And Then There's This...

"Our Blue Christmas"

If I survive the 2024 edition, I will have lived through 89 Christmases. Of these, only one stands out in my memory. It was not a happy one. Here's why: In July 1959, I finished writing the thesis for my master's degree in journalism at Ohio University. The next step was to turn the rough draft over to a typist to create the finished copy. It had to be typographically perfect, no blemishes or errors. These, by the way, were the days of manual typewriters and carbon paper copies. No word processing, no photocopies. To do this exacting work, I called on my friend Norma, the kind-hearted and supremely competent administrative assistant in the journalism department.

Although neither of us had even so much as flirted with each other before she undertook the job, the closeness of working together night after night soon led us to falling in love, which in turn led to us to doing what young lovers tend to do. For a 23-year-old guy who'd never had a single date during all his college years, this new recreation was absolutely enchanting. There was just one snag — Norma, who was only 20, had been married for the last two years to her high school sweetheart. That loomed as a problem.

After my graduation in August, I moved back to my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia and took a job as reporter for “The Charleston Daily Mail.” Norma remained in Athens, and we maintained contact by mail. Then her husband found a letter she'd written to me. That ended the marriage, and as soon as they separated, she came to join me and find us an apartment.

Having grown up in a family with no car, I had never learned to drive. Farmer's daughter Norma, however, began driving a tractor when she was 11 and was thus a whiz at the wheel. So using my job as security, I got a $1,500 loan and bought us a 1955 black four-door Jaguar sedan with a red-leather interior and walnut dashboard. It was a treat to look at but a toothache to drive, constantly breaking down at the worst times. (The sale price should have tipped me off.) Nonetheless, we were now set up for mobile days and nights of connubial Olympics.

Alas, our bliss was short-lived. As long as I had been a full-time college student, I was exempt from military service. But now as just another job holder, I was vulnerable. In October — barely two months into my work as a reporter — the Selective Service System summoned me to take a physical exam, which if I passed would hurl me into the Army for at least two years. (Military service would not be made voluntary until 1973). To my horror, I did pass the physical.

In desperation, I looked for a way out and discovered that teachers were also exempt from service. I called a fraternity brother who told me there was an opening at his high school for a history and English teacher. With dizzying speed, I applied for and got the job. Unfortunately, it was in the bleak coal-mining town of Logan, West Virginia, a three-hour bus trip distant from Charleston, where Norma had found work as a secretary at an oil company. She needed to keep her job to pay for our apartment. I needed mine to keep my civilian status. The dismal upshot was that we could be together only on weekends.

The one bright spot as we parted was that I wasn't that far away from my Christmas vacation — 10 glorious days and nights of unalloyed hedonism. All ecstasy all the time. Or so I thought. Norma was less single-minded. She wanted to spend Christmas with her family. They knew and liked the husband she had abandoned and wasn't at all sure she had improved her life by taking up with a gaunt and penniless hillbilly. Coming home would enable her to mend fences with her folks and perhaps even persuade them that I wasn't entirely a lost cause. That was fine with me since we'd still be together. But as we Jaguared our way from Charleston to her home in Apple Grove, Ohio to commence the holidays, she told me as gently as possible that since we weren't married we'd be sleeping in separate bedrooms to honor her parents' sense of decorum. I did not receive this news with delight, but I figured I could forego our frolicking a couple of nights for the sake of domestic harmony.

Christmas eve and Christmas morning came and went, as did Christmas dinner and the day and night following Christmas. I kept urging her to leave, and she kept telling me we needed to stay. Besides, she honestly relished spending time with her family. But the longer we stayed, the more I sulked and in doing so chipped away at her joy. This was the first time in our idyllic, us-against-the-world relationship that each of us found fault with the other. When we finally drove back to Charleston we knew we'd reached the end of something irreplaceable.

Bruised though we were, we were still in love. Her divorce came through in January, and on Feb. 6 we entered a marriage that would endure for the next 61 years. We both wanted children, and after creating one of those magical creatures on our own we adopted three more. I remained in teaching but at the college level for 10 more years before cultivating a 40-year career in entertainment reporting. Always the self-improver, Norma was by turn a professional photographer, an editor and writer of college textbooks and finally a nationally renowned music publicist.

Until she was shattered by Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, Norma still doted on Christmas, especially in setting up the tree and hauling out boxes and boxes of decorations to hang on the pine limbs with jeweler's precision. Sometimes that first Christmas would come to mind and we would uneasily finger our scars. By her last Christmas, we had no tree, but our kids installed a string of multicolored lights above our living room windows, hoping they might spark in her faraway world flashes of brighter times. And maybe they did. Who knows? Whatever the case, they still hang there, glowing as radiantly as when she first saw them. I haven't the heart to take them down.

(Please send your comments or questions to stormcoast@mindspring.com with “And Then There's This” in the subject line. And thanks for reading.)