LOVE AND DEATH: CHRISTMAS 1964.

"Toots" Vestal lay in state in my Funeral Home on that cold foggy Indiana Christmas day.  A fine cold mist in the air.  Not a single person called, perhaps due to the weather and the holiday. Toots and his wife, Dorothea, while not loners did not have a wide circle of friends.  

Toots, a veteran of The Great War, had met Dorothea while they were employed by the same hotel in Capitol City.  They had married late in life.  They were not a handsome couple if I remember but they were devoted to each other.

 Dorothea spent that entire day sitting in a folding chair in front of her husband's casket, refusing an offer of water or conversation, a manifestation of that love and devotion.  I have seen all sorts of grief by too many widows.  Dorothea's was the most sincere.

And I could not possibly have foreseen that 50 years later to the day, I would be sitting alone in front of a computer in Denver writing  about a love I observed long ago.

THE GIRL ON THE MALL SHUTTLE

Denver.  August 8^th.  4:00 p.m.  The hottest summer since records have been kept.  I am on the mall shuttle on my way to the library and then to an AA meeting.  I noticed her

standing across from me.  Shortish.  Just short of beautiful.  What a lovely face----and then, cleavage.  Not enough to be as obscenely in your face as so many women do now, as though I would miss the point.  This was displayed just tastefully right.  Firm and a light creamy brown.  Pert.  The more I gazed the more my desire.  Look gave way to an unabashed stare on my part.  My lips parted and the tip of my tongue involuntarily played out and gently…..And then she smiled at me.  It was a gentle, friendly smile off invitation.  Or was it?  She exited the bus and glanced over her shoulder at me as she entered a McDonalds.

And then---my concept of reality, or fear….of rejection, or what took control.  I am no longer a young man.  Was it that female cop who specialized in entrapment back again having polished her act.  This woman was young enough to be my daughter if not my grand daughter.  Still I could make contact perhaps sound he out.  I faintly heard a voiceover of  

Eartha Kitt singing September Song.  And it is a long, long way from May to December.  Perhaps I had read the signals wrong and I would be rejected and embarrassed.  But then I did have to go to the library and I did want to catch the meeting.

So the risk taker of old regretfully turned away from another ‘face in the train window’ and plodded. stoop shouldered to the library thinking of the old saying,  “Nothing  ventured, nothing gained”.

MILKMAN - INDIANA - ca 1940