Thirty years ago this month- I remember it because it was the same sort of weather- dark and cold days filled with cold rain- thirty years ago this month I went on a long term job in Jawdja, and spent the month of October and most of November there. The engineer for my customer was a woman named Susan who was the same age then that I am now. She had been recently widowed and while she didn’t mention it the first week one of her co-workers let me know so I didn’t say anything untoward.
I did- finally- remark, along the second week or so- that she was doing quite well despite her loss, and she smiled genuinely and thanked me. We more or less at lunch every day together (The customer had a great cafeteria, ample women dressed like nurses carrying fresh veggies and beakers of sweet tea to the tables) but one night she invited me to dinner. We ate at a local steakhouse with peanut hulls on the floor and she chainsmoked and talked of her dreams and ambitions. She was an impressive engineer and I learned a good deal from her both personally and professionally.
By the end of the third week I had moved out of the hotel room and we spent a good deal of time together. I will never know if I was just being a substitute for her lost husband, or a rebound fling, or what. Before I left for good, we went to a fairly fancy place for a fairly expensive dinner which she not only bought but dressed me in an Armani suit to eat it. I ate almost nothing for fear of wearing it on a suit that cost more than my first car.
I still had the suit up to a couple years ago. It was wool, and double breasted, very tailored. I do still have the red silk tie.
She stayed in touch, off and on. I had a lot of respect for her then and still do now. I do always wonder what her high toned friends thought of her, a classic southern lady arm in arm with a tarted up white trash kid from up nawth, but in retrospect, a powerful lot of her friends had young friends of their own. Many uncouth and downright rude. I must have fit in well, because I have never addressed a woman except as “Yes Ma’am” since I was ten. In any event nobody was ever anything but unfailingly polite to me.
I think of those times and those relationships and those past autumns at this time of year, and it is not hard to be maudlin, and losing Max and having a kid away at school does not help that at all. Jenny reminds me that I have to take consolation in having given max the best life I could give him, in having given Susan a couple months of respite from her grief. Maybe it’s worse for me now because I am only two years away from the age Dad was when he died, and I can hear the reaper sharpening his scythe. All I know is I hope I shake this soon.
