Category Archives: Julie Showalter

I am taking a day or two off. While I have much I hope to accomplish, the first  item on today’s agenda is perhaps the clearest indicator why I’m not attending to my usual tasks, such as generating a typically prolix, profound, and profane Heck Of A Guy post.

My morning will be spent re-reading messages written by Julie¹ to me during what constituted our long deferred courtship that finally took place during the 1970s.  I’ve previously described that period in a Heck Of A Guy post,  The First Of A Million Kisses:

We’ll kiss the first of a million kisses
and let the past fall away
~From Allelujah by Fairground Attraction

…then I did the simplest thing in the world.
I leaned down… and kissed him.
And the world cracked open.
~Agnes de Mille

Julie and I needed eight years  to get from our first meeting to our first kiss.

To get from our first kiss to our first home together took four months.

Well, it was a pretty good kiss.²

In those four months before we were finally moved in together,

• I had (another) I want a divorce confrontation with my wife, filed divorce papers, and moved into an apartment.
• Julie gave notice at her job, arranged to end the lease on her apartment, packed the belongings essential to her (i.e., clothes and books), and sold or gave away the rest.
• Julie and I spent a couple of hectic, wonderful weekends together in Chicago.
• We called every two or three times a week and exchanged letters (in that benighted pre-email era) daily. ³

Of course, a series of bullet points cannot convey the anxiety, guilt, frustration, excitement, and happiness we experienced during this time. Everything was happening and happening fast.

Julie still had job responsibilities until she actually left her position at the end of this period, and the demands of my residency were unabated. Because my wife and I had no children and no money the legalities of our divorce were relatively simple, but there were tears, mutual insults, accusations, and counter-accusations aplenty. My soon-to-be ex-wife’s obligatory suicide threat was followed two days later by a polite, if urgent, request that I talk to the movers who were insisting that it was physically impossible to move a large sofa from her apartment to the moving van.⁴ I needed money so I was working extra hours in my part-time job at a halfway house for recently discharged state hospital patients. That such arrangements were officially forbidden but traditionally winked at by the residency added one more unit of ambiguous risk. Yada, yada, yada, …

Neither Julie or I ran this gauntlet unscathed (that’s not how gauntlets work), but we were sustained by our belief that we were, finally, destined to succeed. This conviction was, I now realize, a fallacy, albeit a fallacy with anodyne properties for which I’m grateful.

And, that element of faith may explain my current difficulty describing this period of alternating (and sometimes simultaneous) angst and excitement in a way that communicates the experience. I’ve tried a half-dozen approaches to express the emotional roller coaster ride of those four months in this posting, but this effort has been unrequited. When all this was going on, my life was hectic and unsettled but – and this appears to be the key – never in doubt. I knew what I wanted was to be with Julie; everything else was secondary.

So, this is, I suppose, an apology of sorts.

You’re just gonna have to trust me on this one.

The excerpt that follows, taken from a letter written two months before Julie moved to Chicago to be with me, is unfair to Julie, whose epistolary style abounded with wit, allusions, nestled references, double entendres, wisdom, depth, insight,  and, of course, salacious suggestions, none of which is included here. Nonetheless, I believe these passages will explain why I am giving this endeavor my highest priority.

Dear Wonderful Allan,

I want, need, and deserve to see you (I’ve been such a good little sick girl). Therefore, I will see you. This is a variation on the glad game, much in vogue with N.V. Peale and his ilk.  (You, of course, being absolutely and totally unique in all the world, are ilkless.) …

Where, oh where, has my cynical unromantic attitude gone? I fear it has forsaken me for good (or ill). I’m ready to spend my life in a terminal case of cuteness (or sweetness), sipping banana milkshakes together. …

Carly Simon is singing “Lovin’ you’s the right thing to do.”  How odd, to have a song seem to apply to us. “I know what I think I’ve known all along.”  Ah yes.

My mail today contained “Handyman” magazine, an anniversary gift from [ex-husband], an exhortation from my mother to have a little talk with Jesus ([sister] ratted on me and told her I was trying to raise my consciousness), … and a clever card from [friend] saying “One thing about that operation of yours/It’ll make you forget about sex” (to which she added “for about 5 minutes.” My friends know me).

Now Carly doesn’t have time for the pain. Lucky Carly.

Allan, Allan, Allan – I am infatuated, smitten, head-over-heels, name your cliche (and I do hate cliches. That’s how low you’ve brought me). Why is it getting harder to be without you instead of easier? Why couldn’t I remain detached and calm? Why are you proving, after all this time, irresistible?

Julie

Those words are not going to be mistaken for the lyrics of a Leonard Cohen song, but they do offer the music I need today.

1. Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance  as well as several of her short stories and other pieces.  For the location of the various content about or by Julie, see Julie FAQ. [↩]
2. For more about that first kiss, see Willie, Waylon, Jerry Lewis, Julie, And Me [↩]
3. The built-in USPS delay resulted in three or four parallel mail conversations. The response to a joke mailed today would arrive perhaps four days later; in the meantime, two or three notes responding to other letters would arrive. One had to be on the ball. [↩]
4. I pointed out to the workmen that they were the same crew that had moved the sofa into the apartment and that the sofa had not grown nor had the apartment doors shrunk [↩]