Elizabeth Meade Howard

With Love to My Father

2010-06-01T12:19:00.014-04:00

From LOVE. SING. DANCE & SAVE THE PLANET:
HOW ELDER MENTORS ENHANCE OUR LATER LIVES

My father taught me to look to the stars: The Big and Little Dippers, and Orion the Hunter whose belt shone three stars in a row. He also taught me to love laughter - as well as Virginia Woolf, haiku, butterflies, Broadway, old movies and the streets of New York. He taught me to work every day work at something I believe in. To eat what is put in front of me. To say “thank you,” “I'm sorry” and mean it. To be on time and never go to bed angry. To walk the beach in summer and winter. To save bees and bats and anything that lives. He taught me to keep going when he no longer could.

In 1984, my father was 71 when my mother died suddenly in her sleep. He said her death felt “like a black hole in space.” My parents had married in college with no money or career prospects, and 50 years later, he'd done well in advertising and later teaching at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Graduate Business. My mother backed his ambitions, making nests and guiding his decisions with good nature and bold, clear-eyed counsel. After all their years together, my parents were still entertaining and planning trips even as he booked the Ritz and she the Ramada. They were still best friends.

Her death left my father alone in the house they'd planned together. At first he said, “it's your mother's house. I don't feel I should move a thing.” But slowly - blessed with good health and the affection of family, friends and even lovers - he found new ways to move forward. He adapted to his losses and although had no apparent master plan for aging, his innate “solutions” served him well. He wanted to stay in the game and worked hard to do so. He was a mentor worth my following.

He left complaints at home and brought good humor to the table.

He vowed not to worry about anything longer than three days.

Every morning, he dressed well and packed his briefcase, off to teach and write at the Darden School. When he reached the age of mandatory retirement, he continued working, writing for the School's alumni magazine and sending out manuscripts for adventure novels first drafted in long hand. The year after my mother died, my father wrote and published The Dragonfly, a novella about her childhood. Writing was his first and last defense.

He volunteered his writing and acting talents to the Dyslexia Center and Recording for the Blind.

He reread Ian Fleming, Shakespeare, Nabokov and Virginia Woolf.

He drew whimsical cartoons for all our holidays and birthdays.

He stayed in touch with old friends and furthered new friendships with the young. When their babies were born, he wrote them welcoming letters, many of which were framed or saved as keepsakes
He made his first travel plans alone, joining a group trip to England. He made new friends on the journey and returned to visit them on many subsequent springs. One year, he took his granddaughter with him. Another summer, he and his grandson flew to Maui where they bought flowered shirts and marveled at volcanoes and waterfalls.

He swam, walked and chinned himself on the bathroom door. He stood straight and tall and stayed “on the wagon” for more than 40 years.

In his late 80s, my father had several close car wrecks, but, when approached, graciously agreed to stop driving. It was a tough loss of mobility and freedom that could have cloistered him at home. Instead, he hired his housekeeper to drive him to the grocery store, and to the Business School library where he drafted new stories, lunched with faculty and read The New York Times. When friends asked his whereabouts, he quickly replied, “At work!”

On Sundays, my father took a taxi to the early service and sang off-key at St. Paul's Episcopal church.

At home, he let the paint peel and the roof leak.

He said, “take it” to anything anyone admired. And when he said “I love you,” they were words easy to return.

He often volunteered, “I'm a happy man.”

While my father fought retirement and remained relatively strong, I eventually became concerned about his living alone, however much he insisted on his independence. I was relieved when he accepted my prodding to have a University student rent a back room even if they rarely crossed paths.

I worried that he ate less and slept more; he dismissed cataracts and late-developing diabetes. By 88, I saw signs of mini strokes and forgetfulness and an increased effort to mask changes with genial reassurances and an unusually fertile vocabulary.

I remember that late January afternoon. My father walked me to my car in the cold. I smoothed down his blowing hair and red shetland sweater. We hugged and said goodbye.

The next morning, the housekeeper called in panic. My father had collapsed at the dining room table while a friend helped him pay bills. I raced to my father as medics strapped him to a gurney, sped him to the hospital and into intensive care. Twenty-four hours later, he was diagnosed with viral encephalitis, a rare and aggressive attack to the brain. For a month, he hovered near consciousness. I came to see him every day, and every day I feared would be his last.

