Widow: a Four-Letter Word: A Memoir of Men … Loved, Lost, and Learned From

By Judy Crowell

Author, Judy Crowell, a sixty-three-year old widow is shaken out of her topsy-turvy malaise by an old acquaintance, cajoling and wooing her back to the dating world of the twenty-first century, a world she last experienced when Eisenhower was president. Tackling a pile of disregarded old photos, she reminisces over the men in her life: a hormones-raging teenage Lothario in a lime green 50s Chevy; an eighty-year-old Benedictine monk; a Johnny Walker-swilling uncle, and a husband taken too soon by cancer.

After forty-two years of marriage, can she share another mans popcorn at the movies? Feel another mans beard against her cheek? Another mans touch? Another mans bed?

In Widow: A Four Letter Word, humor and tragedy intermingle as a widow looks back at the men in her life and grapples with a persistent suitor wooing her to date and, perhaps, to love again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491782392

Judy Crowell

Judy Crowell is a travel writer for Ladue News in St. Louis, Missouri, and Noozhawk in Santa Barbara, California, where she lives near her family. Past owner for twenty years of an upscale bridal boutique and founder of Kids Under Twenty-One, both in St. Louis, she is a widow…a word she rejects.

Book preview

WIDOW

A Four-Letter Word

A Memoir of Men … Loved,

Lost, and Learned From

Judy Crowell

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WIDOW: A FOUR-LETTER WORD

A MEMOIR OF MEN … LOVED, LOST, AND LEARNED FROM

Copyright © 2015 Judy Crowell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Some names in this memoir have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8240-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8241-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8239-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015920086

iUniverse rev. date: 2/18/2016

JUST ONE OF THE THOSE THINGS (from "High Society)

Words and Music by COLE PORTER

Copyright © 1935 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP.

All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

EV’RY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE (from Seven Lively Arts)

Words and Music by COLE PORTER

© 1944 CHAPPELL & CO.,INC

Copyright Renewed and Assigned to JOHN F. WHARTON,

Trustee of the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trust

Publication and Allied Rights to CHAPPELL & CO.,INC

All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

EASY TO LOVE (from Anything Goes)

Words and Music by COLE PORTER

© 1936 CHAPPELL & CO.,INC

Copyright Renewed and Assigned to ROBERT H. MONTGOMERY.

Trustee of the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trust

Publication and Allied Rights to CHAPPELL & CO.,INC

All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

WAR SONG

By COLE PORTER

© CHAPPELL & CO.,INC

All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

DON’T FENCE ME IN (from Hollywood Canteen)

Words and Music by COLE PORTER

© 1944 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP.

All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

Some Enchanted Evening

Copyright © 1949 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

Copyright Renewed

Williamson Music (ASCAP), an Imagen Company, owner of publication and allied rights throughout the World

International Copyright Secured.

All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission

CONTENTS

Pursuit

Tom, Dick, and Harry

Dad

Lunch

Fritzandkit

Babu

Uncle Bob

Fritzandkit

The Jitters

Father Ted

Brendan

Friends

Sean

Bill

Truce

Billy

The Circus

Bill

Baseball

Rick

Bill

Father Frederick

Bellinis

Bill

Billy

Stents

Dad

Bill

Billy

Gene

The Windy City

Brendan

Billy

A Little Lane

Father James

Bill

Puccini

Bill

Father James

Bill

Andy

Sailing

Andy, Will, and Nick

Labor Day

Epilogue

To

Kathleen

*Occurrence

You might have been born in Hong Kong

when Ghengis Khan

was pounding the planet.

Or even today, aeons away

in London or Tokyo.

But somehow someone’s kindly computer

decided

that you should be

roughly here

roughly now

and with four thousand million

currently elsewhere

I almost explode with thanksgiving

as I blunder

like some beautiful rhino

into the path of your being.

—Ralph Wright, OSB

* Ahhh … the seeming randomness of our men.

Pursuit

I’m a sixty-four-year-old widow, a word I despise, married to the same man for forty-two years.

A man I know casually, well enough to say hello to, starts calling me a year after my husband’s death. No, thank you, I reply. A year goes by, and he’s still calling. He doesn’t give up easily. We talk for a while, and I tell him, kindly, that I’m not interested.

I’m interested enough for both of us, he says, and couple of weeks and a few floral deliveries go by.

Again he calls, and we talk a little longer. I remind him that I’m two and a half years older than he is.

That’s okay; you look younger.

Thanks, but no thanks, I say once again, and a few more weeks pass by.

