Part 3 - Hazel's Life after Dad Died in 1985

Dad died in 1985. Mom was 71 years old, my age as I write this. She was alone for the first time in her life, and in shock for sometime afterward. Don and Ellie had recently lost their farm in Wisconsin, had moved to New Orleans, and arrived there only a few days before his passing. They dropped everything and headed to Kokomo. I took a day to arrange for a substitute before boarding a plane for home.

Mom lived another fourteen years without Dad. I think several of those years were pretty lonely especially the first and final few. She visited Don and Ellie in New Orleans, and came up to Alaska, but was kind of a lost sole in both places. She had lived in Kokomo since 1937, but life around town seemed alien to her after he passed.

The trouble with living a long life is that you out-live most everyone else. One of her friends sat in the front row at Dad’s funeral. I no longer remember her name, Bernice maybe, but she and Mom had been the best of buddies since the sixties, did a lot of things together. The woman had emphysema, and breathed with difficulty. I heard that she passed a short time later.

Mom was the last of her generation to go. She outlived her three brothers, and Dad’s four siblings - family members of whom I’d known from my beginning.

Three or four years passed. I visited for a week every year of so, cleaned gutters and did needed repairs around the house. We tried the Senior Center for lunch a couple times, but she didn’t seem to know any one there. We went to a Unitarian Church service. She liked it and continued to attend till summer recess, but never went back when they commenced in the fall. She lived in her bedroom with the television on 24/7. On visits I often crept into the room to turn off the blaring TV after she had gone to sleep. The TV was her constant companion in those days. The bedroom and kitchen became all she needed and were the only rooms she went into.

Then things changed for her in the next year. One night she called me, said she had been out with a couple old friends, a rare occasion. The three had a couple of drinks and Mom’s voice possessed a bit of an uncharacteristic slur. We talked on for a while, then the phone line went silent for a short spell, and then Mom blurted out, “What would you think if I got myself a boy friend?” In-a-way she was asking my permission, would it be alright with me? If I had said something like, “You don’t want to do that.”, she would have dropped the subject and I’d have never heard anything more about it. I said, “That sounds like a good idea to me”. I consider that to have been one of the wisest and most thoughtful statements I’ve made in my life.
GO TO: Part 4 - Hazel's Life After She Renewed an Old Friendship

Courting Mary, Part 2 - The Wedding

Mary’s younger sister, Angie, moved up from Oklahoma that fall to try life in the far north The two got an apartment by Lake Spenard, at which I spent considerable time. Angie stayed till after Thanksgiving, but decided she preferred a hot, humid, and conservative Oklahoma, to a cold, wild, and free-wheeling Alaska. Mary needed a new roommate or she needed to move. I needed to look after my house, and invited her to move in with me. We transfered her stuff on a cold day during the Christmas vacation of 1981. All went well except for a couple plants that didn’t care for the temperature they had to endure.
Fast forward a few months to a Chinese restaurant on the corner of Minnesota and Benson Avenues. I proposed marriage over a sampler “Poo Poo Platter”, our favorite appetizer plate. She said she didn’t know. We always wondered what significance we should ascribe to the fact that the place closed shortly thereafter.

We arrived upon an agreed October date. Neither of us had much enthusiasm for big weddings, so we decided to have a small ceremony at the house and to limit the wedding list. We sent out no invitations and asked only a few close friends. We were both teaching at West High School, the number of possible attendees were enormous, so we decided to let word-of-mouth take it to where ever it went. When someone asked me about it I would tell them they were invited and what time to show up. I had given the end of the year faculty party at my house several times over the years so all knew where we lived.

Charlie Hostetler arranged a bachelor party for me at Clinker Daggers. About a dozen, mostly fellow teachers from West High, escorted me out of single hood with a raucous dinner that was apt for the occasion. Luckily we all made it home without police intervention.

I was finally getting married after forty-two years of blissful bachelorhood. There was a bit of a quandary concerning my upcoming wedding though. I had no idea who to ask to be my “best man”. There would have been no problem if my brother Don had been available, but as he was farming in Wisconsin, and had neither time nor money to break away, I was in a puzzlement to decide the stand in. I could ask Charlie Hostetler or Dan Wilson. I had done a lot of things with both of them over the years, but to ask one seemed to be slighting the other. Then there was Doug Jackson and Wes Warner. And there were others, a bunch to pick from, and under different circumstances any one of them would do. So I kept procrastinating till nearly the last minute, and then one day the answer presented itself.
Mike Bujno had been my renter roommate for five years. He was from Poland and we were talking one day when it occurred to me that Mike was also one of my good friends. We had liked each other from our first meeting and had come to respect each other. He had entrusted me with his life savings one year when he went back to Poland for a extended visit. He handed me a sizable cashiers check in my name, and wanted me to keep it in case something happened to him. I said fine, but what did he want me to do with it in case something did happen. He wanted me to send it to his parents in Poland. So Mike was a perfect choice for best man. He was my newest friend, and kind of neutral. I ask him then and there and I think he was surprised and flattered by my request.