Incredibly, my father fought his way back to leave the hospital, only to spend months at a nursing home before returning home to around-the-clock care. His doctor, a Hospice specialist who would generously guide his care, said, “Your father is amazing. Most men half his age would not have lived.”

I learned that my father's will to live was indeed amazing. I saw a man much reduced, sometimes bewildered, but by nature still gallant, dignified and fighting the fates with humor. When a friend visiting the nursing home asked how he spent his day, my father replied. “I get out of bed and put my feet on the floor. Then I take my pulse. If I have one, I shave. If not, why bother?”

After coming home from the nursing home, my father asked his housekeeper to drive him back to the Darden library for what would be his final trip. Work was still the staff by which he stood.

When soon confined to home, he seemed decided that life, albeit compromised, was worth living. He'd rise out of bed, tie on his paisley bathrobe and ask the news. When I
told him that I was working on a documentary about a 107 year old local lady, he smiled and asked, "Does she date?"

Other days he struggled with confusion. He reported seeing white tigers loose in the yard. He believed he'd piloted the Enola Gay with the atom bomb aboard and begged me to apologize to the women and children of Japan.

Even in confusion, my father remained courteous and drew on courage that put pleasure before pain. He enjoyed the summer's heat, sitting beside the '50s pool eating fresh tomato sandwiches lathered in mayonnaise. In the fall, we drove the country back roads as he complimented the trees for their rich colors. We listened to tapes of Bing Crosby, Strauss, Mozart and Garrison Keillor; I read him favorite Haiku, and spare poems of London pigeons, swans and whale songs he'd written years earlier and now asked who wrote them.

Sometimes my father said he felt like he was 100. Christmas night he sunk into a deep sleep that lingered for over a week. He lived until January 5th, 2000, seeming to have willed himself into the new century and three days past his 90th birthday. I was thankful for his many years, but when they ended, even 90 felt too few.

copyright 2010

"The Secret to the whole thing is love"

2010-06-01T12:18:00.027-04:00

Harry Kullijian & Carol Channing

From LOVE. SING. DANCE & SAVE THE PLANET:
HOW ELDER MENTORS ENHANCE OUR LATER YEARS

Talk about mentors for love and hope. Carol Channing and Harry Kullijian went steady in the seventh and eighth grades. In 1933, Harry was the leader of the Aptos Junior High School band, and Carol took the stage to run for class vice president. Together, they made up her campaign theme: “If Carol is your vice, it's a virtue.” Carol won her first audience big time.

Carol and Harry also went out for ice cream and watched Joe DiMaggio train at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park not far from where they grew up. Most importantly, Harry gave Carol her first kiss, right there at her mother's kitchen table. While innocent - and even witnessed by her father - it was a kiss Carol would never forget. And after a lifetime apart, Carol and Harry in their 80s, would seal it again with a kiss.

In the intervening 70 years, Harry, the son of an immigrant tailor, became a successful California businessman and land developer, and Carol the Queen of Broadway. In 1964, she starred in Hello Dolly! - the longest running musical of its era -- as Dolly Gallagher Levi, the charming, indefatigable matchmaker bent on bagging a rich husband.

While achieving celebrity as supreme matchmaker Dolly Levi, offstage Carol's romantic unions were less than storybook. She married three times - to Ted Naidish, an unknown novelist; to Alexander Carson, a pro football player with the Ottawa Rough Riders and father of her son, Chan; and to Charles Lowe, her publicist, manager and husband for 42 years. She divorced Lowe in 1998.

In her 2002 memoir Just Lucky, I Guess, Carol discloses many lonely years during and after her three marriages. She also remembers Harry Kullijian, her first love and the affection she still treasures for him. They'd grown up and drifted apart. She knew he'd married and had a son and daughter and done well in business. She longs to see him again. Carol writes that a mutual friend read her book soon after Harry became a widow and urged him to call Carol. Harry said, 'She won't want to see me,' but I took a chance.”

