Front Porch: Still feeling lucky 60 years later

My husband and I have been married a long time. There’s a lot of communication that happens between us that doesn’t involve words.

Often it’s in how we act, how we can just look at one another in a particular situation and know what the other is thinking, or how the other person is really feeling, or if something is amiss. Of course we talk about things, but often we already know. We share this with many other long-married couples.

And then there was that night last month when the spoken words mattered.

Bruce and I met at the University of Florida, 60 years ago this month. I first saw him at tryouts for a play being done on campus, and he kind of knocked my socks off. A man-of-few-words (then and now), a soft-spoken red-headed guy in jeans and a T-shirt, at a time when the other guys on campus were all preppy-looking in their madras shorts and button-down shirts.

He had worked for a while after high school, I was to learn, to be able to pay for college, and drove a flatbed truck from his home in Alaska to Portland, then hopped on his Harley to finish the journey to Gainesville, Florida. In those days, for the most part, the only people on Harleys were the police or bad boys.

He definitely stood out.

He told me later he’d spotted me earlier at an orientation session. I was considered tall at the time – just under 5-foot-10 (though my spine has compressed since then) – and deeply tanned, due to coming off a summer in which I’d slathered myself in coconut oil and taught swimming at a day camp in Miami Beach. I was also, as the term was back in the day, “busty.”

I stood out for him.

We dated for four years, the last 18 months of which we saw each other intermittently, as he’d been notified by Uncle Sam that it was time to do the military service to which all young men were obligated, and he had enlisted in the Air Force. When he wasn’t overseas repairing B-52 bombers during the Vietnam War, he was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base.

I stayed in Florida, committed to earning my degree, and weeks after the diploma was in hand, we married, and I was whisked across the country to Spokane, which one of my aunts, to the end of her days, insisted on calling Spo-kayne.

That was 56 years ago. Spokane has been good to us. It’s small enough that a boy raised in rural pre-statehood Alaska could feel at home and a girl raised in large cities on the East Coast found enough of the amenities she needed to be comfortable.

I’ve had a good career in journalism and related fields. He earned two degrees at Eastern Washington University and started his own business, which he is still operating, though he has cut back quite a bit (our oldest son calls this process a slow-rolling retirement). There have been births and deaths, joys, sorrows, deep friendships formed, adventures, travels, health scares and everything else that makes for a full and nuanced life.

We’re old now. Winding down, but not dead yet. To quote the lyrics of a song with that very title from Monty Python’s Spamalot: “I feel happy. I feel happy. I am not dead yet. I can dance and I can sing. I am not dead yet. I can do the Highland Fling.”

Probably have to go light on the Highland Fling thing, what with my bad balance and all … but you get the idea.

In recent years there have been a series of medical things lining up to take turns impacting our lives – some serious and scary, some variations on routine maintenance activities for aging bodies (like cataract surgery or the need for hearing aids) – and also more and more thoughts, on my part at least, about how we need to proceed better with a strategy for the concluding chapters of our lives.

And so I’ve been dealing with some anxiety – not the crushing kind that leaves me in a puddle on the floor convinced I’m having a heart attack, but significant enough to impact my well-being.

It was the unexpected announcement by a physician recently that surgery on an eye is required for something that may be troubling, with just a 10-20% chance of finding something terribly wrong. We’ve already experienced “terribly wrong” medical things, so this was something of a final straw for me, ramping up my previous anxiety feelings. I am this way whether the looming medical thing is Bruce’s or mine, because in the end, whatever it is, is ours.

One night last month, I felt the need to lay all the feelings out before him, calmly and out loud. Of course he already knew much of what I wanted to say, but I found the need to use my words.

My abiding terror is that I won’t be here to help him at a time when he needs help, and (not being as dramatic as I am) his worry is not being here or able to help me should I need additional support to get along. We know where we are now, but where are we headed?

And so we talked. We’d talked before, mostly about action items, and lightened the load with some possessions and things no longer used regularly (goodbye dear sailboat). But this conversation was more about the heart, not the head.

We don’t approach things the same way, so the conversation wasn’t necessarily smooth, but it was good and necessary and let sunlight in. Ah, sunlight.

At the end Bruce looked me in the eyes and said, “All I know is I feel so lucky to be married to the best and most beautiful woman, and it can’t get better than that.”

And suddenly I had no words. Sixty years later, there I was, sockless once again.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.