Heck Of A Guy

The Final Leg Of The Journey

By calendrical quirk, the first day Julie¹ could leave Wichita Falls, her job, her apartment, and her friends to move to Chicago was Christmas Eve. And so, when most people were buying last minute gifts, preparing feasts, and steeling themselves for that over hill and over dale trek to grandma’s house, Julie was beginning her journey to cover the last 1,000 miles between us in an over-packed, spectacularly nondescript seven year old Volkswagen Squareback painted an indeterminate tan-beige-off white and so mechanically precarious that we later designated it The Hunk-O-Junk. In fact, we soon realized that its benefits didn’t justify the inconvenience of repeatedly searching for a parking slot in a neighborhood where cars and curb space existed in a dynamic equilibrium (AKA Musical Cars) that required at least 12% of all vehicles at any given time cruising the avenues looking for a place to park. During the next snowstorm, we wedged The Hunk-O-Junk into a semi-legal space on the street and left it to its fate until we returned in the spring to sell it (the automotive equivalent of setting the tribe’s infirm elders adrift on an ice floe).

That resolutely inglorious chariot did, however, transport Julie to Chicago, earning itself emblematic status, immortalized in our telling and retelling of this story.

The Destination

I had selected the apartment we were to share because of three primary attributes:
1. It was available the same day I was looking for a place to live
2. I could almost afford it
3. Its location placed the entire city of Chicago between my soon-to-be ex-wife and me

Although relatively small, the apartment featured an excess of open floor space because of the minimalist decorating style I embraced secondarily to abandoning most of my worldly goods when I separated from my wife. The only furnishings I had salvaged from that relationship were a mattress, a desk, a desk chair, and a bolster that served as my easy chair. I would have adhered to the custom of setting aside some drawers in anticipation of my new roommate’s arrive– if I had had any drawers. The final accent to the apartment’s décor was the artistic display of my underwear and socks on the bedroom floor.

As is apparent from the map, the apartment (located near the orange marker on the map) was near Lake Michigan and, indeed, had a view of the lake. If one stood at the eastern corner of the kitchen and squinted southwest toward the conveniently reflective window of the apartment analogous to ours in the high rise directly across the street, a glimmering sliver of Belmont Harbor could be sighted.

Other than red foil and gold ribbon of Julie’s gift that the clerk had wrapped for me (that store didn’t routinely provide gift-wrapping; I think this was a pity wrap), there were no holiday decorations. Or window coverings. Or lamps. I was just too busy, too befuddled, and too broke to furnish the place.

On Christmas morning, the only groceries in the apartment were my usual sandwich ingredients procured from the local White Hen convenience store. I had, however, found (also at White Hen) not only a second (non-matching) set of flatware to go with the single knife, fork, and spoon I had liberated from my former residence but also a brand new pack of paper plates in classic white.

The Obligatory Final Glitch & Then We Open The Presents

After driving The Hunk-O-Junk most of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Julie arrived at the apartment that afternoon to be met by – the doorman who handed her a note from me, explaining that I was at the Medical Center to calm the troops and scrawl my illegible signature, as Administrative Resident On Call For Psychiatry, on a couple of documents to make a protocol problem go away.

Happily, this was only a brief, if frustrating, delay. Two hours later, I returned to the apartment, ready to render my well rehearsed apologies for my absence. As it turned out, the contrition prep was wasted effort, and the apologies went unsaid.

While waiting for me, Julie had not only unpacked her belongings (without appreciably decreasing the empty floor space) but had scrounged all the fixings for the most wonderful of Christmas celebrations: “It’s A Wonderful Life” was playing on her 15 inch black and white TV; a holiday feast of tuna salad sandwiches, ripple-cut potato chips, and icy cold glasses of gin and tonic was at the ready; and the room was bathed in candlelight (Julie had somehow secured a handful of candles from the batch the doorman kept at his desk to give to residents in case of a power outage).

Julie met me at the door with what became a continuation of that first kiss in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Then, with us still locked in an embrace in the open doorway, her Christmas greeting to me, the first words between us now that we were, in every sense of the word, together, were

There was much more that happened that Christmas night, all of it fantastic, but nothing that tops that moment in the doorway.

The Future

The mechanics of telling this story bog down (even more) here. The problem is that Julie and I were, from this point onward, too damn happy, and I find it difficult to write an interesting narrative about happy. Come to think of it, I’ve always found being happy a difficult task, requiring sustained and arduous effort – efforts that have been and continue to be amply and disproportionately rewarded, but strenuous nonetheless.

We were, of course, vulnerable to the same problems as everyone else and managed to create a host of hassles that were uniquely our own, as does everyone else – although I like to think we were both clever enough that we may have created a set of tribulations that would have ranked somewhere in the 90th percentile. Both of us worked too much, especially in those first few years. I was still married for the first several months of our co-habitation while the lawyers and the State of Illinois sporadically nudged the divorce along its meandering path toward completion. We moved. Then, we built a house and moved again – a couple of times. Jobs changed, friends changed, the weather changed. Julie’s daughter was in and out of our lives. We didn’t have kids and then we did have kids.

Permeating every aspect of our lives, of course, would be the tragedy of Julie’s illness, diagnosed two years after our first Christmas together, and, years later, her death.

You see my problem – we were too amazingly, overwhelmingly, embarrassingly, remarkably, astoundingly, resplendently, incorrigibly, wonderfully happy.

While I considered winding the story down at this point, there is too much about Julie that is too important for me to omit. I have to at least attempt to preserve and commemorate what Julie meant — and still means — to me. So, my plan is to collapse and condense the years Julie and I spent together, covering most of that time in what for me passes as telegraphic style, elaborating only those moments and events that proved to be life-altering.

You’re certainly welcome to watch me try.

____________________

[Next Installment Of Julie's Story: The White – Or At Least Very Pale – Chapter]
[Previous Installment Of Julie's Story: The First Of A Million Kisses
[First Installment Of Julie's Story: This Is How A Love Story Began]

Footnotes

1. Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author, with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie Showalter FAQ.↩

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