Now eager to hear Carol Channing's never-too-late-for-love story from her own lips, I write for an interview and Harry calls from home in Modesto, California. He's a first name, whatever's-on-my-mind, friendly kind of fella. “Our story,” says Harry, “is all about hope... love and respect..our love is invigorating. It makes us feel young. It's a miracle for Carol and me to be together again.”

Harry has me already and we set an appointment. Carol answers, her sandpaper and satin voice remarkably as advertised. She says she's resting, stretched between two chairs. At 85, she's an acrobat too. Carol talks fast, her candor endearing as she confesses to seven bleak years before meeting Harry again. “I was just desperate; I was so alone,“ she says, “You find when you're my age, everybody's dead, and as an only child you have no family, and that's terrible.”

Carol replays their reunion. “I was sure Harry was dead. He's a year older than I am. He called and I said, 'Well, when do we see each other?' And then all of a sudden Harry walked through my gate. Two weeks later we were engaged cause we knew each other so well. And we'd formed each other at an impressionable age. He had a beautiful sixty-year marriage..in this very house in which I'm living now.”

I picture moonstruck Carol, she and Harry marrying at a friend's house near San Francisco on May 10, 2003. She wore silk pants, Harry a dark suit. “It was wonderful when he held me in his arms. He'd even promised my parents to take care of me,” she recalls. "Of course it doesn't hurt that he was so beautiful..He's Armenian. He looks Biblical to me..like Moses sitting on Mount Sinai eating a fig.” Eat your heart out, Charlton Heston.

“Its just chemistry and I'm unaware of what creates it. Why is it with other people you don't have chemistry?” Carol asks. “What brings people together?”

Hmmmm..Maybe like attitudes? An approach to life? A shared point of view?

“Maybe,” Carol says. “I know when Harry was 13 years old and I was 12, he was the exactly the same as he is now. He said, 'Isn't that strange? Carol, you haven't changed one iota.' Isn't that something? My feelings for him haven't changed either.”

“I think you said something profound.”

“I think you did,” says Carol, making us laugh.

With the steam still rising from their reunion, Carol shares her not so simple secret. “This is my first marriage. The secret to the whole thing is love. If you do just love each other, and you don't say, 'Oh I have to love him or 'I have to forgive him.' There's nothing to forgive when you finally have a marriage where love is involved.

“You don't say, 'Now can we afford a housekeeper? You don't say, 'What kind of home will we live in?' You don't ask, 'How much money do you make?' None of that. You just love him. And he loves you.”

Just like that. So why do we make love so complicated and take a lifetime to figure it out? If Carol's earlier marriages were only preamble to Harry, what had savvy, generous- hearted Carol hoped for in her previous marriages?

Carol buzzes on, engagingly honest. “I had three marriages and mostly it was because my mother in New York - when I was young and trying to get a job - said to me, 'Carol, it's 10:30 at night and you're sitting here talking to this man. You can't do that! You can't talk to a man alone at night in your little one-room apartment. You can't do that! So I married him. I was terribly lonely trying to get jobs. And I just married three times for that reason.”

And yet Carol's marriage to Charles Lowe lasted over 40 years. “Charles kept me working and most actors are grateful for that,” she says. “Most actors want to keep working. We had very little time to be alone together.. I was working all the time. And boy did I learn a lot.”

She drops down a beat. “He wasn't interested in me. No. I was lonely. I didn't miss him. I spent my life going from hotel rooms to dressing rooms all the way around the world. I thought that was marriage.”

According to Charles Lowe's 1999 New York Times obituary, Carol filed for divorce in May 1998, saying her husband had abused her, mismanaged her money and only had sex with her twice in their marriage.

Carol swings back up. “And all of a sudden, this is my first marriage! You don't have to say anything...You just want to do things for each other. I notice in my husband's family, they're all very gentle and sweet with their wives and considerate. The husband tries to do the dishes even though he doesn't do them right. Marriage is a beautiful thing,” says Carol, consideration and sharing now her restorative norm.

Carol offers a glimpse of her “beautiful” new life. “It's never the same...Every day is different to tell you the truth. It's wonderful here. We have a beautiful rose garden. We have a white fig tree and a black fig tree and an apricot tree and peaches and lemons and
oranges, a walnut tree..everything. We say to each other, 'What will we have for breakfast?'
And then we go out and get whatever we want, just pick it off the tree. It's heaven..He also cooks or we'd starve to death..”

