Charlie Kirk wanted to turn the USA into a white evangelical Christian theocracy with Sharia-like justice system. Some Americans agree with that direction, feeling it is what the “founding fathers” wanted. Others find that reprehensible anti-Americanism. The mainstream press has been avoiding this discussion to a large degree, trivializing it with the rubric “culture war.” To survive together, we must learn how to bridge this chasm without violence. “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”
When I moved from my apartment on Breeze into the house on Wavecrest, I’d put the box on the shelf in the closet of our bedroom. Way over to the side, out of the way, where I could forget about it. It shouldn’t have been so scary; it was only a bunch of photographs I’d taken in Isla Vista, the year after graduation. And a journal, in a velvet pouch I’d sewn together.
One Thursday evening, when Al was on call and I was off the next day – we were hoping to use our long weekend to cross the border into Ensenada – I grabbed a chair and retrieved the box. Sitting on the narrow edge of the waterbed, I tugged at the packing tape wrapped multiple times around the cardboard. Once I got it open, I went into the kitchen, took a glass of wine to the klunky table Al insisted on putting in the middle of our “living room”, and brought the box in.
I pulled out the batch of photos first. Each one was stiff and wrinkled, the white borders already turning yellow. I handled each as if it were a precious gem. I found myself back in the bathroom in the little house near the cliffs overlooking the beach in Isla Vista, the bathroom where I had developed the film, enlarging each onto paper which I then developed, fixed, and rinsed in a makeshift basin.
The work was repetitive, soothing. In the dull glow of the red light, music from the college radio station playing on a tinny radio set atop the toilet, I escaped from the crazy post-college life I found myself in. The life I’d written about in jagged, searing diary entries I’d sewn shut in that velvet bag.
I spread them out across the table. Mostly of young women, some my friends and others I’d approached at random. Those days were free for so many of us: free from parents, free from school, free to explore who we were or might become. Several showed a belly dancer, others a new mom. One depicted a long-haired blonde lounging in deep contemplation.
In a flash, I realized these photos, these young women, were some of the paths I might have taken. A circle of possibilities, spreading out in all directions. Over the past four years, I had narrowed down that circle, and now found myself moving more carefully, more thoughtfully, towards a specific goal. I would become a midwife, and I would not go back to the unfocused rambles hidden away in that diary.
My eyes fluttered closed from the wine and the peace I found leaving the memories of those days I saw in the portraits. The next thing I knew, I woke up to the morning sun dimpling my face, and a whisper in my ear.
“Cheryl…Cheryl…should I carry you to bed?”
“Wha…? No, I guess I slept out here..”
“At the table, all night?” Al sat down and lifted up one of the prints. “Who are these people?” he asked.
Two naked bodies, one male, one female, stood hip-to-hip, their blond hair cascading half way down each of their blacks. The girl’s arm circled his waist, his covered her shoulder. They stared ahead across the cliffs to the surf below.
“Wait…”,I said, grabbing it away. “That’s not…”
He picked up another one. “This is you?”
I saw myself, squatting, face replaced by my father’s Exacta SLR 35 mm, long sun-streaked blond hair swirling on each side of it. I nodded. “I don’t know if I’m ready…”
“Ready for what?”
“I took all these back in Santa Barbara. You know, when I told you I went a little crazy for a year. When I did…things.” I looked at the velvet bag.
“That’s OK, we don’t have to talk about our past, do we?” he answered.
I picked up another one of my pictures, of a trim mother in a loose-fitting flowered ankle-length dress. In her left arm she held a toddler, bright blonde hair cut short. Her right arm wrapped around the baby’s father, shirtless with a mustache, his own hair longer than his daughter’s. I frowned and wondered if I could ever find myself in such a photo, all three of us smiling at the camera.
I grabbed Al, and told him, “I want to go down to the beach, OK?”
“Now?” he said. “I’ve been up all night, and there was a crash, it took forever to get past Robertson on the freeway.
“Just a short walk, to clear my head.” I wanted to tell him about the future I saw, but didn’t know how to do that without exposing my past, the year I took those photos. I’d used my camera to ground myself, to build a stable center in the idle of all the chaos I had put myself through. How could I tell him about my dream of a safe future without him knowing me when I didn’t feel safe. How could he know what to give me unless he knew what I needed?
Al quickly changed out of his work clothes into floppy white linen pants and a baggy sweater. Eschewing shoes, he headed for the door. Before his hand reached the knob, our two dogs started barking and scratching, knowing they would get to run on the sand, and maybe chase a stick into the surf.
We turned left down Wavecrest. I marveled as usual at living not on a street, but a sidewalk heading directly to the shore. I put both arms around him and buried my head for a moment underneath his shoulder. He hugged back.
“You know those photos?” I started.
“Uh-huh…Where’d you find them?”
“I’ve had them a long time.”
“Who are all those people?”
“Friends I had then, mostly. A few I just stopped on the street and asked if I could take their picture.” I hesitated, wondering how to go on, how to talk about those times. “This was after I graduated. I was still in a house I shared with other people.” I remembered Jimmy and Shelly, and what happened between us, what I did to them and to myself. I thought back further to Ian, how hard it had been to leave him. I looked up at Al, and asked, “What were you doing after you broke up with … what was her name…?”
“Susie,” he said in a subdued monotone. “Or did you mean Carol?”
“Whichever, I don’t care. I just want to know more about you.”
