A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

I'm not saying I wish it hadn't happened. It happened perfectly. I adore my children and grandchildren and was friends with my ex-wife, up to and including being the one who became her caregiver when she came down with cancer. But it has to be said: my now ex-dead-father-in-law tricked me into proposing to his daughter.

Mary and I had dated exclusively as seniors in high school. I liked her mom, but her father was, how can I put this nicely, a little nuts. Of course, looking back I realize it was a combination of the facts that he worshipped his only daughter, and was my grandfather's age, having been born the previous century. He had fought in the first world war, and still sometimes referred to it as "The Great War". So his ideas were somewhat antiquated. For example, every now and then he would wave a newspaper article in front of me about some woman found dead in her apartment and rant how it "all began when she moved out of her parent's house and lived on her own without a husband." I quickly found that these proclamations weren't meant as prologues to a conversation; they were the opening volleys to monologues that revealed his mores to be a little to the right of Attila the Hun as far as women's rights went. (He confided more than once that "this country began to go to the dogs" when women got the vote…an event he could remember!)

You don't want to know how he casually referred to any of Mary's friends whose skin was a different color from hers.

He was also an alcoholic, which his wife tried to control by refusing to give him the car keys. That didn't stop him; he simply paid cab drivers to purchase and deliver quarts of whatever it was he drank to the house. One evening he thought someone was trying to steal his car, and stood in his undershorts at the porch door and shot his own tires out so the imaginary thieves "couldn't get away".

So I moved on and so did Mary. A couple of years passed by and now I was attending St. Johns River Junior College in Palatka, Florida. One day in November, 1971, Mary's father—the last person I expected to hear from!—called me and asked if he could pay me to put in a shelf in his closet.

As familiar as I was with closets at the time, I assure you I was the last person anyone would ask to do carpentry work. But I felt obligated to help out if an older person needed it and so drove over to his house.

I was finishing the job—with a lot of guidance—when Mary came home from an afternoon date with her new boyfriend, Mike. She was as surprised to see me as I was to be there. I was happy to see her, of course; my argument had been with her father, not her. And no one could deny she was a very beautiful young woman.

Of course I wanted to know what she was doing these days, and she told me about her work at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. I told her about junior college, and in a burst of friendliness, offered to escort her as my guest around the school one day if she liked. She accepted, and we decided to make the trip the following Thursday.

I picked her up as agreed (after settling on a return time of midnight, so as to avoid arrest) in the morning and we made the 45-minute drive past the Florida potato farms to Palatka and the campus. I took her to my classes in theatre and music and introduced her to my friends Mike Tucker, Johanna DeWitt and Kim Bartlett, and the head of the music department, George Champion. We ate at the Hungry Pelican (a fast food place where I also worked). It was a long but enjoyable day. It was dark by the time we returned to the coast, coming in on SR-206 instead of SR-207 so we could ride along the beach.

Actually, we parked on the beach, it being a mild, dark night, and listened to the surf crash while we talked about how we actually felt about each other and our being separated.

The next weekend I took her on a jaunt to Silver Springs.

Right across from Silver Springs was Tommy Bartlett's Deer Ranch. It was basically a petting zoo with just deer.

We had a lovely time. We really did. Well, we must have; because, sans ring or plan or expectations, by the time I brought Mary home…

…we were engaged.

To be married.

In fact, we set the date, February 12, 1972. We picked February 12 rather than Valentine's day because it was less obvious, and also because it was on a weekend. Mary told her folks when I dropped her off; I told mine when I got home. My two sisters had both married earlier in the year; I think Mom breathed a sigh of relief at the idea that I, too, might soon be moving out.