Carol's idyll includes daily walks in the garden or into Modesto and back. ”Walking's the best...We also have a swimming pool, that helps. Sometimes I join Harry on his “rowboat” machine,” she says. “We dance too. I taught Harry.”

On Sundays, Carol and Harry attend different Protestant churches together. Harry was raised in a religious Armenian household and she as a Christian Scientist. Her father, a newspaper editor, was also an active lecturer and editor of Christian Science publications.
Carol clarifies the credo that keeps her in good stead: “I can't say I'm a Christian Scientist. I go to doctors. But the curtain goes up at 8 o'clock at night and I've got to be on that stage. I think Christian Science's pretty good training; nothing's going to stop you from doing your work.”

No joke. Carol didn't even slow down after nearsightedness caused her several falls into the orchestra pit, the last fall emerging with a broken arm, three ribs and a collar bone. Carol's especially proud of not having missed any Dolly! performances, some 5000 in the 1960s, popular revivals in 1978 and 1995 as well as on the road tours in 1985 when under a doctor's care for uterine cancer. Carol won ten Tony awards for Dolly! including best actress in a comedy. “That was eight shows a week, sixteen in concerts. I was doing cobalt and chemo. There's nothing like sheer panic to create adrenaline. The healing process is to keep working,” she says.

Carol, still the trouper, adds that her work cure is only amplified by the give and take of an audience. “You give the audience a little piece of your soul, and they give you a little piece of your soul back again by appreciating it - or applauding or laughing or crying. It builds and by the end of the show, I either feel better or I'm HEALED! My doctor said, 'Well for gosh sakes, you are healed.”

And Carol, born January 31,1921 in Seattle, Washington, holds to the healing faith taught by her father and lifelong mentor. “Daddy used to say, 'God loves you the most when you're working because it flows through you faster.' Whatever God does. I don't know..I don't claim to know.. I think all of us, whether we realize it or not, believe. We had to have one creator. Some people don't believe that, but then no doctor could put us together and make us live. Sometimes onstage I still hear him saying, 'tell it to an understanding heart. Tell it to me.' I do and it's brand new to me. Are you an only child too?”

“Yes.” I feel quick kinship.

“That's it!” says Carol. “And then you get to worshipping your father!”

I laugh in recognition.
“Yep, me too,” Carol echoes.

Carol was only 35 when her father died; he was 68. “Too soon. I never got over it.. I just grieved for decades. Finally now, it's the first time I don't have to keep his picture in front of me and talk to him. But he's still with me..,” says Carol whose mother confessed on her departure for college, that her father was actually half German-American and half African-American but had always passed as white. Carol's mother said she didn't want Carol to be surprised "if she had a black baby." Carol said afraid of being type cast, she kept her secret until publishing her autobiography at age 81.

Now reminiscing in gear with her father, Carol brings her delighted passenger along for the ride. “We'd go for a ride to break in the new car,” she recalls. “We'd sing all the way to San Jose and back to San Francisco. We also drove from San Francisco to Boston every summer so we sang ALLLLLLLLL the way to Boston and ALLLLLLLLLL the way back again. Daddy would drive and I was next to him. Mother was in the back seat. She'd clap to what we were singing. Daddy and I'd sing and harmonize. He was able to make me sound good.. My voice was high and I had thin vocal chords growing up...Oh we loved doing it.

We sang Baptist hymns usually. 'Amazing Grace' and 'Underneath the Everlasting Arms'..” Given her cue, Carol unexpectedly bursts into song, reviving her childhood repertoire to full effect. The phone vibrates. “Oh roll Jordan roll, roll Jordan roll...'I am bound to shout to glory when this world's on fire...Oh glory, Halleluiah!” She takes a breath. “We continued singing right up until he died. 1956.”

Ready to tune up once more, Carol continues performing with Harry at the helm. They'll soon tour with her revue of reminiscences; The First 80 Years are the Hardest. She calls to Harry in the wings: “Where am I booked?”

