Letter 115: Dancing the Life Away

“Of mine own moods, or wailful divine;

With them joyed and was bereaven.

I was heavy with the even,

When she lit her glimmering tapers

Round the day's dead sanctities.

I laughed in the morning's eyes.

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,

Heaven and I wept together….”

--Francis Thompson, circa 1890.

On Friday, November 27, 2015, a date that shall live in indifference, I attended my last débutante affair, the presentation of my darling niece, Miss Elizabeth Crisfield Purnell, to Baltimore society. That event occurred one month shy of forty years from the first such function I had attended. Back in 1975, a prime factor cousine, Miss Sarah Edson (now, Mrs Jay Gauthier), was presented at two débutante functions.

I was invited to one, though I would normally have been ineligible as a high school senior. Since that dance was more flexible than her other début, open only for people in her town – which I never attended, being a native of Pittsburgh proper – people acceded to my family’s request as I was age-eligible if not high-grade owing to my repeating the second half of fifth grade upon my return from Australia.

Well, I felt very special, especially since I had never worn white tie and tails, let alone black-tie. Like a few others I know today, I was one of those rare birds, the odd duck: I got stoned before I got drunk and I wore a full dress before I ever rented a dinner jacket. Feeling, perhaps being, cool was something that occurred about once every twelve to eighteen months back then, almost always by happenstance.

That night in 1975 was to be my night, though my cousine was the one actually being honoured. Two of the prettiest gals – with whom I was not related – of Pittsburgh were to be coming out. I had my target and I had my back-up all picked. Listening to another cousin’s newly bought ‘Physical Graffiti’ album, in my mind’s wandering and unfocussed eye, I was ready to roll.

At the dinner preceding the event, hosted by my family, a relative by marriage told me an off-coloured joke, presented in his masterly diplomatic (read: waspy) manner. That joke was great: “I have a leprechaun in my pocket.” He would reach mythically into pocket and cup his hand, “Can you see him?” Of course not.

“Hey, this leprechaun is smiling at you. He likes you! Now just shuck him under his chin, and he will grant you a wish.” Dumbfounded stare. Now indicating the motion with his other hand, “Now, come on, just shuck him like I this.” So I gave in: a hand shuck at an arbitrary height above the cupped hand of this ineffably suave relative, holding this idiot if invisible banshee. Then he motioned the drawing of a line in the air a little over twice the height of my shuck.

“Well, actually, he is this tall.” A smile; he winked, “Now you’ve got a friend for life…” Laughter. Well I told that joke often at that dance, substituting a punch-line for the ladies ('He has no problem with a one night stand....').  About two hours after the actual presentation, or about ‘aught-thirty’, some random dance partner was put off when I told that joke; a first for that evening. She said, “I just heard that joke from so-&-so…” Of course, I had no idea who this so-&-so was. Thieving bastard.

Thus describes the only content I have ever released that actually went viral. Back to the two young lovelies on the inside track to become the future Mrs Edward McDonnell. Only one came out. The other, prettier one attended in an elegant dress that was far more alluring than the white, virginal and shapeless gown donned by the débutantes themselves, mainly because they were fat from freshman starch or their fathers were Calvinists.

First, I went to the blonde débutante. I had met her before, the Summer previous, on Cape Cod, while my family visited cousins for a week’s stay. This gal was a great dancer; her brother was at my future alma mater, Washington & Lee University, and also in attendance at that dance bar. He had taught her how to ‘shag’.

‘Shagging’ was basically a souped-up version of the jitter-bug to the rumpus room rock and roll (early Southern bluesy stuff) and ‘beach music’. Fifteen years later, I found out that ‘shagging’ meant something else in the U.K., when I walked up to a sultry Saxon beauty at a British Bank’s Christmas party and suggested, “Hey, why don’t we go out and shag?” She blanched immediately; within minutes, I was ‘spoke to’.  Whups…

In any case, the blonde would surely remember me, so graceful, like fellow PGHer, Gene Kelly (¡NOT!) had I been at that bar in Hyannis. I asked her to dance and she did. In the middle of my virtuosity on the floor she smiled in a friendly manner and said, “By the way, I am such-&-such. What’s your name?” Well, at least, I had the back-up. The brunette in the yummy dress was better looking, anyways.

