Tag Archives: Julie Showalter

The time I set aside for blogging today dissipated into the multiple efforts required to prevent a family problem from evolving into a family catastrophe, the routine, mind-numbing chores necessary to feed and clothe those same family members, and a couple of hours spent reconstituting myself by re-reading the letters Julie¹ sent me before our lives merged in a single geographical location.

Consequently, the best approximation of a post I can offer is a fragment from that correspondence.

The Epistolary Courtship

In the pre-email, Twitterless, Facebook-free era when envelopes emblazoned with 13 cent stamps routinely carried letters to and from family, friends, business associates, and lovers, whether  writer and recipient were separated by a couple of blocks or an entire country, Julie and I each wrote the other well over 100 letters between Labor Day weekend, when  we reunited  after being incommunicado for six years, and Christmas Day, when we moved in together.

Julie’s letters were, as one might expect, stunningly erudite, grammatically correct, and syntactically sound with a marked tendency toward the epigrammatic, no small feat in those days before every ambitious dolt attempting to impress a sweetie, a boss, or whomever can lard his email messages with random quotes and aphorisms, courtesy of The Great And Powerful Google.

The letter from Julie  I randomly selected first today, for example, ends with this line:

I love you “intensely and for good.”²

It’s nothing profound, but it’s a step or two beyond the How are you? Fine I hope sort of letter I  typically received from others.

I soon realized that my  only advantage in this  ongoing correspondence was a greater familiarity with and a greater willingness to casually invoke modestly-moderately crude  and, on occasion, lewd terms in my compositions – nothing that would shock a longshoreman but still studiously coarse enough to contrast with Julie’s invariably  proper and polite constructions.

Of course, I used my power only for good, such as  redirecting a discourse drifting  dangerously close to intellectual percepts or, worse, an emotionally laden give-and-take toward altogether more appropriate down and dirty  topics, many of which involved anatomical explications.³

And this tactic worked – but for all too short a time.

One of today’s finds was  a card from Julie that marked the point at which my grand strategy was negated.

I had given Julie  a subscription to Chicago Magazine, an especially self-serving gift given that we  were then deciding whether to live in Dallas or Chicago , along with a card that read simply

Who the hell do you think would send you this?

I judged this sufficient to jog Julie’s attention.

A couple of weeks later, I received a birthday present from Julie, a  salt and pepper grinder made of brightly polished wood. Attached was the card from her:

I love a quick study.

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. This is a Browning quotation taken criminally out of context – I don’t care, I like the words [↩]
3. One especially decadent instance necessitated, I’m proud to say, a diagram [↩]

The Julie Memento Paradigm

The discovery of this Nicholas Nickleby Playbill marks the latest instance of what has become a recurrent pattern: in the midst of my search for an item or bit of information I need acutely, I find instead something associated with Julie.¹ A couple of hours later, I realize I’ve been fixated on the memento instead of pursuing the hunt for the original object.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Julie, and DrHGuy Coincide

On my last trip to New York, I found myself touring sites Julie and I had visited in our sojourns there. By 1981, Julie had been in New York several times on business while I remained untainted.

When I read in early 1981 that The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, already a hit play in London, would be coming to Broadway, I realized I had only two choices: I could cancel all our magazine and newspaper subscriptions, forbid TV viewing, and prohibit conversations with the outside world in hopes of preventing Julie, an impassioned, well-versed reader of Dickens who had written her dissertation on his work, from hearing the news, or I could plan a trip to the big city.

Making reservations and buying tickets seemed the less onerous option – in any case, it was certainly less risky.

Plymouth Theatre

Such it was that we arrived in New York less than a week after Julie was discharged from the hospital following gynecological surgery (related to her breast cancer) to celebrate Halloween by spending eight-and-one-half hours, broken into two sections by a dinner break, watching the Royal Shakespeare Company’s forty-two actors portray 138 speaking roles in the play based on the novel by Charles Dickens about the life of a poverty-stricken schoolmaster named Nicholas Nickleby.

For this privilege, we paid $100, not counting the dinner bill at Sardi’s, an amount that was to be the decade’s most expensive theater ticket while scalpers were reportedly getting $2,000 for such seats.²

The Big Finish

There isn’t one – a big finish, that is.  I can’t even find an ironic twist or a lesson to impart. It’s a shame too.  This seems the kind of episode that could handle a big finish and perhaps even deserves one.

Don’t get me wrong – the play was funny and moving and bedazzling. Julie and I were enchanted.  She chatted with the actors during a break, obtaining the autograph of Roger Rees, who starred as Nicholas (that’s his name scrawled across the Playbill). It was a day we talked about for the rest of our lives together.

That may be the problem. Even though Julie would live 18 more years after that trip, which is about 17 more years than the prognoses we were given at the time, I can’t help but reflexively add, at the end of every story about Julie, “but she died anyway.”

But we were both very alive that  fall day in New York when we saw Nicholas Nickleby.

And, I guess that will have to do.

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. Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. “Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The.” The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Oxford University Press. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 8 May. 2009 . [↩]

I learned, a month before Julie¹ died, to brush a small, thick piece of tuna with sesame oil, soy sauce, pepper, and lime zest, drag it through a pan of sesame seeds until it was coated on both sides, and quickly sear it in olive oil in a very hot iron skillet.

For a time, Julie would eat seared tuna, even when she could tolerate no other food, even when I had to feed it to her.

Finally, of course, she turned away the tuna as well. It was, after all, only seared tuna, hardly a match for cancer or the ordeal of treatment.

Shortly after Julie died, I taught our sons how to make scrambled eggs, ham and cheese omelets, and pasta with marinara sauce.

That was nine years ago.

I realized only this morning that, other than following the instructions on a box of frozen food or the back of a soup can, I have not cooked anything since.

1. Julie Showalter was a prize-winning writer and my much-beloved, fiercely smart, wickedly sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. There are many other posts about her and her writing in this blog. For information, see Julie Showalter FAQ. [↩]