Arrangements

I have been helped these last few hours.  Mary Beth gathered the pertinent info for an obit.  The mortician has come and gone.  People are calling but I'm in all likelihood going to let it go to voice mail.  

I'm planning an open house where I'll do the equivalent of sitting Shiva.  My intent is to talk to anybody who stops by.  It'll be on January 28 and don't come before 10 and by 6 I should be totally drained.  I hate to post directions on the internet, so if you need them, email me at debs@guitarcarver.com - I made a separate mailbox so I could respond more easily.  

I don't expect everybody to drop it all and run up here.  I'll be happy to host you later or even to meet you half way or if it's Jersey, I could be talked into visiting the old neighborhoods.  I'll probably need excuses to get away on day trips.  

Anybody who needs lodging, I can find a bed.  We've got plenty.

This is a whirlwind for me so forgive me in advance for leaving anybody out.  Tell anybody who'd be interested.  

She's gone

Peacefully.   The reality of it is so much worse than the theoretical it's been. 

Deb's a good sport and I can prove it

In preparing for our wedding (in 1985) I had but one thing to do.  Reserve a hotel the night of the wedding so leave for the honey moon from in the morning.

I had an fool proof plan.  We'd get dropped at the hotel across from La Guardia air port, in the morning I'd go across the street and rent a car and off we'd go to the Modanock Mountains in New Hampshire.

A week before I walked in to the Pan American Hotel and asked to make a reservation.  The lobby had marble tiles, a water fountain and it was decorated kind of Mediterranean.   I asked for a room and he said, "Are you sure?"  and I said "Well, yes..."  he made the reservation and I let him run my credit card.

The whole day whizzed by me so fast I was amazed.  I met people I'd never seen before and had to make associations from the neighborhood, from the music industry (her father's work) from the majong players and family and so on.  The wedding was a blur.  Which came into focus at the hotel afterwards.  And for those leering, get your mind out of the gutter.

My friends drove us and helped with the bags.  No bell hops at this hour and as you'll soon see, at all.

We got our key and opened the door to the hall and stopped dead.  Every door on the 1000 foot hallway had a pad lock on it.  I had checked us into a welfare hotel.  It's where the city put up people who had nowhere to go and a situation requiring some aide.

Deb was mortified, to say the least.  My friends didn't know what to say.  It was very, very awkward.

And we had an envelope full of cash and checks.

In New York, if I might generalize, cash is a very normal gift.  Deb used to say we had to "cover our plate" when we went to a wedding.  We were spending the night in a hotel who's occupants felt it necessary to padlock their doors when they left.

We spent the night and did fine.  What can you do about it at 1am, dead dog tired and about to loose your transportation and our own apartment was full of travelers?  We lent our car to my parents.  Our friends were going to Manhattan to visit the city that never sleeps.  Or maybe that was her cousins.  Like a said, it was mostly a blur for me.

How many women do you know who spent their wedding night in a welfare hotel and wasn't permanently mad at her husband?  Or at least found opportunities to give him the business?  Well, this was another episode that took her a while to fully own.  Although she probably told it more like David Letterman's stupid human tricks episodes.

I've got to say, good sport doesn't do her justice.

Still Resting

She's a junkie now.  So much morphine, hourly now, that about all I can say is she's resting comfortably.  She was lucid and happy that Ryan had visited.

Ryan was not so happy.  It was hard for him.  Fortunately he has Jenny who is looking out for him and giving him A-1 care.  Go Jenny!

As a sidenote, you all don't need to post stories as comments.  There's a post button up top that gives you a spot to write in.

Who asked?

Deb and I got engaged around Christmas time in 1984.  Nobody told me I needed to have a conversation with her father, a rather intimidating man.  Still wet behind the ears, me, not him.

But to get there, we needed to actually GET engaged.

We were having fun living the good life.  We owned a co-op in Forest Hills, we had good jobs, we went to the beach on Saturdays in the summer and had (all day) Sunday dinner with her parents and brother, week after week after week after week.  Camping after Labor Day and a trip to the Bahamas in February.   We even snuck in a trip to Europe unbeknownst to all our coworkers.

I was, believe me, trying to get up the nerve to propose.  One day, she says, "What are we doing here?  Want to get married or no?"  I said sure.  It was probably not that cut and dried, but it was similarly direct.

Sometime later we were at dinner with her neighborhood friends and one asked me how I proposed. I said she asked me and I said yes.

Oh boy, I got such a dirty look from Deb.  It took her a good 10 years before she was able to tell that story and really own it.  I'm glad she asked me.  We could still be in Forest Hills waiting for me to pop the question.

Resting some more

Resting, taking morphine and coming to once or twice.  Ryan is here and when he was out of the room, she got lucid and learned he was here and was very pleased.  Before long, she had dozed off.