Just in time for Christmas, another delivery arrives at my doorstep. This one is a small silver dish filled with holly leaves and fresh cranberries and, in the center, four miniature ceramic figurines from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghost of Christmas Past—all bearing his Christmas greetings. I can almost hear them belting out that quintessential English Christmas carol God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, a bit revamped:

Oh, oh, tidings of comfort and joy,

Comfort and joy,

Just give him a chance

And step out with the boy.

The next time he calls, I tell him about all the other single women out there sitting by the phone, waiting for a ring.

Been there, done that, he says.

Two months later, the same flower truck pulls into my driveway (their cash registers must be cha-chinging with this endless pursuit), and this time, deposited on my back doorstep, I find a bright-pink azalea plant with a battery-operated monarch butterfly made out of tin stuck in the plant and fluttering wildly over pink blossom tops.

Another ring. Some might call this harassment. Again we talk. He’s quite a talker. I bring up my four grandchildren and his confirmed bachelor status.

No problem, he says. I love being a Dutch uncle.

Still no thanks. This has to be getting old for him; yet one month later, another offering arrives—a bright-orange plastic piggy bank in the shape of a four-footed bathtub. Sitting inside this little claw-foot tub is a pink plastic naked lady taking a bath. Press a button, and her pink plastic leg pops out of the tub, nabs a penny sitting on a tiny ledge, and drops it into the tub bank, all to the tinny refrain of Pennies from Heaven. Ridiculous. Adorable.

I sign up for caller ID, and, sure enough, another call. His name pops up just like AT&T said it would. Something must be seriously wrong with both of us. Why does he keep calling? Why do I keep answering? He’s great fun to talk to, and I’ve run out of excuses. I tell him that the whole dating thing terrifies me and that I haven’t been out on a date since Eisenhower was president.

That’s okay. I like Ike.

Oh my God. What do I do now? I’ve said no to dinner, a couple of movies, the circus, a picnic, the symphony, and more potential outings than I can keep track of. I’m ready for the white flag. Maybe if I have lunch with him, he’ll get this pursuit out of his system and the phone calls will end. But do I want them to end? This is insane. Is this what being a widow means? Widow, that four-letter word. That word I despise. Shit! Another four-letter word.

How big a deal can it be to have lunch with a guy? A Cobb salad, caramel roll, and a glass of wine? An hour or so? Some conversation? We’ve already had hours of that. All good.

And that would be the end of it. Right?

Just lunch. But maybe not. Maybe a whole new chapter is beginning in my life.

Do I have enough time for another man? Another chapter? Enough energy left for someone else? Enough humor? Enough understanding? Enough love?

Sixty-four years of relationships.

So many men in my life.

The good, the bad, and the not-so-good-but-tried-to-be. All the way back to that first man of my memory, my dad.

How I miss him.

How I wish he were here now, my dad.

TOM, DICK, AND HARRY

THREE YEARS AND A HANDFUL of months have passed since I buried my husband, Bill—fifteen seasons of snow, sleet, and ice; spring showers; blistering heat; and dazzling fall colors without him.

Right now, it’s mid-August in St. Louis, a city justifiably proud of its role in launching such luminaries as Lewis and Clark, Charles Lindbergh, Josephine Baker, T. S. Eliot, Scott Joplin, and Thomas Hart Benton.

A citizenry neither northern nor southern, boasting hardy German ancestry, predominantly Catholic in their beliefs, and fiercely loyal to their baseball Cardinals—all of which describe me. It’s also not the best place to be in mid-August, when Missouri heat and humidity ooze out from the banks of the Mississippi River, seeping into air-conditioned homes, minds, and psyches.

My mind and psyche have had a compulsion brewing inside me for months. Funny things, compulsions. They make us check front doors over and over to ensure they’re locked, avoid stepping on cracks so we won’t break our mothers’ backs, draw gazillions of smiley faces on cards and letters, and work hard at keeping tidy homes. (Bill used to tell people that I was so neat and tidy that every night when he got up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom, he’d come back to a bed that had been made. Needless to say, an exaggeration!) There are plenty of things compulsion-driven, both mentionable and unmentionable. The compulsion lurking inside my head has been telling me to look back, to reflect on my past, and now that it’s rat-a-tatting and demanding action, I realize it’s actually coinciding very nicely with the first item on my neglected to-do list: deal with the bulging boxes of photos and memorabilia in the basement before the shelves buckle.

So I begin this long procrastinated project that I promised myself to tackle on some hot Mississippi River–humid day. Spread out all around me are a dozen cardboard boxes filled with memorabilia—Polaroids, eight-millimeter film, snapshots. Stuff, just plain stuff, going back more than sixty years, and I’ve got to wade through it, got to look backward so I can start moving forward again.