He pulled away, and called, “Sean! Tasha! Wait!” The two dogs stopped their dance down the sidewalk, alert to his rumbling baritone. They knew better than to get ahead of us before we hit the sand. He shivered. “It’s still cool out here…I should have brought a jacket. All the fog, you know?”
I was learning about his skills at deflection. Whenever he didn’t want to talk about something, he wouldn’t clam up, he wouldn’t turn sullen. No, he would pick up on something else which caught his attention and try to turn mine to it as well.We stepped off the bike path onto the sand and jogged through an opening in the “sand fence”. I sighed and put my arm around his waist. He hugged back.
Fox, by Joyce Carol Oates, is a mesmerizing tale. Not unlike the titular character himself.
Set in an upscale boarding school incongruously located hard by New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, Oates has infused her story with a miasma of disgust, recursively weaving her way among a pedophile’s inner life, the tenuous lives of locals, and a meandering police investigation.
Oates opens with three sets of visitors to a nature preserve, Weiland Waterlands, named after the small town which centers her action. First, P. (Paige) Cady, the single fifty year-old headmistress of The Langhorne Academy, and her rescue pup, a hound-terrier mix named Princess Di, discover what Cady presumes to be the tongue of a deer which she thinks might have been torn loose by the turkey vultures circling overhead. The next day, Eugenia Pfennig, a 13 year-old eight-grader at the Academy, and her Daddy, see the same vultures, but only discover the head of an abandoned life-sized doll in the rushes at the edge of the swamp. Their visit is an attempt by Daddy to bond with his brilliant but sullen daughter who is only interested in securing scenes of nature to draw and describe, as requested by her English teacher, Francis Fox. On the third day, Halloween, Marcus and Demetrius Healy, after delivering scrap lumber to the nearby dump, follow the vultures to a white Acura sedan half submerged in the stagnate water at the base of a thirty-foot drop-off. They finally discover the badly picked over corpse which has excited the vultures.
So far, we’re thirty-five pages into an appropriately gruesome and atmospheric whodunit. Oates has teased us with just enough information to set up her introduction of Francis Fox, the newly arrived English teacher. Immediately she enters his perverted thoughts as he seduces what might be one of his twelve year-old “girl-students”. Helpfully dated flashbacks fill in his journey from a Columbia Masters program in literature to meticulous self-loathing predator. We soon learn the white Acura is his and he is missing following the Fall break. So the chase begins.
But what a slow-motion chase it is. Oates repeats the thoughts and actions of many characters, at times word-for-word. Scenes are replayed from different characters’ viewpoints. And her narration periodically hammers home the horror of Fox’s predilections, the anxiety of P. Cady’s carefully constructed personal and professional life, the domestic disruptions of several Langhorne sets of parents, and the difficulties of the residents of the Pine Barrens simply trying to live day-to-day.
Eventually, Oates begrudgingly returns to her murder mystery (or was it murder?) through H. (Horace) Zwender, a divorced and very human detective on the 8-man Weiland police force. Despite everyone’s interest in labeling Fox’s death a suicide or accident, he doggedly pursues the more difficult possibility that someone killed him. After many false leads, red herrings, and wandering interviews with most of the town and school population, the answer falls into his lap. Zwender ties up the case in a neat bow, leaving everyone with only the private and imperfect knowledge each has.
Not satisfied with the pat answers she’s provided, Oates ends with an epilogue dated nine years after the events in Jersey in the fall of 2013, where she supplies a final resolution.
We had no steps to walk down after our wedding ceremony, no ornately carved arched doors to exit a sanctuary. Back at the van, no one had tied tin cans to the bumper, and no hand-painted “Just Married” appeared on the rear window. We bumped down the canyon a mile or two, arriving at the Alta Lodge mid-afternoon.
Al had prepared an hours-long tape of our then-favorite music, recorded on a reel-to-reel. The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Brown, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Bob Dylan…they all showed up to provide the soundtrack to our home-grown wedding reception. Despite Utah’s stringent liquor laws, Al managed to drink enough to lose his usual staid inhibitions. After dancing with me in front of the entire party, he staggered back to our room, where he remained upright long enough to undress, then fall face down on the bed. I brought the top layer of cake over to him. He stuffed it in his mouth, devouring it in two bites while I snapped photos to use as future blackmail should things turn sour between us.
Next day, we headed back down to Salt Lake in our school-bus-yellow VW van to start a two-week honeymoon through the Pacific Northwest. I had spent my childhood in southern California, never more than a few minutes from the Pacific Ocean. In a month, Al would leave our home in the Avenues to start his new job in Tacoma. To get from Salt Lake to Puget Sound, we first traveled across Idaho and landed in Joseph, Oregon, where we camped at the base of forested mountains. Families surrounded us, many with power boats in which they cruised on the lake during the hot, languid afternoon.
“These are the Wallowas,” Al said, pointing at the evergreen-covered peaks above us. “We can go to Hells Canyon tomorrow.” “Hells Canyon?”
“It’s supposed to be the deepest gorge in the country, deeper than the Grand Canyon. Almost eight thousand feet from top to bottom,” he explained.
“Why is it called Hells Canyon?”
“The Snake River runs through it. Eighty or ninety years ago, some people trying get through these mountains in a steamboat came to grief. It’s narrow, treacherous, full of rapids. And once they got in there, the hills around them were so high and rugged, they couldn’t get out. Not a good way to go. The Oregon trail followed the Snake all the way through Idaho, but once they got to Oregon, they had to haul their wagons up over the mountains, near the road we took. They called the spot where they left the river, ‘Farewell Bend’.”
