter with Life’s Three C’s. I returned home from this six-day trip in time for the first meeting of the 2024 RCC-RILL book club. We had a fine discussion of Marilynn Robinson’s Housekeeping.  That’s for next week.

He was her …North, South, East, and West

Then one Mother’s Day, a fatal stroke, and in days her husband was gone. I have borrowed part of a line from W.H. Auden’s poem, “Funeral Blues” quoted in the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral.  

I imagine the poem is used often. The same way people reach for commercial sympathy cards. Let someone else find the difficult words. I do know words fail me when confronted with acknowledging someone’s death.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest, 

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

https://allpoetry.com/Funeral-Blues

Above in my title, I substituted Auden’s “me” for “He.” While reading A Balanced Life, a memoir by Patricia Schultheis, I remembered Auden’s poem. Last week I mentioned the SMK creative nonfiction essay, “The Country Where I Live.” The combination of the Franz Kafka quote, the memoir, the narrative essay, led me to feel the “Guilty Blues.”  Why?  Not easy to explain in a page of prose.

Simply stated, I believe that countless friendships have ruptured because of Donald Trump. And this rupture relates to something I find vexing in our culture. Maybe I say this after living in a country where there was no separation of religion and state. I do know I feel annoyed if someone in the USA tells me their religion and politics are no one else’s business.  I respect anyone reciting, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” with its declarative first person.  But what about, “We the People?”  I think the plural suggests openness about political beliefs, not a scrupulous and earnest piety of “no one else’s business.”

My friend, the widow, and I parted because of this. I had no problem that she was Republican, but hopefully like those who declared themselves Lincoln Republicans.  I could not accept she would not disavow Donald Trump. She stuck to the “I” and no ‘one else’s business’ creed, and I to my plural, “We the People.” This is to say fixed ideas supplanted feelings. Which means I did not feel the painful loss of her husband, a man my husband very much enjoyed seeing.

For over a decade I was in a group of six writers. One member was already a widow, two more would become widows. Then this woman’s husband suffered a fatal stroke. Earlier the Pandemic had brought an end to the group.  Almost everything she shared with us had a married couple as the subject. We often suggested she bind her creative and humorous stories into a book on marriage.

My point is this. It was only when I finished reading A Balanced Life that I felt my friend’s loss, instead of my own grievance.  In other words, Patricia’s book was an axe for a frozen sea, in which no waves had washed me into an acute awareness of this former friend finding herself in the Country of Grief, and how that felt as a new reality.

What to do?  I am going to ask if she will meet me for coffee downtown one day. And if this happens, I will take with me A Balanced Life and offer the memoir to her. I will also take along a photocopy of Patricia’s masterful narrative, “In the Meantime” which is about mortality and creativity. The one a certainty. The other always an open possibility…

Next week:  Playing with hodgepodge and exploring this word in multiple dictionaries.

Responses to Last Week’s Blog on Dante’s Inferno

I bemoan the small number who read my weekly blog, though I have a fair number of subscribers. And I’m pleased to say responses came from Washington State, California, Colorado, New York, and of course, Virginia. Here is a sampling.

“We moderns have pretty much decided all that “archaic old stuff” isn’t relevant. And here we are—so blind to ourselves, all over again. Appalling, depressing, even horrifying.”

“Brilliant blog on the circles of sin.”

"Decided to read The Divine Comedy.

Checked the local library’s date base. No Dante!”

“Ironweed’s Francis Phelan is a saint compared to politicians I will not name.”

“I’ll sign the petition for changing the name of Congress to Malebolge. Word made me laugh out loud.”

“Relevant blog indeed. The last few months have been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I don’t know how it is going to end.”

“Wholly relevant blog and Malebolge is just the word for our political times. We can only hope (and work) for BETTER.”

“Malebolge seems a proper place for MAGAots, don’t you think? I note they also own territory in all the other Dantean circles except Limbo. None qualify for that.”

Until next week…wishing you a fine Thanksgiving with family and friends. Gail and llona