From a mound of celluloid clutter, I find a faded Polaroid photo of a guy from the past. Boy, do I remember him and his roving hands. Every woman alive remembers her first crush, that fella who got her heart pitter-pattering, her hormones bubbling: her first Lothario. Mine was Chad. He lived up the street and was gorgeous in a blond, Scandinavian, brooding, Heathcliff kind of way. Sixteen, moody, argumentative, egotistical, and aloof. In short, a living how-to manual on What to Avoid in a Guy, and I couldn’t get enough of him. The rattle of his lime-green ’52 Chevy starting up the hill around seven fifty-five each school morning would shake the storm windows as I was brushing my teeth, and with a mouthful of Pepsodent oozing through my braces, I’d race to the bathroom window, peering through slatted blinds in hopes of a glimpse of his Roman profile and blond locks. Didn’t take much in those days to get the pitter-pattering, bubbling hormones going. A year later, he asked me out on a date. He had one thing and one thing only on his mind, and it wasn’t witty conversation. Here’s another guy. Can’t remember his name, but I do remember his roving hands, another juvenile Casanova best avoided. I swear—some guys, like appliances, should come with instructions. A few with warning labels.

Seated Indian style on the tan sisal rug in my den, the razor-sharp, zigzag pattern of the rug sticking and pressing into my thighs, I’m feeling stiffer by the minute, hoping I’ll be able to get up. Here’s a snapshot of an old boyfriend, the shy one, and one of my brother clinging to the hem of my mother’s rose-flowered skirt. All these mismatched men in my life. Men I’ve loved. Men I’ve lost and learned from. Can I make some sense of it all with these photos, these memories? I’ll sure try.

Photos of various times and places, including this ragged-edged, yellowish-brown Polaroid of my husband and me, spark an instant flashback to the day when, stationed in Stuttgart, Germany, we brought one of the first Polaroid cameras, purchased at the army PX, for a tour of the Black Forest in Baden-Wurttemberg. A hawk had swooped down from the jet-blackness of surrounding fir trees, mere inches from our upturned tourist faces. We snapped the hawk in midflight, waited the prescribed sixty seconds for the picture to develop, shook the negative a few times to hasten the process, pushed a button to send the photo out the magic slot, and applied the gooey, sticky preservative to the emerging image, and there it was, an instant photograph of the plummeting bird. No one in our group of Germans had ever seen anything like it before—a magic black-and-silver box looking nothing like a camera but with paranormal ability. Suddenly we were celebrities, GI magicians. We became the attraction. Forget the tour. We were the tour. Besieged by Germans of all ages trying to grab us and touch the magic box, shouting, Was ist das? (What is that?) and Was kostet das? we ran for our lives, fleeing the pristine beauty of the Black Forest into our used Mercedes diesel for an escape on the nearest autobahn. One little worn-out photo created such a flood of memories. What other sharp, stinging memories might be lurking in these piles?

I find a spool of eight-millimeter film at the bottom of one of the boxes. Need to do something with that. There are newspaper clippings, lots of them, and slides in dusty orange boxes divided into stacks of twenty, with rubber bands around each stack. Does anyone bother with slides anymore?

A picture of my dad.

One of my son on his fourth birthday, the last time I was able to get him into a white linen, bib-front sunsuit, Billy in script across his chest, embroidered in blue and matching his eyes. With a peacock-puffed chest, he’s seated in his brand-new, shiny red fire engine with silver arrow decals, backup lights, and piercing siren, looking straight at the camera. He’s just had a birthday haircut, so his blond hair is shorter than he’ll wear it in later years. A black-and-gold Batman Band-Aid sits proudly on his outstretched, dimpled right arm, and his eyes sparkle as he waves at the photographer. I can hear him shouting, I got it! I got just what I wanted! A simple wish, simply granted.

No hint yet in this photo of the risk taker to come, risks and opportunities he will one day encourage in me. You’ve already got Boardwalk and two Get Out of Jail Free cards, Mom. Go ahead and buy Park Place or New York’s a cool place to live. I think we should do it. Go for it, Mom. No hint yet of the sky watchers he and I would become. Tornadoes from the west. Rainbows in the east. Stars at night. Sun in the morning and clouds—so many clouds—on the horizons.

The Greeks in their wisdom have four words for love.

• storge: natural affection as in the love of family

• philia: the love of friends

• eros: romantic and sexual love

• agape: selfless love, ideal love, striving for the perfection of infinite love, God’s love for humanity.

I’ll narrow these dozen boxes down to four—one for each of the Greek words for love, with a fifth box for throwaways, for all the faces who stare out at me from deserted beaches, art deco restaurants, boisterous birthday parties, and the window of an old Thunderbird and posed alongside Route 66 signs. Who are all these people?