Next we needed a person to tie the knot, and luckily, there lived one right next to us. Gordon Corbett, a Presbyterian Minister, and his wife Winn had been neighbors and good friends for ten years. Gordon said he would be happy to perform the wedding, so Mary and I reworked the traditional wedding ceremony, omitting items such as obedience of the wife to the husband, until it was nearly unrecognizable.

The day soon arrived, an overcast Saturday in October. We had two cakes, one that said, “Macho Mary, and Big Bad Joe”, and the other was inscribed with, “A Computer Programmed Marriage”. The second one had to do with the fact that we had just completed a college course in computers and were thus proficient in throwing around arcane terms like BYTE, CPU, RAM, ROM, and GIGO which stands for: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. Word of the wedding got out. We had a full house of guests but were not swamped. There was a good variety of participants, and they segregated themselves to upstairs and down. The more straight-lacers were up stairs and some of their noses twitched as whiffs of wacky tobaccy wafted up from below, but all went well. I asked Charlie Hostetler to take photos of the ceremony and all was ready except that the best man and the maid of honor were missing. Both came after the ceremony was over. I looked around and saw Wes Warner standing in the back. Mike was my newest friend in Alaska and Wes was the one I’d known the longest, so I ask him to sub for my sub. Pat Tremble, a former striper at PJs was to be the maid of honor, Mary ask Rita Atchison to sub. Rita, a former student of mine, was married to Johnny, who use to live above Mary when she was on Roosevelt Street. And thus we commenced our adventurous and tumultuous life together.

Courting Mary, Part 1 - Meeting

Mary and I met in the library at West High School in Anchorage. We were registering students for second semester. She worked the Spanish table which happened to be next to biology, the one I manned. That was in late January of 1981. It was Mary’s first year at West but she had missed most of it due to a serious auto wreck in October. I heard, shortly after the accident, that the new Spanish teacher was in the hospital, but thought the announcement referred to another person. So, there I was, sitting next to the survivor, but ignorant of the fact. I personally registered the presence of a cute, petite, thirty-something next to me - one that was quiet and without much to say.

Another thing I noticed was her newspaper. It was open to the puzzle section, and she was working the cryptoquote. Crossword puzzles are one of my addictions. Hers was blank, and I was in need of diversion, so I gallantly offered to take it off her hands should it be a bother to her. She surrendered it graciously, but without a word.
I didn’t see her again until the end of the school year when a number of us converged on the La Mex for a TGIF session. That commenced a night of bar hopping, including several games of pool at the Mid-Night Express, and Missile-Command at the Fly-by-Night Club. I called her the next day and invited her to breakfast at Gwennie’s as it was handy to both our homes.

The next week we went to a movie, Popeye, starring Robin Williams. I made a big impression on that occasion - got to the ticket booth and realized I had no cash. I now have a deep appreciation for the anguish and pain Mary must have felt in making an unsecured loan to a questionable, high risk client. She was stoic when handing over the bill, but the transaction passed with a certain inertia, a reluctance to let go. I paid her back the next day, and have been paying ever since.

Summer vacation commenced and I left shortly thereafter to work on my cabin, which I was building in a cove on Seldovia Bay, across from Homer. She sent a big box of home made chocolate chip cookies - my favorite. The generous act lead me to the erroneous impression that she liked to cook. We didn’t see each other again until I invited her for a visit near the end of the summer. (Photo below: Summer 1983 @ Cabin)
That fall Mary wanted to know if I could help her find land she bought near Talkeetna. She had five acres in Bartlett Hills Subdivision, one of those land lotteries the state ran in the early 1980‘s. We drove three miles north on the Talkeetna Spur, turned east onto Yoder Road, went another four miles or five miles before getting to place in the road I did not wish to ford. We started walking and were soon picked up by a guy in a jeep who said he had a place up the road where he was going to grow strawberries. He dropped us off at the edge of the subdivision. There were no roads into it at that time. (Photo below Summer 2000)I searched the brush at the side of the road, and found a survey marker. After consulting the map it seemed that her land was yet some distance away. We hiked southward. It began to drizzle shortly thereafter, that slow, steady, dripping that all residents up here know too well. We trudged through tall grass and climbed over downfall for nearly an hour.

Mary became noticeably tired so I found a downed tree for her to sit, gave her my rifle, and said I’d go on and see what I could find. I told her that I didn’t think I’d get lost, but if I had not returned in a hour to fire the rifle once. I continued south, stopping and glancing back after a few steps. Mary sat there in the middle of the wilderness, looking small, wet, and very insecure. I went on for twenty minutes, found another survey marker and knew I couldn’t make it in a reasonable time. When I got back Mary was sitting there patiently waiting my return. I was moved by the trust she seemed to place in me. And she could cook. That knowledge inched me one step closer in thinking I might marry the woman some day.

GO TO: Part 2 - The Wedding