December 10, 2010

Friday

There’s nothing left for me

Of days that used to be,

They’re just a memory

Among my souvenirs.

— Lawrence Wright (AKA Horatio Nicholls), 1888-1964

English lyricist

They fell out of a pile of books I moved today, a pile that’s been residing on the desk in our library/family room since sometime in the summer, when I started another course of culling and organizing in the hope of bringing some order to the chaos of my possessions. And then I got a late invitation to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and gallivanted off for two additional weeks, and that project got stalled.

I can’t explain why these two items — a wedding invitation for June 8, 1968 and a yellowed clip of the announcement in the next day’s Patriot-News — were in that pile of books. Had they been tucked into a volume I acquired then, one of the eighteen novels I read for Dr. Huzzard’s one-semester forced march through post World War I European fiction? Most of those works disappeared from my shelves long ago. These things might have been in my copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners, from that same academic year, a collection I refer to frequently in my pursuit of excellence as a fiction writer.

We’ll call the bridal couple Doreen and Brad. I’d met Brad at Harrisburg Area Community College when I started dating one of his friends. He was a Milton Hershey boy, a graduate of the school for (in those days) fatherless white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. (The school has since gone co-ed and diverse.) These young men had financial support from the Hershey Trust through their college years. Brad and his best friend Larry were among the few in my circle of friends in those days who didn’t live with their parents (because they didn’t have any). They had an apartment on the third floor above a popular restaurant in Hershey where we gathered on weekends. Some Saturday nights the restaurant owner’s wife (they lived on the second floor) would have to come upstairs, bang on the door, and yell, “Boys! Boys! Can you keep it down up there?” If nobody responded, she’d use her key to come in, muttering about the noise as she climbed the second flight of stairs, and start picking up plates and beer cans and ashtrays, more like an exasperated mother than an angry landlord.

Brad and Larry left HACC a year ahead of me and went to the same college near Lancaster where I would find myself in the fall of 1967. They lived above an even more elegant restaurant on Queen Street. Brad became engaged to Doreen. a girl from Hershey who was in nursing school in Lancaster, and I still sometimes hung out with them, although my relationship with our mutual friend had become ragged and intermittent, since he was serving with the Marines in North Carolina. Nevertheless, I was invited to the wedding.

Of that wedding, I remember three things:

1. It took place the same day as Robert Kennedy’s funeral. As I wrote in 2008, “I saw bits and pieces of his funeral on television monitors at a hotel where I was attending a wedding reception. A young man I was dating was a member of the wedding party, and later in the evening one of his friends told tasteless jokes that used both Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s race and Senator Kennedy’s large family and their deaths to arrive at extremely rude punch lines. My boyfriend later told me I had embarrassed him by not laughing.”

2. “Our” wedding gift, presented jointly by me and the sometime boyfriend, was an electric buffet tray for keeping such things as casseroles and loaves of bread warm. Such a device costs about $100 now. I remember paying $25 for it (minimum wage, which I would be paid that summer as an aide in a nursing home, was less than $2 an hour). The boyfriend said he would reimburse me, but he never did, and I suspect he wouldn’t have even if we had continued to see each other.

3. I left my sunglasses in the boyfriend’s car. He took them back to North Carolina with him, and I never saw them, or him, again.

Brad and Doreen moved into an apartment in the same complex my daughter now lives in. I had to look up the address in an old student directory I still have, because after so long I’d forgotten exactly which building was theirs. But I still remember their phone number, because it ended with “6868,” their wedding date, a gesture on Brad’s part that I found terribly romantic. I did go there a few times, was served food kept at a suitable temperature on that buffet tray, but with the demise of my friendship with the Marine came also the demise of the one with Brad and even Doreen. After a conversation at a college event in the fall of 1968, I never saw them again either.

When Brad died in the mid 1990s, before he was fifty, he was married to somebody else. The obituary indicated no children from his first marriage, and only stepchildren from the second. He was lauded as a beloved teacher whose primary goal was to help his students become their best selves. That certainly described what might have become of the young man I knew. His memorial service took place while I was on a literary gallivant, so I couldn’t have attended even if I thought it was my place. And I didn’t write to his widow, because I didn’t know her. But I never visit my daughter’s apartment without thinking of him, and of Doreen.

And now here I hold the invitation to an event that took place almost forty-three years ago, and a picture of a sweet young woman in a “caged gown of organza and Alencon lace,” the symbols of so much joy and so much promise that ended before death could part them.

Does anyone else who was there that day at the First Evangelical United Brethren Church still have one of these keepsakes among their souvenirs? (Mine has residue from tape on the back — I must have once put it in some kind of memory book.) Does Doreen? Has she been happy in the life she made after her divorce? Did she go to Brad’s funeral?

The original title for this piece was “Discards,” and I meant it to be one in a chronicle of essays about things I am throwing away or otherwise passing on. But I don’t think I can do that with these things, not yet, not at this season of remembering. Instead, I’ll tuck the invitation and the newspaper clipping into the pocket of the notebook where I draw my mandalas, the circles with names inscribed of the people and the situations I pray for. And I’ll write Doreen’s name, and surround her with light in my mind in the days to come.

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