Already overflowing is a sixth box, perched at the top of the stairs and labeled WOMEN in black Magic Marker. Weighed down with memories, wisdom, and secrets, it’s too heavy to carry downstairs alone—snapshots of my eleven-year-old best friend, Jane, erroneous bearer of the story of the birds and the bees; my sister, Linda, from the day, when at twelve, I traded my favorite baby doll in for her, my now irreplaceable sister; grade school girlfriends with bangs and pigtails; high school friends with pageboys and bobs; my mother at age four in white lace tights, at eighteen in backless emerald velvet, and at nineteen in a long-sleeved, pleated ivory satin wedding gown; late-night bridge games with my fellow insomniacs at Vassar, then an all-women’s college; stacks and stacks of photos of my daughters and granddaughter, including one or two priceless blackmail photos; countless wives, mothers, and friends from coast to coast whose children I loved, whose secrets I kept, whose counsel I sought, whose tears I shared, whose lives sometimes took my breath away and brought me to my knees in prayer. Women of gentleness and hilarity, brilliance and spontaneity, laughter and clarity, strength and diplomacy, talent and generosity. Women of determination and peace, made of sugar and spice, and not always nice. Women, without whom, life would be dull beyond measure.

I wonder if the Greeks have a word, a label, for that box.

My daughters would have a heyday with this scene. Their anal-retentive, a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place mother trying to bring order to a dozen boxes of memorabilia, trying to categorize the men in her life and calling upon the Greeks for help. My beautiful daughters, who file all their digital photos chronologically in orderly stacks of CD-ROMs awaiting presentation on their computers, never having to deal with the pre-computer, pre-digital conglomeration of hard-copy memories.

My Greek system works for a while.

The Black Forest Polaroid of my husband and me goes into the Eros box and the photo of my brother hanging onto my mother’s skirt and my son and his new fire engine into the Storge box. Here’s a wrinkled sepia photo of my grandfather Babu. A group shot of family and friends at the swimming pool of my childhood. Which box for this one? My friend Brendan. What a complicated relationship we had. No way to neatly categorize my feelings for Brendan. Or Chris. Or Rick.

Greek system no longer working.

Knees creak as I ease my way up from the rug that hurts, depositing all the memorabilia back into their original dozen boxes. These photos, these memories, these men in my life were and still are here for a reason. They were sent and continue to be sent into the path of my being for a purpose. God’s purpose. His kindly, and sometimes not-so-kindly, computer plunking them down in my path. For me to figure out the why and the them.

Can a pile of photos be fit together like Legos to make sense of a life? Can casting one’s mind back shine a light on the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys in our lives? Did we appreciate them or send them away willy-nilly with nary a backward glance? Do we, did we, love them enough? Somewhere in those four Greek categories of love there must be room for the mismatched men plunked down in our lives. Needn’t be Eros. Nice if that works out, but Storge and Philia are ducky and Agape, if ever achieved, over the top.

Another funny thing about compulsions, they tend to morph into other compulsions. All this reminiscing has snowballed into an irresistible urge to start writing my story of the men in my life and widowhood. Another compulsion. Darn.

Writing is hard, really hard. I’ve written enough travel articles to know what it’s like to wake up in the morning to confront an eight-and-a-half-inch-by-eleven-inch piece of bright-white paper. Not a fair fight. And a memoir and a travel article are about as alike as crème fraîche and horseradish sauce.

As usual, compulsion wins out.

I will tackle this project. No more procrastination.

I want to understand and to love better. And maybe help others who read a page or two of my story to look at their old photos and their Toms, Dicks, and Harrys in a new light. Perhaps even have an aha moment.

Famed American novelist Sinclair Lewis had this to say about compulsion and writing: Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. I hope, Mr. Lewis, to disprove your theory.

Since my dad gave me life, I’ll start with this fragile clip of him.

DAD

THE OLD RENTED EIGHT-MILLIMETER PROJECTOR groaned and groaned. I’d played and replayed this fifty-five-second bone-brittle film clip so many times I was afraid it would snap any minute. Must transfer it to DVD before that happens.

My dad is walking toward me in strong, confident, long strides. So young, so beautiful with his carefree smile and soft gray-blue eyes. Overweight in a balanced, appealing sort of way, he’s sporting tan, pleated gabardine slacks; an alligator belt; and a white waffle-knit T-shirt, sleeves rolled up to just above his elbows. His hair is full and childlike, dark and blown a bit by the wind, as he brushes it aside to concentrate on the approaching green.

It’s the spring of 1933. Not yet a husband or father and blissfully unaware of life’s blows to come, he’s twenty-four years old and current amateur golf champion at his country club. Putter in hand, having just completed an approach shot, he is