He calls back: “Santa Barbara, Austin, New York.” I jot down the New York date and will try to be there.

“We open in the Feinstein Room at the Regency. They charge way too much,” says Carol with a tip on saving me the expense. “You can pose as my dresser.” I'm ready.

When not onstage, Carol and Harry have established the Carol Channing & Harry Kullijian Foundation for the Arts, funding scholarships to encourage college students to pursue theater careers. In 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger honored Carol for her contributions in arts education in California, and in 2008, she won the National PTA's Life Achievement Award for her Foundation's support of childrens' education.

“The First Lady of Musical Comedy” studied dance and drama at liberal Bennington College in Vermont before quitting to hit the New York pavements. She debuted on Broadway in 1941 as understudy to Eve Arden in Let's Face It. Her talent was spotted in the 1948 review, Lend and Ear, by playwright and author Anita Loos who later cast Carol as the flashy gold digger Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes. Carol's flamboyant Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend cinched her fame.

“I'm 84 years old..I have found that the hardest thing in the world to find is exactly what you have that can mean something to your fellow man. What is it that I can offer to these students? If you find yourself, you've found it,” says Carol, entertainer, artist, teacher and role model. “All we (artists) do is recreate what was already created...so it's pretty well religious work. It is, in all the arts. It keeps anybody young.”

If Carol's “religious work” keeps her young, she's getting as she's giving. Her second phone starts ringing off the hook. It doesn't stop.
“Do you need to answer that?”

“Just a minute. Hold on. I've got to get up off this chair now.” Carol groans. “I can't do it...Oh I've got it upside down..Oh and now there's the door bell...”
Oops. I imagine Carol tangled in phone lines, wide-eyed, still playing for laughs.

“Are you ok?” I wait to be sure. “Any parting advice?”

“I think it would be the essence of ego to tell somebody else how to live, Carol says. Then, whether overture or encore, she suddenly sings: “It's just love..which is all there is..” She stops. “Well, wait a minute. What's that song? Harry and I just love it...
'Ah Sweet Mystery of Life, at last I've found Thee..” The lyrics speed up. “I know at last
the secret of it all...'Tis the answer, Tis the end of all of living..For it is love alone that
rules...You know that one?”

I know that one. And I love it.

*****************************************************

I stay in touch with Harry and arrange to see Carol perform THE FIRST 80 YEARS ARE THE HARDEST at Feinstein's on Park Avenue. We meet backstage, just long enough to take photos that prove Carol's rechargeable batteries and cross-country grin are for real.
And to see that Harry's right, their marriage is all about hope.

A friend and I finish our salmon dinners as the lights come up and the bass, drums and Steinway hit Hello Dolly! Carol Channing enters stage left in lipstick red tuxedo with mouth to match. She struts in sequins, bumps and grinds her slim hips onstage at the Regency Hotel.

Carol wows loyal fans with her cabaret revue, a seemingly off-the-cuff blend of songs she made famous, Broadway patter and cheeky impersonations. She gives her you've-
got-to-be-kidding, gee-whiz gravel and gusto. She channels bawdy Sophie Tucker, brassy
Ethel Merman, naked and inebriated Tallulah Bankhead, diamond-decked Queen Elizabeth
at a command performance. Carol - batty to professional purpose - animates her own Al
Hirschfeld cartoon.

The dinner audience whistles and calls for their favorites. Carol feigns amazement; her dark eyes saucer: “You remember!?”

We remember and applaud for more. Carol delivers a still sexy “Razzle Dazzle” with rhinestones sparkling on her toes. She follows with Dolly Levi's rousing ballad, now perhaps her own battle hymn, “Before The Parade Passes By..”

“...With the rest of them, with the best of them
I can hold my head up high
For I've got a goal again, I've got a drive again
I wanna feel my heart coming alive again
Before the parade passes by..... “

Carol invites Harry to her side. Harry takes her hand, Carol's willing partner as they soft shoe into the spotlight. They end in step with a gentle kiss.

copyright 2010

A Place and Time

2009-10-11T16:21:00.008-04:00

From VIRGINIA LIVING

However weathered and tilted the axis, we rely on our memories of summer places to remain as fixed as the North Star, a sure compass to the past.

