Chapter 11: Living With and Loving My Pretty Little Vixen
The event of our marriage had swept upon us much quicker than either of us had ever supposed would be the case, and several details had been left unattended.
We went shopping together for rings, including a jeweler's shop in Bellevue where he made all his own stuff, all of it impressively beautiful and unique. The problem was that she didn't want a ring. When after some discussion I proposed that I might give her some other kind of jewelry with which she would feel more at ease, and she agreed, and we settled on simple gold bands to at least comply with tradition. I really didn't want her out there in the world and some fellow thinking she was free for the picking, and she understood that.
Browsing in a mall a few days later I saw something that inspired me, and that same afternoon we went back to the jeweler's shop with my design. On a delicate silver chain, I described what I had in mind, a little heart-shaped pendant with a tiny pearl tucked inside the heart. Could he do it? Christine watched as he sketched an idea on a pad on the table in his cluttered workshop, and we refined the design and the craftsman complimented me on my artistry. He suggested some little variations in the heart profile, leaving it open inside, the more to highlight the pearl. I agreed. I asked that there be only one made, thus leaving it a unique piece forever. He responded readily, and asked if the pendant be for the pretty lady at my side. Yes, I answered, she is my wife, and a unique lady in the entire world. "Then," he spoke softly with a little flair, "so shall it be, and I will strive my hardest to make it a unique emblem of your love for her worthy of her extraordinary beauty. I thank you, sir, for the opportunity to serve you in this way."
I turned to Christine and found her watching with great interest, dumbstruck at my idea, impressed with the man's declaration, and with her one hand at her throat as if touching the pendant for herself as were it already adorning her. She looked up at me with love and appreciation in those big brown eyes, and even awe at what I had done. I asked her if she liked my idea and she just looked at me in silence, and after a moment nodded her head sweetly.
He said the casting and polishing and mounting would take him about ten days, we established a pick up date, I left an advance payment, and we departed. Only in the car did she recover her voice, thanking me gently for such a beautiful gift. For those ten days she stuck to me like glue, mentioning every time we checked our calendars that there were only so and so many days remaining until... and she was openly thrilled at the prospect of her pendant.
When the day came, and, in the parking lot under the big trees we sat in the car together and I clipped it around her throat the first time, she fingered it appreciatively and thanked me with a big kiss, and then curled up in my arms. "Thank you, Dace; I love it! It's more beautiful than I ever imagined it would be. Now everyone will know that I am really yours, darling. Thank you for loving me, and for your gift." What could I say? Of course, there were several dollars involved, but relative to value received, a mere pittance.
It was a beautiful day.
* * *
Education has a way of opening up the world to each of us in its own way, that being a little different for each of us, both with high points and low. For Christine it was no different, and the process itself was an eye opener.
One Thursday in November I reached her literature class as it was breaking up and found her just leaving the classroom with a couple of other girls and all three of them were practically in tears and deeply involved in their conversation. I had no clue as to what tragedy might have overtaken them and felt concerned. When Christine saw me she turned and welcomed me... and it was a few moments before someone thought to clue in into the soul-shattering events that had them so heartbroken. To my amazement, it turned out that that the class had read together out loud one of Willa Cather's short stories from her
Troll Garden
collection,
The Wagner Matinee
, and that is what brought on the tears in empathy for the woman in the story. She had given up so very much of herself and her musical talents and opportunities in Boston to go with her husband to homestead out in Nebraska corn country in the late 1800s. The story is told from the perspective and through the eyes of the lady's nephew, living his college years, I think, in New York City, and to whom she pays a visit while on a visit in the east after thirty-plus years on the plains. The young nephew knows his aunt as the lady In wanting to take his aunt to something special that would be pleasant for her he chooses a musical event, never imagining how the experience would reawaken in his aunt the musical ... and the emptiness of her years without music out there on the homestead.
Each of the girls felt very strongly the injustice of the woman's lost opportunity, the insensitive husband not realizing the cultural needs of his wife, and the bleakness of her world without any music when it had meant so much to her in her younger years. When Christine turned to me so confident that I would have a solution to this earth-shattering tragedy, the other two girls just sort of followed her lead and the three implored me to share with them the tragedy and injustice of this woman's immense sacrifice. Once Christine's example showed me to be receptive, each one of them had to unload their particular perspective on me and together they expected me to somehow redress the woes of the world and rebalance their sense of rightness.
Such would be a challenge for most with understanding and discernment very much greater than mine, but to an extent the task was within my capacity. One of the values of literature is that the thoughtful reader encounters over time a much wider range of life's experiences that might otherwise be the case, and of course that means wrestling with the whys and wherefores of same. Two examples of such literature in German immediately came to mind, Franz Grillparzer's
Der Arme Spielmannn
, and Erich Marie Remarque's
Drei Kamaraden
, both of which are first magnitude tear-jerkers in my book. Such stories actually offer us a good opportunity to lean about the vicissitudes of adult life, the odyssey upon which these three young ladies had so recently embarked. Our classwork was over for the day, it was now mid-afternoon, and we were headed home, and I seized upon what I thought my be a useful moment. I invited the three to an early dinner at Nikola's, a Greek place in Wallingford that was just great. It's gone now, but in its day it was superb.