Almost at the end of the evening, I approached her and she said, with a puzzled look, in a friendly enough manner, “What are you doing here, Ned? You’re still in high school.” That is when I realized that getting married jazz would not be as easy as I had expected. Oh well. Never did get that part right. The next year, about a dozen dancing school class-mates came out.

That was uneventful, mainly because I had gotten so awkwardly drunk at my grade-school crush’s family-hosted coming-out party six months before that I had to clean up my act and stay the Hell of everybody's RADAR. That was fun enough, as were the next seven or eight such events. The third year, my sister came out and I was so excited.

I had gone to the big-name school and she had stayed home in a day school, where she had the good fortune to be mentored in her studio art work by one of the most lovely women I have ever met. Miss W. made me feel like a second grader again, in terms of the gawkiness of my crush. Beautiful, modest and blushing women knock it out of the park for me, every time. Claire was at Sweet Briar College, just over the Mountain from W.&L., having a good time.

Biassed though I am, my sister’s dress was the most old-fashioned and beautiful on the floor that wintry night. When I finally caught up with, and was busy dancing with, said sister, whom I had taught to shag just three months before (beginning to sound like ‘Deliverance’ here), I stated gallantly, “How is your big night, Claire? I am so proud of you…”

“What big night? Mine? No way. It’s dad’s big night.” I am sad that I never got to find that out for me. The other balls were much the same, with one exception. At the year following my sister’s coming out, I met the one woman that I ever thought I could marry and be confident that we would both be happy. I cannot reckon now why I thought that, except that she seemed to fill that blank photo-slide inside my head.

She was also coming out at the more exclusive dance in Pittsburgh’s oldest and most patrician suburb, reserved for my better positioned cousines. So I would not be in her orb, at least that Christmas. She was enchanted, however and as if she really had any choice, with my boisterous rendition of the band's lousy do-over of 'Back in the U.S.S.R.'

Four years later, we met through mutual friends and it was evident that we had ‘chemistry’. That really may not have been true: I could just as easily have have mistaken a good rapport, together with my hormones, as chemistry. Yes, I have known real chemistry since.

Like the one night in the mid-1990s when another girlfriend and I were in the back seat of a cab on the way back from the Angelika Theatre on Houston Street, NYC, to another evening of charmed, if sweaty, illusion. We were necking voraciously, almost intoxicated with chemistry, really, in the back seat of that taxi.

Bubbles were popping across the brain. There was this queer feeling of being watched and then I noticed why. The cab driver, with the appearance of an Arab or, perhaps, Pakistani was glaring at us through the rear-view mirror. Our eyes met; he squinted in contempt up to the mirror, bouncing his silent bile back at me.

At the next red-light, he said, “That is what is wrong with you and your country. You live for sin and fornication…” At which point I leaned forward and said the thing I felt most appropriate for the moment. It was not an apology: “Hey, pal, you do you your job and I’ll do mine.” And my girlfriend laughed out loud as we got back to business in the back seat.

Anyways, over years before that stroke of demented genius, I asked this other gal, who had coloured my empty slide to the Beatles, to accompany me as one of my favorite cousines was to be presented. On the way into the dance, the test-tube of our chemistry exploded when she announced, in so polite a manner that I could not complain, that she had a boy-friend, the man she would later marry.

BUMMER. Yet that night was great for me. She and I lindie-hopped to one dance in the very beginning and to another at the very end of the ball. In between, for three and four hours, we talked and talked and laughed and laughed. Indeed, just two months later, I stopped by to have dinner in her college town after attending a political function in the nearby State Capital.

The restaurant was way beyond my means but I wanted to impress her for whatever pathetically futile reason; it might even have been her birthday. Anyways, we were in this upper-end, stratospherically priced restaurant. After the entrée plates were removed, while we waited for the dessert menus, I looked her directly in the eyes.

Now this was one babelicious woman, to be sure, but she had also been an accomplished athlete at a rival high school to mine. She was strong, for sure. So, I stood up, removed my suit jacket and draped it on my chair. As I sat down, I unfastened my shirt-sleeve and rolled it half-way up my right forearm. I looked over at my dinner date. Yes, she was attentive now, and visibly puzzled.

With a rather exaggerated flair, I moved the candle between us off to the side and got any other inopportunely placed objects the Hell out of the way and put my bony elbow on the table with forearm cocked upward and my hand-cupped, ready to arm-wrestle. “No, you don’t. You can’t be serious.” Silence, as I waved my slightly elevated left hand inward, with that needling menace of ‘bring it on, baby.’ She started suppressing laughter, not really doing a good job.