I did spoon her last night for a while, but oh my, she has a boney ass now.  She always had a prodigious backside.  When she had it, she wished she didn't.  

How I wooed Deb

Forgive me if you know these stories.  Further forgive me if I wrote on the same subject while in India.  That feels like a lifetime ago.  Some of the stories below we would tell in tag team format, so the content has been honed in the retelling.  Honed true?  I hope so.

I interviewed at Bankers Trust on March 17, 1981.  At my first sight of Deb I pegged her as a 40 something gray haired very good looking woman (who in fact was 23).  When I first spoke to her it was about who would hang my coat in the closet.  She wanted to take it and I wanted to do it myself.  It didn't go well for me with this pushy NY woman, assertive but not unkind.  Our first conversation was an argument over who would take my coat.

In 1981 I'd just gotten off the hay wagon having lived in Minnesota all my life.  New York had the draw of living anonymously, something I'd not yet experienced.  In fact when walking around as a newly minted New Yorker, I was amazed that there were any number of human restaurants.   I didn't get it but looked for evidence of dog or cat restaurants and found none.  The punch line here is when I finally read the signs as written, the word was Hunan.  I had to look it up (pre-internet) to find that Hunan is a Chinese province so it was likely they were serving humans a type of regional Chinese food.  24 years old and wet behind the ears, dripping wet.  Smart as a whip, worldly as a box of hammers.

Contrast this with my Deb.  Since she was 14 she knew how to bribe ushers at Madison Garden to see the top names in Rock music.  The subway was at her disposal and she had a circle of friends as wide as can be.  She even used to sneak into bars.

I craved quiet places on the side, being an observer.  Deb craved the middle of the room and thrived in being part of the action.

The first time she visited my apartment in Midtown, it was an unexpected surprise.  She never thought my roommate (Paul) and his future wife (Eileen) and I lived in a pig sty.  We did.  Sorry Paul and Eileen for speaking the truth.  Eileen was studying for the bar.  Paul was working as (towards?) a CPA and his mantra was billable hours.  And he was studying for the CPA test.  I wasn't going to be their maid and they weren't going to be mine, so we simply let it go. We were doing he best we could.

Deb looked at the place, aghast, rolled up her sleeves and started doing the dishes that had built up in the sink.  I was mortified and started helping but eventually wisked her away to our planned event of the evening - Midnight Bowling in Da Bronx.

The backstory for bowling is: she started a departmental bowling team in the Bankers Trust league.  I believe I was her target, but we had a half dozen other BT people in our department bowling team.  Oblivious me finally agreed under her pressure to join.  Monday nights we all met in the village and competed.  Me, not so well.  Deb, she had the moves and consistently did well.

Now this part of the story may or not be true.  I'm not calling her a liar, but she claimed someone pinched her butt on 14th street on the way to the subway after bowling.  Would I please walk her to the station?  Sure I would.  If she could at this moment, she'd still stick to that story.

To get home she needed the F train, I had the choice of N or F.  I took whichever came first.  I was trying to get home in time for the latest episode of Mash, the long running TV show in it's last season.   From either subway exit, I had to hoof it to make that 9pm start.

Her calculus of the situation was different.  If I liked her, I'd wait with her for the F train and continue to sit and talk.

Back to Midnight Bowling - She asked me to midnight bowling with her girlfriend Viv and her boyfriend who lived in da Bronx, In the cab on the way back to Manhattan, she put her head on my shoulder and then the light went off in my head.  She likes me.  Retrospectively, I realized there were certain clues I should have just plane read.  Oh, my.  How dense can a guy be.

Density?  I'm a dyed in the wool NPR listener.  NPR is public news oriented radio and is like the BBC world service in a way.  They broadcast news at 5pm until 6:30 and then cover Wall street for a next half hour show.  Listening to the radio news, making dinner was my daily routine.   Hey, I had nobody to go home to, so this is a good rut to be in.

She asked me one afternoon at work if I wanted to join her and her work girlfriends for a trip to Chinatown for dinner.  I said, and I quote, "No, I want to go home and listen to the radio."  Not reading her incredulous look correctly, I sputtered, "I do this every day and have been doing it for years."   Like that explained everything.

She thought, "If he liked me he'd go, but listening to the radio?  What kind of BS excuse was that?  Surely he could have made a better excuse even if he didn't like me."  I know this now.  We actually told this story in tandem, presenting both sides of the story as we go.   I loved to tell stories with her.  We learned when I was giving it over to her or getting it back.  Oh, we could tell a nice tale.

Bowling night was a success.  We had fun and it was definitely a date.  Roll ahead a week.  How about I cook dinner?  Sure, she says thinking at your house, really?  Eeew.  She arrived to a fresh, clean apartment.  I believe we sat on pillows on the (very clean) floor and cooked fondue in oil.  A very nice way to pass the evening.  Our first 1 on 1 date.