My memories of Virginia Beach stretch back to the 1940s when my parents bought a new shingled house, panelled and furnished in matching pine, a block from the dunes and the wide, white beach. A screened porch and windows opened to hot breezes that smelled of bayberry, honeysuckle and gardenias. Yuccas stood at attention by the clothesline and blackberries provided endless picking for pies I wasn’t yet old enough to bake.

Before I could remember, photos show me running free, bare as a butterfly in the sea grasses, my mother’s sunglasses falling from my nose; we hugged under a striped umbrella; my father waded into the waves with me high on his shoulders.

My father commuted to the beach from New York where he worked in advertising. We lived in a brownstone on17th Street, the Stuyvesant Park sandbox my first touch of the seashore. Later, we moved near the gated gardens of Gramercy Park. My parents were both Virginians, however, still rooted to the state of their births.

At THE Beach - as only Virginians label their home terrrain - my parents made life-long friends with neighbors they looked forward to seeing each summer. The Morrels from Baltimore, the Baldwins from Lynchburg, the Jeters from Roanoke. They gathered in the mid-day sun, cigarettes lit, to watch their children and darken their tans. Before the sun set, they met for cocktails and stories of the day. The Morrels’ handsome older son went to the Gilman School. Just looking at him made me speechless. One day, I was invited to his house for lunch; in excitement, I choked, sputtered and spouted a gulp of milk from my nose. I ran home in morbid disgrace.

The Jeters lived next door and had no children. Fielding Jeter, a quiet man with the face of a choir boy, grew petunias and made fresh peach ice cream so rich it clung to your tongue. He carefully weeded rows of lettuce while hummingbirds hovered in the pink mimosa trees. The sprinkler spritzed the grass, teasing me to sleep on the porch swing.

The Worthingtons lived up the street, close to the steep dunes. They were a sprawling family who gathered under one roof each summer. Their long-legged daughter was rightly named Sugar and the sturdy father and son both named Ben. I looked forward to seeing Lucy, the family maid, more often than not in grey uniform and white aporn washed laundry in the open garage. She was light-skinned and lean like a stalk of bamboo bending easily in the wind. She knotted her dark hair at her neck. She smiled and waved me into the shaded garage, a welcome mat from the street’s hot stones. I didn’t wear shoes to show I had tough feet.

Lucy let me peer into the three-legged barrel where dirty clothes churned in sudsy water. Then she squeezed the soggy shirts and linens through a wringer, twisting out any extra moisture. Sometimes she let me crank the handle. She stacked the tin tubs with wet laundry, ready to hang on the line like tiny masts.

Other happy hours were spent reading "Mopsy" and "Wonder Woman" comics and Nancy Drew mysteries which caused my usually cheerful grandmother to cluck in protest. She made up for it, teaching me to play Canasta and handing out nickles and dimes at the first ring of the Good Humor truck’s afternoon bell. We all ate fresh corn on the cob, blue fish and spot; we cooled off with sunset rides on the boardwalk’s merry-go-round and ferris wheel.

Storm clouds only gathered at Virginia Beach as the tides came in from World War II. Military manuevers heightened at Army bases on both ends of Atlantic Avenue. Convoys of camouflaged trucks carried solidiers from post to post. I waved to the troops from behind our white-washed fence. Landing barges spilled ashore in practice landings; B17s and 24s flew in Vs overhead. My father, eager to be part of the war, volunteered for the Navy. He was turned down for being under weight and near-sighted. Determined, he worked out, ate carrots and took eye exercises and then the Navy welcomed him aboard.

Once accepted, I sat beside my father at the ocean’s edge, quizzing him with flash cards to identify U.S. and enemy planes. Too soon, he was shipped to far away Hawaii. From this mythical place, he wrote and illustrated tales of wind gods, rare white deer, ducks who fall in love on the Central Park lake.

He also sent me a grass skirt and goldfish that I believed had miraculously swum across the Pacific. In fact, my mother found and purchased the fish at the local 5&10. Years later, I realized that she performed other magic throughout the war, keeping the beach house full of friends and laughter, while writing to my father every morning hoping the return mail would only bring good news.

