Long
before we met, Stephanie was once bitten by a goose. I don't remember whether
she was camping with her family, or on a field trip with her school, but in my
memory of her telling me the story, she's quite young. She was feeding geese,
and one came closer and closer, and Steph thought, "Well, this must be an
extra friendly goose," so she held out a piece of bread. The goose snatched
the bread in its beak, along with Stephanie's finger, and it wouldn't let go.
Steph
didn't go into the details of how she got her finger back, but hearing the
story many years later, you got the impression there'd been a battle and some
blood. When she told me about it, she held her finger as if it still hurt, and
added the moral of the story, "Geese look nice, but they're mean. Really,
really mean."
* * * * * * * * * *
Going through some of
her childhood mementos, I see that Stephanie won the "Music in our Schools
Week" essay contest, according to a newspaper clipping that's undated and
doesn't mention what grade she was in. For all the other listed winners,
though, the clipping lists the students as 1st grade through 5th
grade, so let's assume this was from elementary school.
Here's Stephanie's
winning essay:
Music, by Stephanie Webb
Music is the singing of toads in a pond.
Music is the sound of a breeze through the trees.
Music is the one language that can be understood by all nations.
Music is a song that all the world can sing.
Music is the sound of a breeze through the trees.
Music is the one language that can be understood by all nations.
Music is a song that all the world can sing.
Music isn't notes.
Music isn't instruments.
Music isn't a song book.
It's much, much more than that.
Music isn't instruments.
Music isn't a song book.
It's much, much more than that.
Music is a way of life.
Music is a way of feeling.
Music is a sweet thing.
Music is a beautiful world.
Music is a way of feeling.
Music is a sweet thing.
Music is a beautiful world.
* * * * * * * * * *
Sometimes
I briefly wonder whether Stephanie would be mad at me for sharing such things,
but I don't think she would mind. I hope she'd be proud, and I think her ode to music is quite good, especially
for a little kid.
Other times I ask myself
whether Stephanie would like this website, and honestly, I think she'd love it.
We'd long ago lost the letters we'd exchanged after we fell in love, between
her visit to San Francisco and moving there, but every time I wrote her a note —
"Honey, working late tonight, I love you and I'll bring us Wendy's" —
the note remained on her nightstand for months. So, yeah, I think she'd like
reading all about herself and how much I love her, and that's what the website
is.
I'm not sure whether she'd
approve of the Shrine, though — that's the growing collection of the things she
cherished, on shelves which now dominate the living room of our apartment. From
the Afrin for her allergies to the unopened bottle of her favorite wine, the
rack with all her favorite clothes, and her t-shirts and shopping bags tacked
to the wall, there's nothing in the Shrine that isn't part of Stephanie's story.
But I wonder sometimes whether she'd think it's a little too much. Kind of
creepy, even? Hard to say.
To me, the Shrine is where
my memories of Stephanie are stored. If that's creepy, well, she's not here to
tell me it's creepy, so I'll never know. To me it's just sweet, like she was. There's
a fairly large picture of her in the corner, clearly visible from my chair in
the living room, and I look over at that picture often. It makes me feel better
when I'm blue.
Some days I spend an hour standing
at the Shrine, looking through the stuff on the shelves and remembering why
each little item is there … but most days it's just five or ten minutes as I'm going
to work or before dinner. It helps, so the Shrine will be there for as long as
I'm alive. Like the rest of our apartment, though, it's not as tidy as it
should be. Maybe that just adds to its authenticity, as neither of us was ever
terribly tidy.
* * * * * * * * * *
On a vacation with some
college friends, Stephanie once went to Memphis, where she saw Graceland but
not the Grand Ol' Opry, since that's in Nashville. She told me several stories about
her trip to Tennessee, and the one I remember clearest is that she was walking
down the sidewalk with her friends when a drunken Rod Stewart impersonator
burst out of a bar, in full Rod Stewart regalia. He briefly danced with one of
Steph's friends on the sidewalk, before going back into the bar, presumably to
continue the show. Who knew there were Rod Stewart impersonators? And isn't Rod
Stewart a little too rock'n'roll for Memphis?
She also told me she'd visited
the Pink Palace in Memphis, so of course I asked, what's the Pink Palace?
"It's the mansion where
the founder of Piggly Wiggly lived." So of course I asked, what's Piggly
Wiggly? I thought she was kidding or stoned, but no, Piggly Wiggly is a chain
of grocery stores all over the Midwest and South. Being new to the Midwest, I
knew nothing of Piggly Wiggly, but Steph educated me. It was the first grocery
store where you could stroll the aisles shopping, instead of handing your
shopping list to the grocer and waiting while he gathered everything.