“What? Here? In this restaurant?” Her widening eyes made her even more expressive. The racket of the elbow, the suppressed laugh and the second-and-a-half degree had made her plight known to nearby tables, populated almost exclusively by people our parents’ age and even North of that. People seemed to deem my indecent proposal as less inelegant than hilarious.

This lovely woman blushed. She had too much a sense of humor and too carefree an intelligence to be particularly upset or let decorum demolish such a  blatant challenge. All through it, incredibly, the Midnight Senator (i.e., me, according to my father), said nothing – just that taunting wave with an arm cocked and ready to go. Had she put up her failing resistance much longer, people would have started chanting, ‘GO! GO! GO!’ I swear that to be true...not really.

Anyways, she gave in. Now this woman was a member of her college junior varsity crew team, rowing in the eights. She would likely make a chump out of me. As the older folks watched intently and more restaurant patrons were getting glued in, she rolled up her little miss frumpy blouse sleeve and was soon ready to do battle with her slighter dinner date, kind of like Astaire and Rogers. Then again, kind of not.

People were almost ready to place bets. She put her arm on the table. Our hands came together. I stared with intense concentration into her eyes. She kept trying to look into my eyes but could never quite do it without giggling.  Soon enough, a couple of other tables with older couples indulging their own private competitions from arm-wrestles to picking the winner between us and debating the merits of each competitor in this oddly special olympics.

After thirty seconds, perhaps forty-five, the event had degenerated into a stand-off of dueling forearms. But, being so much older at one score and five years to her mere twenty-two, I could feel my energy draining quickly. There had to be some way of avoiding almost certain defeat. Then the idea – the master-stroke to master this stroke – occurred to me. Leaning forward, I quickly kissed her clenched fist. She relaxed momentarily; that momentary distraction was all I needed to slam her hand down.

Looking at the elderly couple in the table next to ours, I raised my arm in Mexico City 1968 defiance and exclaimed, “A cheap victory, but it’s mine!” They and several others laughed.

My opponent, somewhat flirty but every bit as worthy, blushed, smiled, shook her head and said, “Oh, yooooo…I should have guessed.”

My response was pragmatic, as ever, “All’s fair in love, war and dessert.” People chuckled and we enjoyed our respective desserts. Truthfully, I can not recall what she ordered; I had my vanilla ice cream and hot fudge and, frankly, I could have cared less about anything, or anyone, else, at least until the credit card bill arrived.

A month or so later, I stopped by for another visit to play a game of squash and to read her some poetry that I had written, grieving with neither cause nor pause in the grey hole of a washed out industrial town where I now lived. As we entered the squash court, she wore gym pants and a tee-shirt. That made me swallow hard, not from a sense of impending defeat, but hoping my evidence of desire would remain vertical, tucked safely under the belt seam of my bermudas.

Her legs were long, lean and muscular. Her torso, a punctuated ‘V’ with two soft, firm mound-like eyes on her broad chest; these were not quite as soft as, if more inviting than, the two real eyes two feet above. I have absolutely no other recollection of the next two hours of squash, except that I kept getting the score wrong and forgetting whose turn to serve it was. That did not really matter.

We stopped by some pancake house for coffee and greasy eats after the titanic struggle. For me to remain polite company was difficult that day because I felt so free; free of anxiety and free of convention. She looked over her shoulder and noted some gals from her eight crew shell were over in the corner. So I did the logical thing and bounded up and over that other table, with my spoon in hand, and swiped a little whipped cream and the cherry off of a banana split of the prettiest of the bunch.

The gals looked surprised and my buddette came up to introduce, and otherwise explain, me. The gals laughed and we chatted breezily. Now, anyone who knows me understands that such aplomb is unusual for me. In fact, this unusual behavior has only been reserved for loved ones, rarely seeing the light of outside day, hidden as I remain behind a life-long shyness packaged these days as a 'reserve'. We headed out and went back to her room.

This might be the time. Of course, I was feeling the anxiety. Would I soil the slide or plunge into the unknown world of absolute feeling, without hesitance, regret or reticence? She sat on her bed and I sat down next to her. She was sad; she had had a big loss – the ontological blow of losing a deeply loved parent – just months before. She confessed that she was only in the school she attended due to her family’s wealth and generosity as alumni.