Her wishing worked and my father returned home with war stories of a last minute assignment that kept him off a cruiser that was later bombed and intelligence assignments that based him squarely in the Officers’ Club swimming pool. My father joked that he’d only been given 10 minutes to recount his "harrowing" war experiences. Instead, they were buried like ghostly sandcrabs, making sure that only sunshine beamed brightly on our beach idylls for many years to come.

Family summers at the beach continued until I was in high school. Soon after a houseparty on my 15th birthday, my mother’s doctor said her skin was ripe for cancer if she continued to bake in the sun, something we were all too eager to do. She reasoned that if the sun was ruled out, so was our reason for coming to the beach. The next summer, the house was sold.

Still, I never stopped coming to the beach. John and I decided to get married in the moonlight over the breaking waves. Every summer, we rented apartments or cottages and carted our children to the beach, even before they could walk. They chased the sandpipers and squealed at the whitecaps, and, later in high school, they stayed out late, no doubt, also watching the stars dip into the sea.

We now make the yearly trek without parents or children. We stay at a hotel and request an oceanfront view. I still anticipate that moment of reunion, that baptism of the steadfast sky and sea.

This year, we stayed in a cottage two blocks North of my family’s old house. Every day, I walked South on the beach, tempted to stop on our street. The last afternoon, I tiptoed past workmen building a walkway onto the beach.

At our house, facing the busy avenue, the legustrum hedge was now too high to see in, the blackberry field covered in cement. The Baldwins’ had been upscaled with wrought iron pillars; the Jeters’ was crowded with cars and toddler trucks.

A black man was cutting the bushes at the house one back from the beach. “Do the Worthingtons live here?” I asked. He pointed. “No. Next door. Ring the bell.”

I hesitated and circled the driveway. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s ok.”

Following his urging, I rang the bell. A man I didn’t recognize opened the door, someone athletic and strong, with a ruddy face deeply lined from summers in the sun. He wore kakhi shorts and a pale green safari shirt. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “Are you Ben Worthington?” I wondered if I clearly remembered Ben the father and Ben the son, two men whose military bearings remained formidable in my memory.

“Yes, I’m Ben Worthington,” he said politely.

“My family used to live in the house on the corner,” I said. “I’m Elizabeth Howard. I was Betty Meade.”

He extended his hand, a smile slowly forming. “Ev Meade’s daughter?” I nodded.

“A great guy. Funny man. Great guy. Please come in; have a seat.”

“No thanks. I just had a peek at our old house and wanted see if anybody I knew still lived on the street. I remember your sister, Sugar. And Lucy. She was so nice to me.”

He stared over his wire glasses, looking perhaps for a girl of 13 or 14 whom he might have known as a young man in his 20s. “Funny, that you should stop by today,” he said. “I was just working on Lucy’s estate for her children and grandchildren. She died last year. She was 85. She worked for my mother for 52 years.” I was glad the garage was closed where Lucy once strung the laundry.

With our backs to the beach, we stood on the steps, Ben suddenly eager to tell me about his family: his older sister now lived next door; Sugar and her boys owned a place on Maryland's Bay; his parents had died and left him the land where his house now stood surrounded by clusters of rhodendrons, hostas, azaleas and camellias.

Ben said he'd attended Virginia Military Institute, and had seen my father one summer in a business program at the University of Virginia. He said he remembered him well and was sorry he’d died. He was retired, and two years ago, had had a stroke. He said he couldn’t drive anymore and sometimes got things mixed up.

Ben said he still loved the beach; it was too bad my parents sold their house. “Won’t you please come in?”

“Thanks but my husband’s waiting on the beach. He’ll wonder where where I am. Maybe another time.”

Ben showed me to the beach path now umbrelled with bent holly trees. “Remember how high the dunes used to be here? They got pretty well flattened in ‘62.”

I started up the path, remembering the dunes and my parents sheltering there in partial shade before walking the rest of the way home.

“Please come back,” Ben called.

“I will. Thanks so much.” I waved, grateful to this stranger watching me leave, still uncertain who I was and why I’d come but willing to believe and bear witness that I had been there too in a place and time that we’d surely never forget.

copyright 2009