And still, every time I
drive by or shop at a Piggly Wiggly, I remember thinking Steph was pulling my
leg. But no, the place is really called Piggly Wiggly. And it was founded in
Memphis, and their piggy mascot is pink, so when Piggly Wiggly made its founder
a millionaire, he built a Pink Palace in Memphis. You can't make this stuff up.
* * * * * * * * * *
In San Francisco, Steph
was a bit surprised that Italian restaurants were expensive, because she'd
grown up in Racine, a town where, she said, there were numerous Italian
restaurants with good food at affordable prices. She took me to dinner at an
Italian spot near the west end of the Sunset Tunnel; she'd heard that this
place was good, and it was easy to get to on the N Judah streetcar, so we went,
but her eyes widened when she saw the prices on the menu — they were double
what she'd expected, more than we could afford, but we'd already waited and
been seated, so we stayed and paid.
Racine is a smallish
city, so I asked why it would have so many Italian restaurants, and she said,
"The mob was pretty big in Racine." And at that, it was my turn to
widen my eyes. Politically incorrect? Racial stereotypes? Or was she right? Years
later, living in Wisconsin, we visited Racine often, because her parents still
live there, and a few times Steph mentioned again that some of Racine's Italian
restaurants had been known or widely believed to have been more about money
laundering than fine dining. When I asked which restaurants and suggested we
make reservations at one, she said this was long ago, and the places that she'd
heard were Mafia-linked had all been closed for many years.
Steph said it, so it's
either true or Steph believed it to be true, that organized crime once had a stronghold
in Racine County. But curiosity compelled me to spend half an hour Googling to
see what I could find about Racine's links to organized crime, and not much
popped up on-line. No gory accounts of long-ago shootouts between cops and
mobsters, or crooks on the lam who holed up in Racine. There are a few reports
of old-time gang operations in Racine County, and a few from neighboring
Kenosha County, but nothing particularly notorious. Maybe she was mistaken, but
I can say this seriously, no sarcasm intended: She was rarely wrong about much
of anything. So Google or no Google, I'd still wager she was right about Racine
and the Mob.
*
* * * * * * * * *
She liked
reading newspapers, back when newspapers were
still a thing. You'd put some coins into a mechanical contraption on the
sidewalk, lift the lid, and take out a newspaper, and read it. That sounds
hopelessly retro nowadays, but that's how people knew what was going on in
America.
We read at least one newspaper, pretty much front-to-back,
every day. Some days, we read two papers. If we were passing through a city,
big or small, we always bought a paper and read it. When we lived in San
Francisco, we bought and shared a Chronicle
or an Examiner almost every day, and
we frequently made a date of it — at a restaurant, at the beach, or at the park
across the street, Steph and I would trade sections, sip some coffee or soda,
and talk about the news as we were reading. It took an hour, maybe longer, and
when you were done you were honest-to-goodness better-informed than before
you'd read the paper.
We continued reading newspapers after we moved
to Kansas City (The Star) and Madison
(The Capital Times), but our
subscription to the daily paper ended when the Cap Times switched to weekly publication some years back.
There's now just one daily paper in Madison, The Wisconsin State Journal, and it's a
ten-minute read all the way through, with a conservative spin in a very liberal
city. We don't subscribe, and rarely glance at it. Sometimes but not often,
Stephanie or I would buy a copy of the Milwaukee
Journal-Sentinel, which seems to still be worth the cover price, and we
would share it at a restaurant or at the park.
Reading the news in a newspaper was better, I
think — more informative than reading snippets from twenty different sources
on-line, the way more and more people get their news nowadays. A newspaper tried,
and a good newspaper succeeded, in giving you the news that matters. The
internet gives everyone thousands of choices for getting the news, so
newspapers are starving for ad money, laying off staff, reducing coverage,
losing pages, and soon most of them will be gone. Meanwhile, more and more
Americans are getting their news from shallow TV broadcasts or politically-slanted
websites, leaving Americans less and less informed about what's going on.
* * * * * * * * * *
A few days ago, I
rearranged some furniture for the first time since Steph died (unless you count
shifting the shelves to create her shrine), and everything was kind of a mess.
If it's OK to print things that might embarrass Stephanie, I can embarrass myself
as well: this was the first time I'd touched the vacuum cleaner since Stephanie
was here, and there was so much dust and accumulated floor-gristle that the
vacuum made a loud boom and stank of melted rubber. It was a minimum of $120 to
get it fixed, or $50 to buy a new one, so I ordered a new one from Amazon.
The new vacuum cleaner came
yesterday, and I vacuumed today, and it's nice having the carpet a bit cleaner.
Maybe I should vacuum more often. Maybe I should vacuum every couple of weeks,
or once a month. Whatever normal people do.
Anyway, I'm tidying up
for the first time since Stephanie went into the hospital last summer, and
maybe this is the beginning of … "moving on." That's what everyone
says I'm supposed to do, eventually, though I really don't want to and there's
no hurry.