Duty-bound, yet sincere, I made a reasonable and, at least for that moment, persuasive case that she was exactly where she was supposed to be. She looked at me gratefully and smiled, saying gently, “But look at you. You are smart enough—“ Knowing where this was headed, I cut her off at the pass by noting cheekily that she and I had one big difference.

She was about to state the obvious disparity of family means and so I continued peremptorily, “My dear, you did your homework and I did not do mine…” She giggled and I put my hand under her chin tenderly. But it did not feel like the right time, and, most assurèdly, it was not. So I withdrew it and announced that I had a poem to read to her. 

Her fair Scot skin, framed softly by her wavy auburn locks, she almost smirked, half expecting that my œuvre would start, ‘There once was a couple in Nantucket.’ And so wrong she was: I read perhaps my best sonnet of the four or five that I have written. She was spellbound and tears welled up, veiling her eyes in gossamer. No one had written a poem for her before, I suspect. While I love my writing, most consider it laboured (i.e., stilted).

It was time. 

Her bare sinewy legs were a foot away from me. God knows I wanted to but, then, that invisible hand, first present in Bankok fifteen years before, pulled me back. It was December 1968. My father took a new job back in Pittsburgh; my mother had put her foot down. After the murders of Reverend King and Senator Kennedy, she felt we were disloyal staying away from the States. 

That may or may not have been the reason for our sudden return to Pittsburgh from Sydney. It was enough to make my sister and me perfect candidates for testing out kiddie prosac, had it been around. In any case, we were staying at some old hotel on the river; whispers of the British Empire. Before dinner, I was in my coat and tie, Australian style (grey shorts and a tie as wide as a pencil), and walked down to the water.

There was a junk ship there, or what I imagined to be one. There were two boys, roughly my age, jumping into the water from the cumbersome looking sail-boat. I waved and they waved back, motioning me to join them. I started taking off my tie and took off my baby oxfords. Then the hand came. This invisible hand pulled me away and I waved good bye, picking up my shoes and going back to the hotel.

Her legs were inches away. My excitement and anxiety were barely containable. One swoop and her thighs would be tightly in my arms and I would be kissing the inside of them, hoping to set set off the smoke alarm. The hand held me back; why, I will never really know. Probably, it was fear.

But she had a boy-friend and I should not be doing this kind of courting. With a sense of honor and, more likely, a concern about rejection, I kept my distance. And so we went to dinner, carry out fried chicken or something equally ludicrous, and finished up the evening in a coffee or small common room in her dorm. We talked for seven hours until five in the morning. 

Again I was carefree, unusual for me with a woman with the killer bees: brains, beauty and breeding. In college, I had seen women fall in love with my friends. I could never pin-point the exact moment they did – in those three cases – but I surely perceived the two pings on my RADAR: the before and after moments. How? The women had visibly softened, their faces fuzzy in the bathing of their souls by hearts exploding with affection and desire and, yes, love.

As we spoke in the ‘madrugada’ (wee-hours of the a.m.), something remarkable happened. She went fuzzy…for me! At first, I chastised myself for my Irishly wishful thinking and dismissed the phenomenon as a Type-I error owing to the bleary eyes of a half-nighter spent jaw-boning. So, I looked over again minutes later. Dammitall, she was going fuzzy again, no question; she laughed that timeless laugh -- fresh, sweet and utterly seductive. 

It was time, the second such time in twelve hours.

Again, I remembered she had a boy-friend and my intentions were not so honorable. The hand was there, on my shoulder, that whole time. So, I pushed on like a jack-hammer, bloviating away as if I had not noticed her fuzziness. Later on, walking to the train station some five miles away, I was pre-occupied. Only as I boarded the train did I realize my feet were numb.

Being alone in the car on the first run of that Sunday February dawn, thirty years ago, I was able to strip off my loafers (never socks, thank you). The lower extremities were very white, perhaps mildly frost-bitten. Soon enough, they hurt like Hell all the way back to my grey, lifeless town.

The next and last time we spent any together was at a cheap black-tie affair in Pittsburgh, the following Summer, before I entered the University of Pittsburgh’s business school; I was bound for Cape Cod the next day. She came in with a couple, maybe the Camelot pair of the dying steel city: elegant, good-looking, graciously goofy – you know the type, I am sure.

