Month: October 2012

Twenty-Two: Death and Life

/ Gerry Wilson / 17 Comments

Three things marked this year of my life. Right around the time of my twenty-second birthday in September, my father-in-law died of a head injury sustained in the auto accident I described earlier.

In November, John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. I remember where I was when I heard the news (as most of us who remember that day at all must surely do). I was working in the engineering office at Bellsouth when someone came in and told us. I was devastated, stunned. John Kennedy and his beautiful wife represented a new era. Camelot and all that. And then, he was gone.

I remember staying glued to the television for days. I cried as though I’d lost a close friend. What was it about a young man as President that so captured our imaginations?

A few months later, my husband and I had big news of our own. I remember when we told my parents I was pregnant. They had come to visit us, and we had just found out. I’d gotten highlights in my hair for the first time, and my mother kept talking about how pretty I looked. I remember what I was wearing when we went out to dinner with them that night–a slim, white wool skirt and a matching white sweater. I did feel pretty, a little magical, and in awe of what was happening to me.

We were nervous about telling them, though. We’d only been married eight months, and I had my job, and two more years of medical school loomed. But when we told them, my mother said, “I knew it!” She said I had that “glow.”

Here I am in a photo just days before the baby came. I wasn’t very big at all.

Baby shower

Yes, it’s a baby shower. A gloriously happy time, right, in spite of that awful plaid dress. But notice the triangle of people in the picture. I’m opening baby gifts. The young man in the coat and tie is my husband. Does he look simply detached, or ready to bolt?  And that’s my mother, looking a little askance. I don’t believe she was quite ready to be a grandmother, but oh, she did love my babies.

That child made his entrance into the world two days after my twenty-third birthday. You’ll meet him in the next post.

Are we ever grown up enough to be parents? Or do we grow along with our children?

Twenty-one: All Grown Up

/ Gerry Wilson / 12 Comments

Engaged!

At Christmas break during my senior year in college, I was given an engagement ring. It’s what we did back then. If you didn’t get a ring at Christmas, your entire future clouded over. Well, I got my ring from the blue-eyed boy, who had graduated in three years and two summers and gone on to medical school.

So I was spending my senior year “alone,” except for occasional sanctioned dates with a fraternity brother of his who escorted me to parties. Medical school didn’t leave a lot of time for traveling the three hours back to campus to see me, and it seemed that when he did come (I think of him as just a boy then; we were both so young, so young), I would romanticize the time we’d spend together, and he would be exhausted from the study-grind of a first-year med student. Often, we argued, because my expectations far exceeded the reality.

And yet we planned a wedding. I graduated in May. We were married the end of June.

Daughter to Wife

Many girls of that generation went straight from daddy’s house to husband’s, from being daughter to being wife.

There were signs I should have recognized. The night before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, we fought. I chalked it up to pre-wedding jitters. Deep down, I think I knew something was fundamentally wrong, but I closed my mind to it. We went through with the wedding. It rained that day. My grandmother shook her head and said rain on your wedding day was a bad sign. Maybe she was right.

The finishing touch. Notice the curly bangs (humidity).

A Dose of Reality

We had been married two weeks when my young husband’s parents were seriously injured in an automobile accident. My husband had just started his summer job in a lab at the medical center, and I had a job with the telephone company in an engineering office where I learned to write specifications for new telephone installations. (Yes, with English and psychology majors, that was where I wound up. It was considered a fine job for a young woman fresh out of college.)

We dropped everything and went to Nashville where his parents were hospitalized, and we spent much of the summer traveling back and forth. We didn’t have a lot of time to settle in as newlyweds, and we had been married about three months when my father-in-law died. He was forty-eight years old. My husband’s mother recovered, but it was a long, slow process. In the fall, my husband went back to school for his second year, which wasn’t quite as hard as the first. I went on with my “plum” job at the phone company that paid me about half as much as my male counterparts.

So that was my introduction to marriage and to deep loss, almost simultaneously.

The Little Junk-store House

I should add that we loved our first apartment in a duplex on St. Mary Street.  We had furnished it with junk store finds. That little place is still vivid in my mind: the dark paneled walls, built-in bookcases, hardwood floors, big windows in the living room that let in lots of light, a rather primitive kitchen (which didn’t matter because I–almost literally–couldn’t boil water!), a sunny bedroom, and a tiny room that could become a nursery.

We were happy there.

Where were you at twenty-one? Were you settling down, or striking out on an adventure?

We are closing in on the end of the twenty-five memoir posts in the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge. Just a few more to go . . . I wouldn’t have thought it possible! Thanks for sparking the memories, Jane Ann McLachlan.

Twenty: The Me Age

/ Gerry Wilson / 14 Comments

At least, for me it was. Not much was happening. I was studying less (even with a double major in English and Psychology), maintaining great grades, and playing a lot more–dates, parties, football games!

I have not mentioned home much lately. I went home occasionally on weekends, but I had weaned away. I had my own car (a gift from Santa), so I was free to travel back and forth as much as I pleased.

Until I became the mother of adult children, I didn’t fully realize the significance of an incident that happened about this time.

I failed to call my mother on  Mother’s Day until very late in the day. It was obvious by her tone that she was hurt and angry, and at first, I didn’t understand why. Then she told me. I might as well not have called at all, she said, if I was too busy to do it earlier. Was she overly sensitive? Or was I terribly insensitive, too caught up in my own little life? Or maybe she simply felt me pulling away, and it was that sense of loss that hurt her more than the late phone call. She’d had her share of disappointments, after all.

The old house would have to do.

There was the house they didn’t build, even after buying land and hiring an architect. They had the plans and were set to go when my father balked. He was fourteen years older than Mother, and he worried about her being left alone on that hill out in the country. He wanted to be sure that I would be taken care of, too, if something happened to him. So they abandoned my mother’s dream house. She had worked alongside my father for years. They still shared a house with my grandmother.

Wasn’t it time she had something to call her own?

Maybe it seemed to her that I was having all the things she’d dreamed of. I don’t doubt that she was proud of me, though. That was clear, and I was ashamed for neglecting her that day.

We were so mature. We thought swapping sweatshirts was cute.

 

 

Shall I add here that I was in love? That cute boy from the Mississippi Delta, the one with the blue, blue eyes, was turning out to be the one.

I wish I’d been more thoughtful of my mother that day. Is there anything in your young past that you wish you could go back and undo?