“Because that’s where they said good-bye to the Snake?” I asked, laughing. “How do you know all this stuff? Why do you know all this stuff.”
“I like to look at maps, like to read about how people traveled in the old days.”
This was the guy I married – his brain crammed full of history and geography. Somehow he made it charming, spewing out all that “useless knowledge”, as he called it.
“Tomorrow, let’s drive up to the overlook, the high point above the Snake,” he said.
“What’s the road like?”
“Umm, the map says it’s gravel.”
“Can we make it? Do we need 4-wheel drive or anything.”
Al hesitated. I’d learned over the past five years he didn’t like to admit a lack of knowledge, so I could tell when he was starting to deflect, trying make up an answer in the face of ignorance or lack of experience. “The van is like an approved traction device all by itself, with its rear engine, stick shift and high clearance. We should be able to make it, and if it looks sketchy, we can always turn around, right?”
The next morning, after we’d cooked breakfast on the Coleman stove, washed the dishes in the sink, put the food away in the icebox, lowered the pop-up top and turned our bed back into the rear seat, Al got up front and turned the key over.
“Click.”
“Uh-oh”, he whispered.
“What?”
“Well, it didn’t start. Like, nothing.”
He tried again, turning the key a few seconds longer. This time, “click, click, clickity clickity click”
“What is it, what’s wrong?” I hoped my new husband had an answer. Aren’t men supposed to know all about cars, how to fix them?
“It must be the starter motor,” he said.
“So, what do we do?” I asked.
“This is a stick, right? We should be able to jump-start it…”
“Then what? If the starter is broken, we can’t drive into the canyon, can we?”
“No. We’ve got to get it looked at, fixed, replaced maybe…I don’t know. But we’ve got to get out of here, get to a town with a garage. Let me ask those guys over there if they would help us push the van so we can jump it. You know how to pop the clutch?”
I stared at him. “Who taught you how to drive a stick, anyway?”
He started to say something, but saw my look, and walked over to the campsite across the road.
With Al and two other guys pushing, we got up enough speed to get the engine turning over. We drove six miles into Joseph and pulled into the only service station in town.
With the engine still running, Al got out and went into the office, coming back a few minutes later. “They said there’s a guy down in Enterprise who works on VWs, maybe he could help.”
Five more miles, and we found ourselves at a small garage on a back street of the tiny town. A sign featuring a smiling VW Beetle, pastel blue, swung beside the driveway.
Al came back with a guy not much older than us, dressed in greasy overalls, carrying a monkey wrench.
“Says he can fix it, knows the problem,” Al said, jerking his thumb back toward the mechanic.
“Yeah, this is a thing with those starters,” he said. “See, the copper coil sometimes doesn’t line up properly with the magnet and won’t turn. For some reason, there’s a dead spot in that system, it’s not wrapped all the way around. Poor design, for sure. Sometimes, ya gotta replace ‘em, but usually, you can fix it by just giving the starter a ‘whack’ so it jerks the rotor a touch and can get turning around again when the battery sends it juice. Here, turn off the engine.”
Al twisted the key.
“Now, try and start it again.”
“Click.”
“All right,” the mechanic said to Al. “Come back here, watch what I do.” He got down on his back, followed by my new husband, and kept talking. “See that up there? That’s the starter motor.”
I heard a loud ‘Clunk’ and felt a little shudder toward the back of the bus.
They got out from underneath and came up to the front window. “Now, start ‘er up,” the mechanic said with a wave of his wrench.
I turned the key, and was rewarded with a reassuring growl from the engine, rumbling now behind me.
“Good to go!” he said. “You make it to La Grande, or Pendleton for sure, you should be able to find a VW dealer who can give you a new starter, if you’re worried .”
With my future employment assured in Tacoma, I turned my attention to the new experience of home ownership. Our south-facing house, in the terraced neighborhood known as The Avenues, took the full brunt of Salt Lake’s high desert summer sun. Afternoons, I took to resting on the porch in the 95-degree heat, sipping on a gin-and-tonic and contemplating the profusion of plastic tricycles which had sprouted.
Most of the neighbors had at least one child between age four and eight among the five or so which made up the typical LDS family. And each kid had his or her own Big Wheel. They’d madly pedal along the sidewalks, the grinding of rigid wheels drowning out the cacophony rising up from the downtown streets below us.
Weekends, even the Big Wheels were eclipsed by a phalanx of gas-powered mowers giving haircuts to the tiny lawns lovingly manicured along Seventh Avenue. Our next-door neighbor noticed I was not participating in the parade and asked if I had a lawn mower.
“When I was a kid,” I said, “we lived on a hill like this. We had one of those push mowers – I don’t know how to work the gas ones. I thought I’d just let the lawn stay natural. It doesn’t rain much here, right? The grass doesn’t grow all that high, does it?”
Dandelions on my side were turning from yellow flowered tops to wispy fuzzballs, about to drift over his own immaculate fertilizer-fed green carpet. “You know, they make electric mowers now. They’re quiet, easier to use. These small yards, a 75-foot extension cord would be all you need.”
Despite his anodyne smile, I knew he didn’t want the house next to his looking like the one across the street. Several motorcycles were parked askew, their greasy droppings lending an eerie desolation to the browned-out front “lawn”.
Two days later, I drove to the nearest Sears and bought a Craftsman electric mower and extension cord. In fifteen minutes, I’d chopped down the unruly locks of our front yard. The hardest part was pushing the whirring machine at a tilt along the severe slope separating the upper terrace from the lower.
