My sweetie Joe and I went to the Norman Stamp Club Christmas party last night and it was okay. For the first time, though, I really missed Missoula where I lived for the last couple of years. I first met Joe there, and we have been constant companions ever since. At the age of 60 I had pretty much given up on a romance, but then this handsome Italian, aged 70, swept me off my feet and the rest is history. Joe is a stamp collector and, because I love him, I go to stamp meetings with him.
Last year, we attended the Garden City Stamp Club annual Christmas party. As I recall, I had had a rough couple of weeks—the office move, performance reviews (“you know Megan your expertise is really a detriment.”), the $100 NFS telephone-delivered parking ticket for “blocking” the horse trailer gate in the Rattlesnake Wilderness (I was foolish enough to think that the three feet of snow and locked gate meant the horse entry was closed and I so much wanted to capture the day for my 60th year Christmas card), plus at work the never ending Fort Peck oil and gas report (how many times and in exactly how many ways can Indians get screwed?). On the day of the party I wanted nothing more that to pull the covers over my head and I wasn’t overly interested in going to the Stamp Club Party—At 70, Joe was the youngest member and the party had been, well, overly quiet as parties go. The year before last year’s party was livened up a bit by the also pretty elderly Terrie and Dean who both played guitar and sang some Christmas carols. Dean, of course eventually broke into the hilarious “I Just Don’t Look Good Naked Anymore.”
I really liked Terrie and Dean quite a bit and later got to know Terrie a little better. They lived over in Pinehurst Idaho. The two met because both of them sang in area nursing homes. Terrie couldn’t play the guitar and asked Dean to teach her. In his youth Dean was a professional, and he was really pretty good. And so he taught Terrie enough so that she could accompany herself on her goodwill missions singing for the elderly. Well Terrie and Dean fell in love and got married and began to perform together. If you can imagine Malvina Reynolds in a duet, you know what Terrie and Dean sound like—full of heart but maybe wavering a little on the high notes.
The point here is that Terrie and Dean weren’t going to be at last year’s party. Two passes separate Missoula from Pinehurst, Idaho—the same passes that forced Lewis and Clark to eat their horses—and with recent snow and that Montana weather condition called “freezing fog,” odds were long against the two making the trip. So it was only with great affection for Joe that I agreed to spend the evening at the Stamp Club Christmas Party.
The Garden City Stamp Club met in the First Lutheran Church, in the basement, but when I arrived, signs directed me instead to the second floor (Joe arrived early to help set out the spread of Albertsons hor d’oeuves). Apparently the children’s fellowship party conflicted that week with the Stamp Club and the youngsters had taken over our space. Just fortunately, the minister was there to mediate and he escorted the stamp representatives up to the fellowship room. The problem with the fellowship room, and the reason why the kids couldn’t use it, was because the new pipes were being stored there. They had just arrived, pipes intended for the organ, delicate silver pipes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The pipes were maybe twenty feet long and a foot in diameter. To me they looked potentially like they might be the long sought Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) but for Joe they prompted flashbacks to days up on the Montana highline watching over our “nucular” arsenal.
After taking in the dramatic digs on the second floor, I immediately found to my desperate delight that Terrie and Dean had made the trip and that their two guitars stood ready. First though we had the lottery—it was Montana—Terrie had brought a number of crafts produced by the nursing home crowd and Joe, with number 200376 (I had 375-so close!) actually won a rubberized hanging angelfish skillfully constructed around two CDs that formed the silvery fish body. At last the two singers broke out the mimeographed sheets with the words to all the great Christmas songs—Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem and so on. Feeble but heartfelt voices joined in, no concerns here about singing on key—just add some strength. Terrie and Dean had also brought Rich Angel (really). For some reason Rich Angel knew “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Japanese. He sang that and then sang a direct translation and that was pretty cute. I wished hard that my grandbaby Naomi could hear it but like most of life, the song was gone before it began and so was Rich Angel. Then, just when I thought I might cry, Dean broke into his rendition of “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly” and I thought I was safely beyond the tears. But I was wrong.
