Such a Nice Couple

The wife had spent a bit of time staring across the alley at our neighbor’s house. You know the one, the house in the neighborhood that is just a little bigger than the others with a few more toys scattered about the property. Not kid toys to be sure, but the big boy’s toys that get used only once or twice a year. The giant 5th-wheel camper with three pullouts, the fishing boat powerful enough to pull two skiers; that’s the kind of toys, I mean. That house where the prosperous couple with no children live.

They didn’t grow up wealthy or have some hefty inheritance as far as I know. Instead they both work in good jobs at the corporate headquarters of our local big employer. You know that one too; that big employer that most little towns look for, court, and marry for life. Although sometimes the marriage ends in divorce and the factory or plant moves over to China or Mexico and leaves everyone in the bread lines. Loyalty isn’t what it was back before the big depression. A company can look out for only its own self just as a man might do.

The one, Jen, likes the short form of the name, works in accounting. The other, Jamison, tends to the long form of his name and works as a division manager for Big Employer. We don’t know exactly what they earn of course, but the signs point to plenty and to spare, which may be why the wife suddenly called down a curse on them this afternoon.

No, not a voodoo sort of thing like those folks do down in the Mississippi Delta, but a more subtle and expensive sort of curse: She wanted us to pray for them to be blessed with a baby. A baby? Whoa there, doggies! How mean can you get?

I guess that would be a little bit of hypocrisy on my part. After all Mabel, that’s the wife, and me had a couple or four or five of our own as I seem to recall. I like to kid around, because us old folks can do that. I even remember the kids’ names four days out of every six. Mabel has to help me sometimes; I can’t always separate the greats from the grands when they all come over to visit me in the home. Wait until you get to 96 and see if you can sort ‘em all out as well as you did back in the good old days.

The evening is fine and I decide to dance with Mabel to the music on the sound system. It’s getting kind of hard to find our music anymore. Thank God for the satellite receiver; I don’t believe two old folks like us could cut a waltz to this hip-hop thing they do now. Fortunately, I have a CD player with my new stereo system. We can buy CDs of all the old greats we listened to back in our day. The grandkids are starting to enter college, except for one or two in the military, and we tend to laugh at our children. Not the little squiggly kind of laugh like that cartoon fellow on the television set does either, but the big bwaa-ha-ha kind of evil laugh that the best bad guys do. Now the kids get to see how much it costs to put someone through college like we did.

“I see that Junior’s kid landed with Colonel Crowe’s old outfit,” I call out to the wife.

“Yes, Michael called after it came on the news last week,” she hollers from the kitchen. “He figured they must be the unit landing down there since they left just a couple of weeks ago.”

She is confused again, calling the kid by my name when I know that it’s Junior. We’ll get it straightened out when we dance together to the radio this Friday night. There are still a few stations on the AM dial that play ‘our’ music. Ah, the band music of those days.

The kids made it through the Depression mostly because they had not been conceived by that time. My dad had a good job, a necessary job, and he had done nothing to misplace it. They like to ‘lose’ jobs nowadays, like you can lose your car keys or something. He had to take a big pay cut, most everyone with a job did, because the company sales went way down for a few years, but he kept the position. He and mom tightened their belts and brought us kids into the living room to do the same thing to us. Misery loves a companion after all! My mother tightened her belt so much that I thought her top half was going to pop off and roll down the stairs. Times were tough for everyone, but we made it all right. As the Depression faded into frugal memories, the kids got their jobs back or got new ones and moved off to have children of their own.

The wife and I got to have some fun again, for a little while after our wedding, until someone went and decided to hold a big war. According to the papers everyone got involved too. Our country had fighting going on all over the planet once old Hirohito decided the war just couldn’t go on without us any longer, like it had been doing. The frugal times didn’t come back quite so much, but we had to give up all our metal junk and had rationing. You might think rationing sounded bad, but we had all just endured years of depression. The rations seemed almost like a time of high living and general plenty to most of us. Of course at that time we didn’t know how much better it was going to get here in the 1950’s.