I found a hose in the shed out back and hooked up the rotating sprayer I picked up at Sears along with the mower. I placed it on the sidewalk bisecting the yard from the Avenue up to our porch, adjusting the angle of the spray to a 180-degree semi-circle covering the entire yard. I retreated to the porch and rested in the swinging bench suspended from the ceiling by two chains, which squeaked in unison with the soft “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-click” of the mechanical sprayer.
This calls for a drink, I thought. And thus began my afternoon ritual of a gin-and-tonic on the porch, ironically following after following the lawn-care advice of my Mormon neighbor.
While walking through the dining room to mix my drink in the kitchen, I noticed a scrap of wallpaper fluttering in the draft coming from the swamp cooler suspended in the window. I fingered the flap and saw several layers of paper covering the walls. The deeply stained wood floor evoked decades of footsteps, grinding dust into the grain since 1890.
By the time I’d found the bottles of Tanqueray and Schweppes, sliced a lime, and plopped several ice cubes into the mixture, I had a vision for what I could do while Cheryl spent her summer days in clinical rotation at Hill Air Force Base.
*******
“Two hundred dollars for a week,” the hardware store clerk said as we walked towards the back where rentals were kept. “Of course, you could just use hot water and soak the paper off. Get it wet enough, and it peels off with a scrapper.”
I returned home with a bucket, a sponge contraption, a pair of gloves, and that scrapper. During the trial-and-error phase, I found seven layers of wallpaper, laid sequentially over each other, a living history of Utahns’ preference in interior design. Spare stripes of green and gold led back to increasingly ornate floral décor.
Once down to the original lath-and-plaster, I needed to decide on a new look. I was unable remove all of the original glue, leaving an uneven surface. A coat of paint would retain the unevenness, which might go with the rugged brick wall in our bedroom.
“I don’t know. I’d feel better if it were smooth,” Cheryl opined.
“But I can’t get all that stuff off.”
“And I don’t want more wallpaper,” she added.
In the end we agreed on textured paint, leaving a speckled white surface. Even though I had carefully covered the floor with newspaper, some of the paint managed to stain the old carpet. Turpentine removed the paint splotches, but also left small circles of cleanliness in the otherwise dust-encrusted surface.
Thinking I might try to replace the carpet, I lifted one corner up to examine the under surface and found a smudged hardwood floor. My new plan: sand the wood smooth, then re-stain it!
When I shared my strategy with Cheryl, she asked, “Do you think you can get it done before the wedding? I mean, what if we have a reception here afterwards?”
The wedding! “Remind me again when we decided?”
“August 25th.” It was now early June.
“Shouldn’t we find a place, a church or something? Or do you just want to go to City Hall, sign papers there.”
Cheryl hesitated. “I went on a drive in the mountains one day after school. I think I found the perfect place. I want to show you this weekend, OK? It’s up the road to Alta.”
The next Saturday we drove the VW bus all the way to the end of Little Cottonwood Canyon Road and turned into a parking lot jammed with people hefting back packs, waxing touring skis, or sorting climbing ropes.
“Here?” I asked.
“No, I’ll show you.”
We walked about a quarter mile along a former Jeep road now overgrown with this year’s crop of dense mountain ground cover. Fir trees began to replace aspens as a stream emerged on our left. To the right, the upper reaches of Alta ski area glistened with the remaining snowfields in its north-facing gullies. Purple and pink wildflowers sprouted near our feet.
“See? We can do it outside,” Cheryl said as we approached several rocks rising to hip level in a small clearing. “We’ll just walk in, everybody can enjoy the sunshine. We’ll say our vows, and then…”
“And then?”
“I talked to my parents last week. They said they’d pay for it, for the reception, anyway.”
“The reception?”
“Yeah.” Cheryl stopped, then went on. “When I was here before, on the way back, I stopped in at the lodges at Alta. Well, one lodge, the only one open. Alta Lodge. They said they sometimes do weddings, we could rent the hall for the reception, and people could stay overnight in the rooms.”
“People? How many?” I’d envisioned a private little ceremony, a simple set of “I do’s”, then back home.
“Well, your family, and mine, with the girls and our friends, that’s about…”
“Girls?”
“Of course, my sister’s kids. My brother. Your parents, Leigh, and Aunt Gretchen. Friends like Dave and Carol, Catherine, Lynn and Paul, a few others. Probably thirty. That’s small for a wedding.”
This is getting to be a big deal, I thought. “A simple wedding. We’d plan it all ourselves, that’s what I thought we’re going to do,” I said.
“Well, this is planning it all ourselves. But still, a dress for me, shirt and pants for you, rings, flowers, invitations…This means something, this is important, Al.”
*******
With the walls painted, I rented a sander and got to work on the floor. The unwieldy contraption moved across the wood with all the finesse of a pneumatic jackhammer. The rental was for 48 hours. Two days later, all the accumulated wax and grime was gone, turning what had previously been a dark oak patina into a light ash, the color of a new baseball bat fresh from Louisville.
I proceeded to stain the wood, giving it an even tan, followed by a urethane sealant. At first glance, I was proud of the new floor I’d created after only a week’s work. On closer inspection, however, I found the silky surface was marred by wavy undulations. I’d been unable to steady the sander’s oscillations, resulting in a series of minute circular peaks and valleys. The stain and glossy overcoat brought out all the details of my amateur job.