My buddette had on a bright, lip-stick red dress, her subtly red hair drawn back like a Celtic halo, showing me enough of her innocent beauty to get me as lost as I had been on that squash court, five months before. Impatiently, I led her out on the dance floor and lindied sweetly; then it happened. A slow-dance song. No ducking close-contact now.

Since when in the Hell had dancing become a contact sport? ¡Scheiß! She embraced me tightly, reminding me why I had resorted to chivalric cheating in the arm-wrestle months but moments before. Evidence of my desire was not so discreet but more like discrete.

This time, old George (hmmm), stood at attention and right onto her thigh. God in Heaven, please give me the words. The big guy pulled a no-show and, now, I was on my own. I looked up at her, hoping the disapproval would be neither too swift nor too harsh. What a surprise! She was fuzzy and smiling. We had such fun.  Later that evening, we stepped outside of the ball-room to talk alone.  

She looked at me and said simply, affectionately, “My relationship has basically flattened out. I think it's finished…” Since the party’s theme was ‘Casablanca’, I was wearing my summer dinner jacket and had purchased a most Bogartesque prop – a pack of Lucky Strikes. Though I had not smoked in several years, I pulled one out and lit up, more as a means to forestall any kissing than to play a part for which I would never be suited.  

(Yes, my flesh crawled for two days craving a nic-stick after just two Lucky Strikes that evening; now I believe that that Scheiß really is more addictive than heroin.)

Anyways, I summoned up my courage and pretended I was Bogey telling my fuzzy Ingrid Bergman that she would be getting on that plane; this was not yet to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. 

Now it was really time; no charm on this third time. 

Looking straight into her eyes, intently, I said words I regret to this day (when I am thinking wishfully and wistfully about other things I might have said that evening). “You see me once every two months when I am at my best to all set and rehearsed impress you. You haven’t seen me after a night of fitful sleep trudging around, Clearasil in hand, with hideous morning breath.”

She looked at me, uncertain and puzzled, no longer fuzzy. So, I continued on, “You see, you and this fellow of yours have been together for two years, day in and day out. My intuition says that you two have not yet made the final split. If you do, then we will date and I mean REALLY date…” She stood up and nodded. We understood each other.

Speaking that week-end with my parents, I recounted what I had said. Each readily agreed that, should she come back to me, she would expect to marry me. “Are you ready for that?” asked one of my parents.

“No, of course not, but I will ask her to marry me and make myself get ready, like it or not…”

That dance was the last time we ever talked about anything substantive; yes, the rapport was still relaxed but the infectious content and fuzziness D.O.A. She married that boyfriend; I was not invited to the wedding. That hurt my feelings. Life goes on and so must we. Over the years and a string of failed relationships, two declines of my proposal to marry other women and my breaking off an engagement, I have re-lived that moment, thinking I was stupid that night.

That regret should have lifted ten years later when I found myself in much the same dilemma, this time a little clearer because gossamer eyes were nowhere to be seen. And I said almost exactly the same thing to a young lovely who looked like my Audrey Hepburn, complete with the killer bees. She had informed me that her relationship was flat-lining. 

My response that second time was a no-brainer and it was the same as ten years before, "Take the risk and go. There are things in this world more important than banking." She promptly moved across the country and married her beau, whom she had considered ‘plateaued’. No, I was not invited to that wedding, either. Older and a little bit wiser, I understood why. How do you spell awkward again?

Honor is honor and that is that. It reminded me of the reason why I had said what I had said at that dance a decade before. Truthfully, at that dance, I had no idea of what would happen when I said and did the right thing with her Royal Highlands. Yet I was wise enough to understand that, had I made a move that night, we likely would have made passionate love later in the Summer.

But that would be it for I would have lost her respect for taking advantage of her when she had been so vulnerable. And if someone doesn’t have respect for the other going in, that newly wed will surely be checking out, soon. About that, at least, I got it right.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I am not at all a goody-two-shoes. The difference in this case was that I wanted something long-term. Perhaps I simply should have said so. Unfortunately, what I had in honor, I lacked in courage.

My piping princess was probably the only lasting legacy of all those damn deb dances; hey, we’ll always have Pittsburgh. There were some incidental moments in later dances, but my last one for twenty years occurred with yet another cousine presented circa 1992. Fast forward two decades and two careers later.