Now the couple across the way there didn’t have to grow up during the depression. So I doubt know they know what penny-wise is. They can live on less, they just choose not to. It’s all a part of this new prosperity we are enjoying after the big wars. I guess the second one over in Korea wasn’t a big one as some people call it, a World War, but just a police action or some such. I don’t know of any police that went over there, but a lot of young men did just like their older brothers did a few years earlier. For some reason, the two wars left us in good shape financially, as a country I mean. I was too old to fight in either one.

Heck, the wife likes to remind me that I was too old for the First World War, although it seemed to be a European kind of ‘world’ war from what I could tell. I must admit though that I seemed to get old at about the right time. Living out your 80’s during a time of national prosperity is pretty good timing, praise the Lord God Almighty! The old folks who spent their last years in the Great Depression had it pretty tough at times. When the family cannot afford to keep a fellow and he is too old to go back to work or stand in a bread line, then I guess he does what a few of them did: let the good Lord know that now is a good time to come home and sit down to wait for it. Jesus told John that suffering would come, and boy it surely does at times!

As a bit of a historical piece myself, I have seen the great changes in the land. I remember the days of outhouses and chamber pots, cooking in wood stoves, and eating everything on our plates since there was no way to keep it. Now we have airplanes and cars, refrigerators and gas ranges, radio sets and television sets, and this telephone that the wife is using to fire up the ol’ prayer chain. I guess she really does want to inflict a little bundle of financial damage on that couple!

I wonder if she remembers how much those kids cost us. Could be that her memory is fading like mine is. Don’t tell her I said that though; she thinks her memory is just fine even though she called the firstborn son by my name the other day. I done told her that his name is Junior, everyone knows that!

Speaking of kids, I wonder if those folks across the alley know how to go about makin’ some. Not sure that I can help them with it now. As I recall, it started out as an inexpensive and mostly fun sort of hobby that somehow got completely out of hand along the way. After the fifth kid came out, I began to wonder if we might not be doing it wrong. I asked the pastor about that, but he seemed to think that the kids would keep on coming until God saw fit to stop ‘em. I talked to the Lord about that and he seemed to agree with me that five was perhaps a bit more than enough. The wife claims I just got too old, but who’s going to believe someone that hangs stretchy brown stockings all around our tub so that a man just about hangs himself each time he takes a bath?

Uh, oh, the phone calls are finished. I make a break for the back door, but I fail to get enough steam up and get caught before I can make my escape. That’s one problem with having a wife 30 years or so younger than me; I try to run but she can catch me every time. She’s 53 and still quick.

“Where you going in such a hurry?” she asks.

“I was a goin’ to see if those folks wanted a baby before you get ‘em one with your prayer chain and all, young lady,” I know enough not to say ‘old’ anywhere near her.

“I spoke to Jen yesterday, dear,” she says. “They have been trying for years, but still no baby.”

“Aha, they just know how to do it right. I knew we were doing something wrong back in the day!”

“We did everything right, my love,” the wife gets in a good one. “Just think how many kids we would have if you hadn’t gone off to those wars.”

“Wars! I was too old for the wars. I have grandkids in school!”

“We shouldn’t have got started so early in our marriage if you didn’t want kids in college already,” she says while leaning into my chest. She knows I still like that even at my advanced age.

“We didn’t start that early,” I complain.

“Bosh! You couldn’t wait,” she tells me. “We didn’t even make it twenty miles out of town before you pulled into a motel. You called that resort in San Diego and told them to hold our room until the next day.”

“An old man would never do such a thing!” I correct her, must be those memory problems of hers again.

“Oh poo! The twins were born nine months to the day after our honeymoon…” she pauses, “You haven’t been telling folks that you’re 80 again, have you?” she smacks me one on the chest. “You’re 44 and I’m 37, and it is NOT too late for us to have another child!”

While we straighten this out, we dance to our music on a new record player with two speakers. What a marvel of technology!