I pointed this out to Cheryl. “We could cover it with a rug, hope whoever buys the house won’t notice until they move in?”
“You don’t want to start over, try and smooth it out?” she asked.
“I’d only make it worse,” I said.
She tactfully changed the subject. “I found a Mormon lady to make my dress. She says she can hem your pants as well. And rings. We have to go to the jeweler.”
“All these details! What else?”
“There’s a baker for the cake in Trolley Square.”
“A cake. Wait, is it going to have tiers, and a bride and groom on the top?”
Cheryl giggled. “No! They showed me some choices. Some rabbits – they had these two cute little rabbits holding hands with a heart in front.”
“Rabbits!”
“Sure, we’re a midwife and an Ob. You know, rabbits are a symbol of fertility?”
“I can’t wait!” I said. Cake! I love cake! What flavor, chocolate?”
“No, carrot – the rabbit theme, you know.”
“And tiers…?”
Cheryl thought a moment. “Oh year, a large one at the bottom, smaller layer above that, and then two pillars support a tiny piece with the rabbits on top. That’s the one just for us, that we get to eat.”
“Like, we feed each other…?”
I took a sip from my gin-and-tonic. Seated together on the hanging swing, the Salt Lake Valley sprawling beneath us, spreading up to the Wasatch and the canyon of our betrothal, I put my arm around her shoulders. Cheryl dropped her head onto my chest.
“Umm, that sun feels so warm. I love the sun,” Cheryl purred.
“So you don’t mind the floor?” I asked.
She titled her eyes up towards mine. “You’re a surgeon, not a carpenter,” she said.
We rocked a bit more, a gentle breeze floating up from the Temple Square a mile away. Cheryl sat up.
“Oh, forgot to tell you. I started on the invitations!” She left for a minute, then returned with a box of greeting cards and envelopes. She pulled one of the top and handed it to me.
Surrounded by hand-drawn flowers, a giant “W” dominated the page. Next to it in a column were “ho – Al & Cheryl”, “hat – our wedding”, “hen – August 25, 1979”, “here – Alta, Utah”, “hy”, then “heee!”
I was stunned, almost to tears. I was about to join my life with someone who could create such joy in the mundane act of sending wedding invitations.
“You’re going to have these printed up? You can’t write them all yourself,” I said.
“No, I’m going to have them copied. I thought there’d only be about 12 or so we’d have to send, but all our parents friends…, wedding presents, you know.” She looked up and asked, “What do you think?”
“I love it – the who, what, when, where, and especially the ‘Wheee!’ at the end.
*******
August 25, 1979. We loaded up the VW van with the cake, a change of clothes, a small pillow for the rings, and Cheryl’s four nieces. Meeting in the gravel lot at the end of the road, Cheryl and I led our little procession down the trail. Six children frolicked to and fro along the way – Cheryl’s four nieces, and the sons of our friends Dave and Carol from Denver, and Lynn and Paul from across the street. Six older adults – our two sets of parents and two aunts – strolled on with bemused satisfaction. Two sisters, a brother and brother-in-law provided gregarious ballast along with a smattering of local friends. Cheryl’s scuba buddy Catherine had balloon duty, trailing a bundle behind her.
Cheryl picked wildflowers growing along the side of the path and wove them into a crowning tiara, the reds and yellows complementing the baby blue crotched shawl protecting her shoulders from the high mountain sun. She had one left over, a purple Indian Paintbrush, and stuck it in my left pants pocket. I wore a light tan wide-brimmed beaver Stetson (size 7 1/4), the crown encircled with a feathery band. A few clouds sailed overhead, moderating the rising afternoon heat.
We had no program, no organ, no aisles, chairs, or bower. Cheryl and I ambled ahead along the rutted, dusty trail, trying to remember the clearing we’d found a few weeks earlier. Once everyone had gathered, it took some time for a circle of sorts to form surrounding Cheryl and I and the minister we’d hired.
I took off my hat and handed it to Dave, the closest I had to a “best man”. The four girls, Kirsten, Nika, Jenny, and Katie, all dressed in blue and white, flung flowers out ahead while we walked to the center of the circle. With Cheryl on my left, I tried to look casual as the minister recited a standard matrimonial liturgy. We had no vows to say ourselves, expressing our commitment with a look and a kiss. Benjamin and Gabe walked up with our rings on two embroidered pillows. Inside the unadorned bands was engraved our initials (C.A.H & A.M.T), and the date (8-25-1979). Cheryl slipped the larger on me, and I returned the gesture.
With that, we announced to ourselves, our family, our friends, and the world at large our intent to stay together forever. Somewhere, three unborn souls looked down, and smiled, knowing they’d get a chance to join us soon.
With the walls painted, I rented a sander and got to work on the floor. The unwieldy contraption moved across the wood with all the finesse of a pneumatic jackhammer. The rental was for 48 hours. Two days later, all the accumulated wax and grime was gone, turning what had previously been a dark oak patina into a light ash, the color of a new baseball bat fresh from Louisville.
I proceeded to stain the wood, given it an even tan, followed by a urethane sealant. At first glance, I was proud of the new floor I’d created after only a week’s work. On closer inspection, however, I found the silky surface was marred by wavy undulations. I’d been unable to steady the sander’s oscillations, resulting in a series of minute circular peaks and valleys. The stain and glossy overcoat brought out all the details of my amateur job.
I pointed this out to Cheryl. “We could cover it with a rug, hope whoever buys the house won’t notice until they move in?”
