Stardust

RIPPLES IN A STREAM

I miss romance, which I guess is another way of saying I miss being young.

A few minutes ago, I sat on the side of my wife's bed as she listened to Willie Nelson's Stardust, just as she has each night for the past week or so. Her memory struggles to ignite her mind, but when she hears Willie singing “Moonlight in Vermont” or “Don't Get Around Much Anymore,” her eyes widen and sometimes sparkle and she is with me again.

Sitting there beside her and loving her beyond tears, I rambled on about the sophistication and majesty of those songs that still move us. I talked to her about paging through the old discarded Life magazines I kept in a box under my bed when I was a boy and how they spun me into dreams that spirited me away from that West Virginia hollow with their pictures of men in white dinner jackets and be-jeweled ladies with sculptured hair and cigarettes held at jaunty angles. That was romance—not sweaty and urgent but casual, civilized and beautiful—like “Long Ago and Far Away” or “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

Romantic that I am I do not romanticize history. I know that in my own golden days blacks were being lynched, woman were denied all control of their bodies and gays were hounded into desperation. But I miss the songs that made love a big deal instead of a score. I miss the quiet corners of songs about meadows and skylarks and the bright lights of Broadway, the places your imagination could flow into and fill with its own white dinner jacket imagery.

My wife—her name is Norma—embodied the best elements implied in those songs—the soft voice, the elegant gait, the sly and formidable wit. She was a Gershwin lyric come to life, and I thank Willie for bringing her back to me in a swirl of stardust tonight.

DEBITS, CREDITS & DESSERT

My wife and I live in a post-excitement atmosphere that renders us immobile and uncommunicative for most of the day and all of the night. But this afternoon, I stirred from my characteristic torpor to ask her if she would like to go out for dessert. Her frantic batting of the eyes told me I had struck emotional paydirt. Alas, Kingston Springs does not exactly pulsate with sugary oases, so we settled on a truck stop at the town’s exit from I-40 that’s fabled for its pie menu--not pies, you understand, just a very alluring menu that manages to enchant and then disappoint. But there’s always the next time.

Norma (the name she goes by) studied the menu until she found and ordered the most expensive and health-averse offering, while I virtuously sipped on coffee, declining to participate in her nutritional madness. While she eviscerated something that appeared to be constructed of chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream and a Styrofoam cookie, my eyes drifted to a family seated at a table nearby. There sat two middle age males, two mature females and a little girl--perhaps seven or eight-- wearing a cheerleader’s uniform. Except for the fact that one of the women was clad in an orange T-shirt, I remember no other details.

Anyway, the waitress came by, told us our bill was $9.58 and then went on to continue her service at the other table. When she came back by, I gave her a $20 and told her to keep the change. She whispered to me that our bill had already been paid. I asked her how that could be. “Oh,” she said mysteriously, “some people are just nice.” Norma and I are ancient, but I couldn’t imagine that factor alone being the cause of such generosity. More likely, I reflected, it was because the clothes clinging desperately to my portly frame pre-dated the popularity of Nehru jackets.

In my imagination, every waitress has sore feet, a slacker boyfriend and a sick kid at home, so I insisted that ours keep the $20 I had first proffered. But I pressed her to tell me who our anonymous benefactor was. She nodded covertly toward the family still seated at the table I’d been looking at. So I went over to thank them. The woman in orange pointed to the little girl and said paying our bill was her idea. I thanked her while she smiled shyly, made some sort of joke about her joining me in one of my business ventures and returned to Norma with my tears bubbling like the Trevi Fountain. I’m an easy cry, and when I encounter kindness and youth in one package, I’m a damn wreck.

But fate was not through with us.

We were just pushing open the front door to the truck stop on our way out when we were accosted by a tall fellow, probably in his 60s, wearing a cowboy hat and boots and a leather vest that seemed to have been fashioned from a live calf. “Can I ask you folks a favor,” he asked, exuding the kind of oily, synthetic good fellowship that is so often a prelude to homicide. As fast as a gunfighter, I whipped my hand toward my pocket, expecting to fend him off with another $20, but all he wanted, he explained, was a ride back to the next exit west on I-40 to pick up his rig that he’d left there for repairs. He even took out his phone to show us a picture of a Peterbilt, as if that should settle the matter of his honesty.

What could I do? Turn down a fellow creature in need who might also be a serial killer? Not today, honey. With that little girl’s sweetness still clogging my tear ducts, I beckoned the fellow into our van, and we headed west toward his wounded semi. That I am writing this is proof that the old guy didn’t put a gun to the back of my head and urge me on to more distant horizons--not that it would have availed him much since my van is a rattle trap and had only a quarter of a tank of gas in it. But he did succeed in annoying me by blathering on throughout the trip about the goodness of God, even though I was the one providing him the ride. What a prick!

While all these wonders were transpiring, Norma sat as stoic and stone-faced as a lawyer facing disbarment. “Well, what do you think?” I asked her as we headed home. “I should have ordered the apple pie,” she said.