“But I have scars; I must be really old to have scars there,” I try to set her straight, but she won’t have it.

“You have scars ‘there’ because you didn’t keep your fanny down like that nice Sgt. Fisher told you to in boot camp, my love,” she sets me straight instead.

Indeed, I had served in the Pacific with 2/8, that’s 2nd Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment for you civilian fellers. The ‘old man’ Major (later Lt. Col.) Henry Crowe had led us through Betio and Iwo, and then I had been called back to go over to Korea just a few years later. I never told the wife, but the resort where we spent our 20th anniversary had been close to Camp Pendleton so that I could report in to Sgt. Fisher and let him know that his training didn’t take.

Actually, the wounding of my poor buttocks had been a mistake on the sniper’s part. I had been temporarily assigned to the Army to ferret out a supply thief and had a desk job in a tent for a spell. I don’t know what happened on his end, but I got up suddenly, for no reason that I can recall, from my chair at the desk in the rear, and got it, well, in the rear, instead of in my cranium. The boys on the perimeter had taken care of the sniper, but my war was finished. The armistice got signed before I even left the MASH unit.

A couple of jovial doctors by the name of Pierce and Honeycutt had a grand old time with me and my wound. I can’t say that I blame them; it isn’t every day you get a Marine with hole in both butt cheeks. Their little joke about running the still through my rear end and putting a spigot on my hip got a little old, but I can’t help that it still makes me laugh. Sorry about the bad pun there.

“So you say this is just a nice couple trying to have a baby and we should pray for them?” I ask the wife.

“Yes, very nice,” she says.

“Noticeably insincere, cunningly evasive… that kind of nice?” I know this is going to get me in trouble.

“Nooo,” she laughs. “Where did you come up with that awful thing?”

“Pierce and Honeycutt, of course,” I admit.

“I think we better put that spigot on your hip to keep you out of trouble, love,” she isn’t supposed to know about that!

“Have you been writing to that mean ol’ Hawkeye again?”

“Yes, and he spills the beans every time he writes,” she confesses.

“I thought he died last year?” I said, confused that Pierce would still be writing letters to us after his death.

“Hawkeye isn’t dead, dear. It’s 1959, we had our anniversary last year in San Diego, and you brought me to meet that nice Sgt. Major Fisher and his lovely wife,” she straightens me out again. “We danced at the 1st Marine Division Ball on Camp Pendleton, and you proposed to me again.”

“Did you accept again,” I asked mischievously.

“I said that I would think it over,” she pokes fun at me and laughs as we dance to the record playing.

The sound of the music is good, coming as it does from the jukebox I got at the auction with my back pay. The war is finally over for me and my wonderful wife met me at the dock in San Diego with our children, all five of them bouncing around and making a ruckus ten times their size. Little John is four this year; I have missed a lot of his growing up. The twins, Michael Jr. and Mary Ann are seven already. Mark in the middle is 6, and Millicent is 5 as we somehow managed to have them almost exactly one year apart each time until the war came late in ’42.

Six months after my return, I suddenly realized that we had made that most common of parental blunders and named all of our kids with the same first letter.

“Good heavens! How you do come up with stuff!” My wife-to-be gazes in wonder at me, “Did you see all that from just one kiss?”

“I saw our lifetime ahead of us, darling one,” I say. “You know we have all of it to live after the wedding.”

“June 25, 1938,” she sighs. “A date that will live in my memory to the end, dearest love.”

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“What did the old guy want, love?” Jen asks.

“He misses his wife terribly, I think. He wanted to tell us that we can’t have kids because we are greedy,” James replies.

“Are you greedy?”

“Yes, greedy for you, dear one!”

“James.”

“Yes, Jenson.”

“You would think even an old guy could see that we can’t have kids in the way he means because we are both men,” Jenson says.

“I agree, my love,” James looks at the old man holding no one, dancing in his kitchen to a music only he can hear. “He sure does cut those old dances though. You have to give him that!”