“You don’t want to start over, try and smooth it out?” she asked.
“I’d only make it worse,” I said.
She tactfully changed the subject. “I found a Mormon lady to make my dress. She says she can make you a shirt as well. And rings. We have to go to the jeweler.”
“All these details! What else?”
“There’s a baker for the cake.”
“A cake. Wait, is it going to have tiers, and a bride and groom on the top?”
Cheryl giggled. “No! They showed me some choices. Some rabbits – they had these two cute little rabbits holding hands with a heart in front.”
“Rabbits!”
“Sure, we’re a midwife and an Ob. You know, rabbits are a symbol of fertility?”
“I can’t wait!” I said. Cake! I love cake! What flavor, chocolate?”
“No, white – it’s a wedding.”
“And tiers…?”
Cheryl thought a moment. “Oh year, a big on at the bottom, smaller layer above that, and then two pillars support a tiny piece with the rabbits on top. That’s the one just for us, that we get to eat.”
“Like, we feed each other…?”
I took a sip from my gin-and-tonic. Seated together on the hanging swing, the Salt Lake Valley sprawling beneath us, spreading up to the Wasatch and the canyon of our betrothal, I put my arm around her shoulders. Cheryl dropped her head onto my chest.
“Umm, that sun feels so warm. I love the sun,” Cheryl purred.
“So you don’t mind the floor?” I asked.
She titled her eyes up towards mine. “You’re a surgeon, not a carpenter, she said”
We rocked a bit more, a gentle breeze floating up from the Temple Square a mile away. Cheryl sat up.
“Oh, forgot to tell you. I started on the invitations!” She left for a minute, then returned with a box of greeting cards and envelopes. She pulled one of the top and handed it to me.
Surrounded by hand-drawn flowers, a giant “W” dominated the page. Next to it in a column were “ho – Al & Cheryl”, “hat – our wedding”, “hen – August 25, 1979”, “here – Alta, Utah”, “hy”, then “heee!”
I was stunned, almost to tears. I was about to join my life with someone who could create such joy in the mundane act of sending wedding invitations.
“You’re going to have these printed up? I asked.
“No, I’m going to do them myself. There’s only about 12 or so we have to send, it won’t take long. What do you think?”
“I love it – the who, what, when, where, and especially the ‘Wheee!’ at the end.
“Two hundred dollars for a week,” the hardware store clerk said as we walked towards the back where rentals were kept. “Of course, you could just use hot water and soak the paper off. Get it wet enough, and it peels off with a scrapper.”
I returned home with a bucket, a sponge contraption, a pair of gloves, and that scrapper. During the trial-and-error phase, I found seven layers of wallpaper, laid sequentially over each other, a living history of Utahns’ preference in interior design. Spare stripes of green and gold led back to increasingly ornate floral décor.
Once down to the original lath-and-plaster, I needed to decide on a new look. I was unable remove all of the original glue, leaving an uneven surface. A coat of paint would retain a lumpy look, which might go with the rugged brick wall in our bedroom.
“I don’t know. I’d feel better if it were smooth,” Cheryl opined.
“But I can’t get all that stuff off.”
“And I don’t want more wallpaper,” she added.
In the end we agreed on textured paint, leaving a speckled white surface. Even though I had carefully covered the floor with newspaper, some of the paint managed to stain the old carpet. Turpentine removed the paint splotches, but also left small circles of cleanliness in the otherwise dust-encrusted surface.
Thinking I might try to replace the carpet, I lifted one corner up to examine the under surface and found a smudged hardwood floor. My new plan: sand the wood smooth, then re-stain it!
When I shared my strategy with Cheryl, she asked, “Do you think you can get it done before the wedding? I mean, what if we have a reception here afterwards?”
The wedding! “Remind me again when we decided?”
“August 25th.” It was now early June.
“Shouldn’t we find a place, a church or something? Or do you just want to go to City Hall, sign papers there.”
Cheryl hesitated. “I went on a drive in the mountains one day after school. I think I found the perfect place. I want to show you this weekend, OK? It’s up the road to Alta.”
The next Saturday we drove the van all the way to the end of Little Cottonwood Canyon Road, and turned into a parking lot jammed with people hefting back packs, waxing touring skis, or sorting climbing ropes.
“Here?” I asked.
“No, I’ll show you.”
We walked about a quarter mile along a former Jeep road now overgrown with this year’s crop of dense mountain ground cover. Fir trees began to replace aspens as a stream emerged on our left. To the right, the upper reaches of Alta ski area glistened with the remaining snowfields in its north-facing gullies. Purple and pink wildflowers sprouted near our feet.
“See? We can do it outside,” Cheryl said as we approached several rocks rising to hip level in a small clearing. “We’ll just walk in, everybody can enjoy the sunshine. We’ll say our vows, and then…”
“And then?”
“I talked to my parents last week. They said they’d pay for it, for the reception, anyway.”
“The reception?”
“Yeah.” Cheryl stopped, then went on. “When I was here before, on the way back, I stopped in at the lodges at Alta. Well, one lodge, the only one open. Alta Lodge. They said they sometimes do weddings, we could rent the hall for the reception, and people could stay overnight in the rooms.”
“People? How many?” I’d envisioned a little private ceremony, a simple set of “I do’s”, then back home.
“Well, your family, and mine, that’s maybe 15 with the girls…”
“Girls?”