Languishing as a ‘selfless’ (sic) Peace Corps volunteer, enduring my first hospital visit in forty years, I had seen death in Calcutta, heard bullets in Kunduz and bombs in Baghdad and, of course, lived through the aftermath of 9-11 in my belovèd New York. It was late Summer in Querétaro, in the central highlands and inside the middle of the granite-hard conservative core of México; funny thing, Querétaro’s hottest month in May.

The tour had been good to me but I was under pressure. My niece and god-daughter, Mary McDonnell Purnell, was imminently to be presented at the Cotillon in Baltimore, one of the oldest and most tightly framed débutante balls in the country. I had not worn my ‘new’ full dress since the late 1990s. I could not afford new pants and would not have time to get them altered before the dance.

So I went into weight-trainng mode by running between two and a half and four miles, three days a week. Don’t ever take a break from running in your fifties. You age quickly and it is really difficult to fire back up. But I persisted and, thankfully, still fit into the pseudo military cut suit. At the preceding dinner, I toasted my niece for her independent mind and spirit, qualities I have always adored in her.

At the dance, things were much like the débutante dances of old, though the Baltimore rendition was more structured in its presentation. As I watched the fathers and honoured daughters walk through their ‘figures’, I swept back a hundred years. Now, as a successful businessman from a decent family or part of some bloodline looking for healthy corpuscles, I had my card out noting each deb as she strode by me.

‘Hmm. She´s a sturdy, if gummy, lass. Good for my son, better for my business since, together, we would corner the Maryland market in sugar…’

‘Oh, God, what is it about these young women these days? Another weeping willow...again, and long in tooth to boot; she’ll never produce a grandson worthy of my name…’

Business is business. That dance proceeded quietly and I got a good night’s sleep. Three years later – just three weeks ago – my second niece, Elizabeth Crisfield Purnell, took the plunge into polite society. She is merely a presumptive god-daughter. I deem her one, though I am not so appointed.

Hell, I lived in NYC long enough to know how to take credit when it most assurèdly not due.

This last débutante affair, forty years after my first, was my favorite. There was a note of sadness to it, however. My niece and another gal from Baltimore had a joint dinner. The other gal’s father had been a schoolmate from W.&L., a class act and a first-rate gentleman. Sadly, he had succumbed to cancer two years before. We had become re-acquainted in the Adirondaks.

My lovely sister and gracious brother-in-law have generously hosted me for several years as they have rented a boat-access only house on Long Lake, just down the street, sort of, from the family compound of my school-mate. His cousine had invited me there once but I shied away for various reasons, but mostly thinking I would hate ‘camping’.

To this day, I am Ned Buntline to that lovely woman, a hip and happy mother of two gifted children and wife to a nice guy who made a killing in China in rare earth minerals. Well, I love my week there in Long Lake since I like to tread water for up to two hours a day, usually around sunset. My school-mate had always treated me with respect in college, a rarity for me at the time. That had readily said far more about him than me.

He was a great man, from the inside out.

Frankly, in looking at him, he had what I wanted: honor, courtesy, character. He died two years ago at way too young an age, again shattering that desperate sense that there really is some secret order shrouded by the random events of our lives. Plato was dead-wrong. At the dinner for Elizabeth, I toasted my niece and my dead friend’s daughter. Then I toasted my school-mate himself, recalling his character and basic nobility.

People liked the toast. Then my sister rose to tell the winsome tale of how my honoured niece and her honoured friend pulled the sneak attack of the Summer of the penultimate year we were all in Long Lake together. We were canoeing around; I was sitting up front and my W.&L. brother-in-qualms aback. We were tired; obviously our age was beginning to show.

We did not complain but chatted away since I would be damned were I to admit my enfeebled state; he likely felt the same thing. Since I was tired, I focussed on the unexpectedly Herculean task set in front of me and never turned around. Sure wish I had. I would have noticed my adorable niece and her equally coquettish co-conspirator had latched their canoe onto the back of ours, thus ‘permitting’ us to drag them along! Those not-so-little rascals! Blonde brats! Humbug!

That next Summer, the renewed friendship was nearing its end. My school-mate was valiantly fighting cancer, a foe he could not beat. He did so with honor and optimism, much like my father had, but my school-mate was doing so twenty years ahead of any reasonable schedule. 

The only positive scheduling variance I wished never had been realized. His first concern when we talked those few last times was how I was doing; was I having a good time, etc. Yes, he had what I wanted, always – a basic and ingrained decency and humility. I am a better man because of him. There have been three or four people, the early demise of each has upset me to the point that I yell at God, saying, "Dude why not me? He's a father, a husband."