Anyway, Christine was delighted and turned to her girlfriends and introduced me as her husband and the very nicest man ever in the entire world... and her enthusiasm quelled their anxiety and they accepted. It turned out that they both lived in Wallingford and knew Nikola's and had been there, and only Christine had not, and now they were encouraging her and the entire party moved forward from there.
Dinner lasted some three hours and more that evening, and we covered a wide range of ideas in an open and leisurely manner. I knew of Cather's stories from years before in my own classwork, and we looked at the story in detail, using ideas like individual choices, limitations of the times vs. what we have today, differences in expectations and standards in the society. In the case of Cather's heroine her situation was a result of her own choosing, though, of course, she could not in advance perceive the cost of her choices. She had said yes to her husband's proposal, I reminded them, and left unspoken the lesson for them to be wise in selecting a life's companion. The girls, each in their own way, seemed to venture forward, over the bridge, so to speak, between their typically short-sighted childhood past onto the broader plain of greater awareness of life as an adult. For each of us, when such moments occur, we leave a portion of ourselves behind as we push on across the prairie on our own journey of adventure.
I won't belabor the issue here, but it was a pleasant dinner time together. There was a high point for me, though. One of the girls, the blond-haired one who seemed to be such a quick wit, asked Christine, quite seriously I thought, how she found her husband. There followed a long period of silence as my girl mulled over her response.
"I think," she started off slowly, serious and certain in her way, "I think there must be a God in heaven who loves me... and watches over me... and blesses me." Her fingers were at her throat, fondling the little heart-and-pearl pendant there.
There was absolute silence at the table, and it seemed as if all the room were listening for her conclusion.
"I can not see any other way to explain it. I tried to be the best person I could be, but I had no way to ever have figured out who he might be or where I might find him... and then in the depth of great tragedy he appeared at my door as if God had sent him. Even now, that is the only explanation that makes sense to me."
There is little that will humble a man quicker than something like that. I can at least lay claim to enough sense to have known at the time to say nothing. She had said all that could be said. I tried not to blush myself at her very great compliment, and appear not too swell-headed to the other two girls. The silence at the table just drew out as each considered their own thoughts and what our dining together had wrought.
Expanding horizons and the opportunity to contribute to another's growth and welfare were the impetus to another of Christine's quantum forward leaps. If you yourself have not seriously studied a foreign language this experience will be perhaps a surprise, but for young adults who tend to be self-conscious a major challenge is accommodating the flood of a language's strange new sounds, all or most of which tangle the tongue and offend the ear. After struggling with how to assist my first and second year German classes to bridge this chasm more effectively, I hit upon what I thought might be an entertaining technique. I asked my wife to read to them and talk to them in German for a few minutes at the beginning of each of the two classes on Wednesdays, just some simple readings from their texts so that they could follow along. The point was to hear a native speaker handling the strange words and their sounds as if they made complete sense... which they did, of course, to Christine. The modeling in class in a small group with one their own age was worth a thousand hours in a language lab and caught on immediately. Her ear proved very keen, and from a group response to her she could pick out the one struggling with a certain sound.
She made two suggestions that proved of great value to the students. Firstly, from the vocabulary words for the week she would go over difficult pronunciation hurdles and model for them correct sounds. This made the vocabulary come alive for them somehow and was a great assist. Even more dynamic and powerful was her introducing little pieces of poetry for them. She would recite them first, and then invite them to recite with her, and she would explain word usage and meaning and assist with pronunciation, and Christine was able to do clever things with the rhyming sounds that triggered great interest. Magical! Poetry to many is unappealing and put-offish, but even one of the more macho fellows in my second year class was reduced nearly to tears by her offering the second day she recited poetry to them. She had selected Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's popular little ditty
Heidenröslein,
and her explanation showed the depth of her appreciation, and then, what I had not expected, her very tender complete reading which, just as she started, fingering the little pendant at her throat, she dedicated to her husband sitting in the back of the room watching her.
Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn,
Röslein auf der Heiden,
War so jung und morgenschön,
Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn,
Sah's mit vielen Freuden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,
Röslein auf der Heiden.
Knabe sprach: Ich breche dich,
Röslein auf der Heiden!
Röslein sprach: Ich steche dich,
Daß du ewig denkst an mich,
Und ich will's nicht leiden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,
Röslein auf der Heiden.
Und der wilde Knabe brach
's Röslein auf der Heiden;
Röslein wehrte sich und stach,
Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,
Mußt es eben leiden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,
Röslein auf der Heiden.
[English]
Saw a boy a little rose standing,
a little rose on the heather,
't was so young and morning fresh,