“Of course, my sister’s kids. My brother. Your parents, Leigh, and Aunt Gretchen. Friends like Dave and Carol, Catherine, Lynn and Paul, a few others. Probably thirty. That’s small for a wedding.”
This is getting to be a big deal, I thought. “A simple wedding. We’d plan it all ourselves, that’s what I thought we’re going to do,” I said.
“Well, this is planning it all ourselves. But still, a dress for me, shirt and pants for you, rings, flowers, invitations…This means something, this is important, Al.”
Once again, someone is trying to rein in US health care costs, this time by somehow forcing Big Pharmaceutical to lower its prices for drugs in the US.
This is not a new issue. In 1970, when I entered medical school, all the first year students were given black leather bags with our names (followed by “M.D., which we wouldn’t deserve for at least 4 years) embossed in gold. Inside were a stethoscope, reflex hammer, and a few other medical toys. The generous donor was a drug company (name lost in the mists of time). A number of my classmates refused the gift on the grounds that drug companies were rapacious profiteers, getting rich off of the illness of others, spending more on advertising to physicians (like the bags) than on actual research.
Our country has repeatedly failed to come to grips with the effects of market-driven health care since at least 1947 when Truman proposed “nationalizing” the medical system, as was happening in the UK. Johnson with Medicare, Nixon with HMOs, Clinton with failed reform, and the bastardized Affordable Care Act all foundered against the shoals of an obstinate belief in the value of the free-market in our health care system. Until the voting public gets over its fear of “socialized medicine”, we are doomed to pay ever-rising costs without a concomitant rise in the health of our nation.
With my future employment assured in Tacoma, I turned my attention to the new experience of home ownership. Our south-facing house, in the terraced neighborhood known as The Avenues, took the full brunt of Salt Lake’s high desert summer sun. Afternoons, I took to resting on the porch in the 95-degree heat, sipping on a gin-and-tonic and contemplating the profusion of plastic tricycles which had sprouted.
Most of the neighbors had at least one child between age four and eight among the five or so which made up the typical LDS family. And each kid had his or her own Big Wheel. They’d madly pedal along the sidewalks, the grinding of rigid wheels drowning out the cacophony rising up from the downtown streets below us.
Weekends, even the Big Wheels were eclipsed by a phalanx of gas-powered mowers giving haircuts to the tiny lawns lovingly manicured along Seventh Avenue. Our next-door neighbor noticed I was not participating in the parade and asked if I had a lawn mower.
“When I was a kid,” I said, “we lived on a hill like this. We had one of those push mowers – I don’t know how to work the gas ones. I thought maybe I’d just let the lawn stay natural. It doesn’t rain much here, right? The grass shouldn’t grow very high.”
He looked at the dandelions beginning to turn from yellow flowered tops to wispy fuzzballs, about to drift over his own immaculate fertilizer-fed green carpet. “You know, they make electric mowers now. They’re quiet, easier to use. Your yard isn’t that big – a 75-foot extension cord would be all you need.”
His smile looked pleasant enough, but I knew he didn’t want the house next to his looking like the one across the street. Several motorcycles were parked askew, their greasy droppings lending an eerie desolation to the browned-out front “lawn”.
Two days later, I drove to the nearest Sears and bought a Craftsman electric mower and extension cord. In fifteen minutes, I’d chopped down the unruly locks of our front yard. The hardest part was pushing the whirring machine at a tilt along the severe slope separating the upper terrace from the lower.
I found a hose in the shed out back, and hooked up the rotating sprayer I picked up at Sears along with the mower. I placed it on the sidewalk bisecting the yard from the Avenue up to our porch, adjusting the angle of the spray to a 180-degree semi-circle covering the entire yard. I retreated to the porch, and rested in the swinging bench suspended from the ceiling by two chains, which squeaked in unison with the soft “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-click” of the mechanical sprayer.
This calls for a drink, I thought. And thus began my afternoon ritual of a gin-and-tonic on the porch began, ironically at the suggestion of my Mormon neighbor.
While walking through the dining room to the kitchen, I noticed a scrap of wallpaper fluttering in the draft coming from the swamp cooler suspended in the window. I fingered the flap, and noticed that several layers of paper were covering the walls. I looked down at the deeply stained wood floor and wondered what the house may have looked like in 1890, when it was built. By the time I’d found the bottles of Tanqueray and Schweppes, sliced a lime, and plopped several ice cubes into the mixture, I had a vision for what I could do while Cheryl spent her summer days in clinical rotation at Hill Air Force Base.
“A real job,” he said. “The money from Kaiser’s going to run out by August, September at the latest.”
A shudder bubbled through my heart as I asked, “Where?” I had another year left before I finished my Master’s in Salt Lake. While we were apart in the fall, before he came out to ski, when he worked at Kaiser in LA, I found out I didn’t need him around every day. No matter what he decided, no matter where he went, I was going to stay in Utah and finish what I started, become a midwife. But I also discovered I wanted to be with him, long-term, to keep what we’d had in Venice going. After I finished, I dreamed, he and I would find someplace to work, together.
“I’m going to start here. I called up the Ob-Gyn group at Intermountain Health, and they’re looking to expand.”
“I don’t know. Working with a bunch of Mormons? Wouldn’t they want one of their own? And what are they going to say when they find out we’re not married, but we’re living together?”
“I can get along with anyone. We’ve got this house, we’re part of this community. USC is a great residency, I’m sure they’ll take me.”