Well after my sister had finished with the story of the sneak attack in a battle-ready canoe, I stood up, feeling obligated to respond, “Oh yes, I remember that story well. Young ladies, I hereby revoke my previous toast to you two.” That brought some merriment into the evening. The dance itself was much the same as that for Mary. But one thing stood out as fun, besides my 'feckless foreign policy' on the dance floor.

The booth next to the Purnell booth was occupied by the Shrivers – yes the old, very patrician Catholic family of Maryland, and sponsors that evening of some young progeny of R. Sargent Shriver, first Director of the Peace Corps. The old man had died four years before. In that booth sat two very elderly people, I suspect a younger cousin or sib of the great man.

Garnering up my courage, I went into the booth and spoke first to a younger member of the clan and told her my stories about Ambassador Shriver (à la France pour le président Nixon); she enjoyed them and, later, granted me clearance to tell her far older relatives a Readers’ Digest condensed version.

Near the end of the evening, I approached the very stately looking couple. They had sat there, expressionless, the whole evening. Surely a tough nut to crack. Damn, they could have sunk the Titanic faster. Unfortunately, the husband appeared to be deaf and the Shriver of the two.

Of course, I did not give my name to put them at ease that I was not angling for something other than a laugh and a gold star on the forehead. With my kid gloves back on to lend solemnity to the occasion and the tale in tails to be recounted, I plunged in.

“I am not from Baltimore but you may enjoy this story. As a freshman at boarding school, the candidate for Vice President of the United States walked through the dining hall with his son and the Director Admissions, apparently touring the school. 

"So, being the deferential sort that I am, I flicked a butter pad right onto the ceiling. The aspirant to the Vice Presidency looked up, rubbed his chin in puzzlement and walked out a nearby door with his entourage of two. Needless to say, Junior did not go to my school.”

A tentative, sickeningly polite smile. Shoot, Missy, in for a penny in over my head. I continued, almost stoically, “Well then my senior year came and Ambassador Shriver was running for President in the Massachusetts primary of 1976. You see, I was from a conservative family, more or less, and not really all that political (sic). But a history teacher in between undergraduate and law school at Harvard had taken a liking to my mind and invited me along…”

Eyes rather cold now. Man, I needed some two-out lightening real, real bad. “Well, when the Ambassador came to thank us for working for him, instead of telling us why he should be the President, he spoke about his time at the Peace Corps and how much that had meant to him. He did not know it, but in those five minutes, he recruited me for the Peace Corps. And – BOOM – thirty-five years later, there I was in México…”

No longer cold eyes but still indifferent. “I remember telling Ambassador Shriver that I went every Summer to my Aunt’s house in the same town as he on the Cape. He told me to stop by for a lemonade later that following Summer. 

"And so I was walking out of my Aunt’s house, announcing that I would be out for an hour or two. My father asked me where I was going. And I answered to get my lemonade from R. Sargent Shriver, who promised me one when I worked for him in Massachusetts. My father then motioned me over and said quietly, ‘Son, you have forgotten the difference between a polite gesture and a lemonade.’ ¡Bummer!”

Now the older woman smiled. Whew. So, I wrapped things up in a hurry, with the deficit narrowed at bit, “Well, Ma’am, after that week-end in Massachusetts, I told my mother that Ambassador Shriver really would make a great President. And my mother replied sadly, ‘Ten years ago he might have been elected, dear, but we are too far gone, now.’ ¡¡DOUBLE TR0UBLE BUMMER!! And that is my tale in tails…”

She woman’s eyes were warm now, her necessary reserve washed away by the best form of sincerity: resolute anonymity. She said, “Thank you, that was a beautiful story…” She even chuckled.

“About a beautiful spirit, Ma’am.” She leaned over and put her hand on her agèd husband’s arm, “Remind me to tell you this young man’s (sic) story when we get home…” God love him, the prim and stately old man nodded slightly at last. Sweet or sweat victory was mine; I bolted, fast.

Mission accomplished and feeling like a billion mucks, I went off to a serene night’s sleep. Of course, the best part of the four most important of fifteen such affairs over four decades – my sister’s presentation, that of my first meeting with the crew lady, and those of my two nieces – was that each was filled with that priceless quality that money can never buy: a sense of humor.