There stood old Terrie and Dean, and they wanted to finish by singing a song they had just learned—a love song. They tuned and hummed and then Dean began to sing the first verse to my favorite—Emmylou and Guy Clark, “I don’t love you much do I…just more than all the stars in the sky” and Terrie joined in “. . . see how it sparkles in my eyes. . . I couldn’t hide it if I tried…” Well it was a moment in time and I looked at Terrie and Dean and marveled at the power of love. Then I saw the stamp group—elderly disheveled men without wives mostly, but with the passion for their stamps getting them here for all these years and just lighting up their eyes and all the good companionship they sought here, all the longevity, and all standing under those now really beautiful giant silver tubes, purchased by the quiet, humorless Lutherans just to make music and then Terrie and Dean looking so intently at each other and trying so hard to get the ending to the song timed just right “. . . just more than anything else in this whole world.” And they surely did get it right, well pretty close anyway, close enough. It was a Christmas miracle to me—the moment when the meaning of everything, if there is such a thing, and surely there is, seems right there, tangible, and Christmas warms you to your toes. Which we also needed. Because, like Joe, Lutherans never turn up the heat.
I really liked Terrie and Dean quite a bit and later got to know Terrie a little better. They lived over in Pinehurst Idaho. The two met because both of them sang in area nursing homes. Terrie couldn’t play the guitar and asked Dean to teach her. In his youth Dean was a professional, and he was really pretty good. And so he taught Terrie enough so that she could accompany herself on her goodwill missions singing for the elderly. Well Terrie and Dean fell in love and got married and began to perform together. If you can imagine Malvina Reynolds in a duet, you know what Terrie and Dean sound like—full of heart but maybe wavering a little on the high notes.
The point here is that Terrie and Dean weren’t going to be at last year’s party. Two passes separate Missoula from Pinehurst, Idaho—the same passes that forced Lewis and Clark to eat their horses—and with recent snow and that Montana weather condition called “freezing fog,” odds were long against the two making the trip. So it was only with great affection for Joe that I agreed to spend the evening at the Stamp Club Christmas Party.
The Garden City Stamp Club met in the First Lutheran Church, in the basement, but when I arrived, signs directed me instead to the second floor (Joe arrived early to help set out the spread of Albertsons hor d’oeuves). Apparently the children’s fellowship party conflicted that week with the Stamp Club and the youngsters had taken over our space. Just fortunately, the minister was there to mediate and he escorted the stamp representatives up to the fellowship room. The problem with the fellowship room, and the reason why the kids couldn’t use it, was because the new pipes were being stored there. They had just arrived, pipes intended for the organ, delicate silver pipes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The pipes were maybe twenty feet long and a foot in diameter. To me they looked potentially like they might be the long sought Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) but for Joe they prompted flashbacks to days up on the Montana highline watching over our “nucular” arsenal.
After taking in the dramatic digs on the second floor, I immediately found to my desperate delight that Terrie and Dean had made the trip and that their two guitars stood ready. First though we had the lottery—it was Montana—Terrie had brought a number of crafts produced by the nursing home crowd and Joe, with number 200376 (I had 375-so close!) actually won a rubberized hanging angelfish skillfully constructed around two CDs that formed the silvery fish body. At last the two singers broke out the mimeographed sheets with the words to all the great Christmas songs—Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem and so on. Feeble but heartfelt voices joined in, no concerns here about singing on key—just add some strength. Terrie and Dean had also brought Rich Angel (really). For some reason Rich Angel knew “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Japanese. He sang that and then sang a direct translation and that was pretty cute. I wished hard that my grandbaby Naomi could hear it but like most of life, the song was gone before it began and so was Rich Angel. Then, just when I thought I might cry, Dean broke into his rendition of “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly” and I thought I was safely beyond the tears. But I was wrong.
There stood old Terrie and Dean, and they wanted to finish by singing a song they had just learned—a love song. They tuned and hummed and then Dean began to sing the first verse to my favorite—Emmylou and Guy Clark, “I don’t love you much do I…just more than all the stars in the sky” and Terrie joined in “. . . see how it sparkles in my eyes. . . I couldn’t hide it if I tried…” Well it was a moment in time and I looked at Terrie and Dean and marveled at the power of love. Then I saw the stamp group—elderly disheveled men without wives mostly, but with the passion for their stamps getting them here for all these years and just lighting up their eyes and all the good companionship they sought here, all the longevity, and all standing under those now really beautiful giant silver tubes, purchased by the quiet, humorless Lutherans just to make music and then Terrie and Dean looking so intently at each other and trying so hard to get the ending to the song timed just right “. . . just more than anything else in this whole world.” And they surely did get it right, well pretty close anyway, close enough. It was a Christmas miracle to me—the moment when the meaning of everything, if there is such a thing, and surely there is, seems right there, tangible, and Christmas warms you to your toes. Which we also needed. Because, like Joe, Lutherans never turn up the heat.
Love is the best--for someone special, for stamps, for music. Never give up.
1 comment:
What a beautiful telling of a tender and precious story! I can picture the whole thing.
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