“I don’t know if I want to stay here after I graduate. It’s a strange place, the way they treat women. It’s not like LA, a lot of different people around. Everybody’s all the same here, and they’re not like us. Are you sure you’d want to stay here, after I’m done?”
“We’re used to being here. We don’t have to stay, we could try it out for two years, five years, if it’s no god, move on. I want to explore the possibilities at least. We’ve got an appointment for an interview, next Wednesday at 11:00.”
“Us?” I asked. “You want me to go, too?”
“Family…they want to talk to both if us, they said.”
We decided not to explain our unorthodox (for Salt Lake City) arrangement. “We’ll just tell them we’re engaged, getting married in August,” I said.
“For real? I thought…”
“My sister called last night. She and Carl, the ER doc she’s living with now, they’re going to get married. So I started thinking, maybe I could, too?”
“August? I don’t know…August?”
What, now he’s not ready? I thought.
Two weeks later, I came home from school and found Al slumped at the dining room table, poring over maps with several medical journals splayed open around him.
“Taking a trip?” I asked.
He looked up. “It’s Intermountain. They called. They don’t want me.”
“What did they say?”
“The young guy called, the newest partner. He said they were concerned we didn’t have family connections here, that we might not want to stay. They want to have somebody who’s ‘rooted in the community’.”
“Well…”
“He said there was a lot of Ob work here, more than enough for another practitioner at the hospital. He suggested I go into practice for myself, maybe they’d fit me in as part of their call schedule. ‘There’s always room at the top,’ he said. Sounded like he wanted moe people in the call rotation, without having to put the practice at risk by taking on a new person”
“Would you? Go into practice by yourself?” I asked.
“That would be scary. We’d have to get a bank loan to set it up, find an office, hire people, all that stuff. I’m not sure I want to be in business like that all by myself. What if it doesn’t work out, if we can’t pay it off, if people won’t come to a gentile Obstetrician?”
“So what are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of trying to find someplace else.”
“Where will you look?” I asked.
He pulled out a medical journal, the one with the green cover. He flipped through the articles and showed me a page with four ads on it. “I’m thinking of going on a road trip to Idaho, Colorado, California, Washington. This journal has a bunch of these ads, and also the weekly Ob-Gyn newsletter. I’ll find someplace I like.”
You like? I thought. What about me, don’t I get to choose?
*******
“I drove up from San Jose through Portland, around to the Olympic Peninsula and camped at a state park.” Al was telling me about the jobs he’d looked at. In Washington State, he said he’d found something which seemed perfect.
“You went to interviews after camping in the Bus? Didn’t you want to take a shower?”
“I washed my face, under my arms. I was OK. I had a suit in the closet and everything.”
“What was it like?”
“First I went to this place called ‘Doctor’s Clinic. That was in Bremerton, on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle. Everywhere you looked, you’d see little inlets with houses on the water, on Puget Sound. It’s where the Navy has a shipyard, and they keep old battleships, the ‘Mothball Fleet’.”
“Did you like it, like the people in the group?”
“Umm…first of all, even though it was a group practice, they expected you to buy into the group, not start out as an employee. The docs are all paid individually, based on how much work they do. Not much security. I expected a probationary period, where we check each other out, and they pay me while I get up to speed. The guy who was recruiting me talked about the last person who’d looked, and why he turned them down. He said that guy’s wife had commented wasn’t a bookstore in town. The recruiter, the head doc, said they didn’t need one, they could just take the ferry over to Seattle where they had all the big city stuff.”
I imagined a frontier town, isolated in a rain forest. Sure, there was water everywhere, but what about people, what about all the culture that makes a city exciting.
“So I don’t think I’m interested in that one. The next day, in Tacoma, the place I interviewed at, I kind of fell in love with.”
“Tacoma, what’s that like?”
“I drove over this giant suspension bridge, like the Golden Gate. The city is right on the water, and reminds me of Cincinnati, hills everywhere, trees. And a giant volcano right out of town, Mount Rainier. A ski area an hour away.”
“Mount Rainier? Isn’t that a national park?”
“Yeah, it’s huge. You know Mount Whitney, how high it is? Mount Rainier is almost as tall but starting from sea level. It goes from sea level to over 14,400 feet. Mount Whitney starts at 8,000 feet. Rainier is like this giant scoop of vanilla ice cream looming over everything, glaciers make it look like its covered with snow all year.”
I remembered the hikes we’d taken in Colorado and Idaho, how much he’d enjoyed being in the woods, hiking up to a view with a lake or a mountain. That sounded like someplace we both would enjoy, in a real city, with mountains close by.
“What is that one like, the place in Tacoma. What’s it called?”
“Group Health of Puget Sound. Like Kaiser, except it’s a cooperative, not run by a big company, but by the people, the patients who use the services. It’s a big deal – they have two hospitals, clinics all over, all the specialties.
“They’re expanding just bought a little HMO in Tacoma, now they have to staff it up. I’d be the first Obstetrician. So it’s almost as if I’m starting my own practice, except I wouldn’t have to worry about any of the business stuff. Like Kaiser, I’d just take care of the people who are signed up, not have to hire nurses or buy equipment or lease an office. Only practice medicine. And get salary, not fee-for-service.”
“That’s good?”
“I think so. Fee-for-service, you wonder, ‘Is the doctor doing this because I need it, or because he needs the money?’ If I’m on a salary, I feel like I could do the right thing without money getting in the way.”
“Now what?”
“They gave me some forms, an application to fill out, get references and everything. I’ll start doing that, send it in and then – wait.”
