LIFE: With Kathy being bed bound, our television is on a lot. We have the news and old movies playing in the background. The Hallmark channel has been on fairly often this holiday season. On the Hallmark Channel Christmas starts around Halloween and goes on and on until Valentines. As far as I can tell, it is just Christmas; no alternative feast days; no Hanukkah; no Solstice. Santa needs a wife or has a daughter. Or he sends his first-born elf to earth to save Christmas. She gets romantically conflicted and stays. Everyone is pretty or handsome, respectively. The kids have some issues but they are all smart. The women are mysteriously single. The men are widowers with a hint of facial hair. They are only interested in women who are only interested in men. Everyone appears to be available. Life and family problems get resolved by the end of the last commercial. The families become close, the children stop running away and the lost dog unites the families.
I guess it would be nice if life worked out that way. Life never has neat plotlines. They have paths.
December 23rd was our 37th anniversary. Kathy and I were married in front of my parents’ Christmas tree in Fitchburg Massachusetts. After a family style reception we stayed at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn. We were driving Kathy’s Volkswagen Squareback to visit Kathy’s family in Fort Myers.
On Christmas Eve we were going around the beltway around DC and Kathy was asleep. I had a habit of driving too late at night. I was tired and was confused by the signs on the exit I was on. I lost control in the rain and we left the road. The police officer told me that the reason we lived was because a Cadillac had taken out the guard rail a week before. (And they weren’t as lucky.) The car was a mess but looked fixable. The car had to be winched out of the mud. It was towed to a garage in College Park, Maryland that fixed VWs. The driver left us off at the creepiest motel I have ever stayed in. It made the Bates Motel look upscale. Cash was exchanged for a room key through a slot in a wall. We slept on top of the covers.
The next morning we found a family run guest house nearby. It was a college town during Christmas. There weren’t a lot of choices. This was warm and clean and had a TV. The Hallmark channel didn’t exist then but I remember we watched Miracle on 34th Street.
I remember the weather was frigid but sunny. We decided to find some place to get Christmas dinner. It turned out the Seven-Eleven was our only choice. We opted for some frozen burritos that we nuked insufficiently. We returned to the guest house; walked past the family having their holiday dinner and we had our burritos al dente.
The next day the car got patched up. The garage owner was nice and tried to get us on the road as cheaply and safely as possible. We needed a headlight and some used tires. He tried to straighten out what he could, but the frame was bent from the accident. We drove the rest of the way and back home to Massachusetts at an angle. We stopped to visit my college roommate, Joe in Atlanta and I bought new tires at Sears. Buying snow tires in Georgia wasn’t as impossible as I thought it would be. The used tires were looking tired (pardon the pun) from driving sideways.
Because it leaned to one side, Kathy named her car “Lazlo,” after a book called “The Lazlo Letters” by Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci). One of Lazlo’s sayings was “Lean to the left! Lean to the right! Stand up. Sit down. Fight! Fight! Fight!” (Think early Stephen Colbert.)
I always felt responsible for messing up Kathy’s car. But our marriage survived more serious things to come.
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