Consecration

When Allen was diagnosed with myocardial ischemia, Nora’s husband had already died from it nine months earlier, seven hundred miles away in Jacksonville, Florida.  Allen never met him and only learned of his death when Nora called Allen after nearly fifty years of silence. The day he got the call, he was in the hospital scheduled for bypass surgery. His room was dark except for the little energy that dusk pushed in through the half-open curtains. The dim light filtered the fright from his face.

Nora’s husband died on her birthday. He thought it was the best gift he could give her after having burdened his wife for years. He had put her through four ambulance rides, six hospital stays, endless bouts of chest pain barely abated by nitroglycerine tablets and countless alarming episodes of heavy, sweaty breathing. The last four months, he was barely able to walk from one room to the other without pausing to lean against a wall or steady himself by holding onto a table or chair.

He might have considered his departure a gift to Nora but she saw it as the end of all future birthday celebrations for her. Instead of reaching over to not find him at night, she decided to sleep in his empty spot in their bed. She told herself that at least through the night, she could become him and thereby make it impossible for her to miss him.

“How did you find me?” Allen asked Nora but the question he really wanted to ask was, “How did you know?”

“It’s not the seventies anymore. How hard is it to find an old friend these days?  I called your home and spoke with your wife. She seems very nice. She wouldn’t tell me what you’re doing in the hospital. It’s none of my business but I asked. She only gave me the number of the hospital and the room number.”  Nora wondered why his wife was not by his bedside.

“I’m having a little trouble with my heart,” he said.

“Aren’t we all,” she replied. Allen was convinced that she somehow knew and did not need to ask. He wanted to believe that she had felt it. He told himself that the cosmic connection between them was real and despite the time and distance between them, she had sensed that he needed her at that moment.

Nora and Allen had met in the fall of 1971 on Neptune Beach after a major hurricane. Most of the homes in Jacksonville were without power. They were both restless in the aftermath of the storm and were each using a beach walk to restore some sense of normalcy. The surge had brought in starfish which were very rare. Allen was carrying a big one in his hand which became their conversation starter.

“Bathe it in bleach to harden it and remove the smell,” she shouted to him as he walked past. She was waist high in the ocean and was not aware that a wave had pulled her bathing suit to one side revealing one of her perky nipples. They walked side-by-side for at least a mile without her ever realizing that part of her was exposed.  Allen tried not to look and thought it best not to mention it to her.

They came upon a flock of at least fifty sandpipers perched on the sand staring out to sea. She turned around and said,

“Come on. Let’s go this way.” Allen smiled and asked,

“Are you afraid of them?” She laughed.

“No. They were here first. If we walk past them, they’ll all fly away. It’s not fair. We’ll scare them.”

“We don’t want to scare them. We just want to walk past them. Didn’t you say you live the other way?”

“We’ll come back. By then, they’ll be gone.” He took a glance and discovered that at some point she must have tucked her breast back into her bathing suit.

The next night, they agreed to meet on the pier for grouper sandwiches. He had learned during their beach walk the day before that she liked barbecue potato chips so he brought her a bag. That and a single yellow Calla Lilly. At the end of the evening when they were saying good night, they hugged and she slipped a five dollar bill into his shirt pocket without him knowing it. She did that after having asked three times that night if she could help pay for the evening and each time, he refused. That exact five dollar bill went back and forth between them over the following decades.

Sometimes one of them would include a note reminding the other of a memory like the time her roommate had walked in on them in the midst of an amorous encounter.  Another time the note declared a craving for a lobster roll at Captain Mac’s and another time, a note mentioned the James Taylor song You’ve Got aFriend which was released the year they met.  One time the bill was accompanied by a five inch by three inch index card bearing a hand-sketched image of a sand piper. A few times, the five dollar bill was inserted in a birthday card or Christmas card without any written reference.  When it was not being handled by the U.S. postal service, that five dollar bill was securely in the custody of its only two care-givers, stuffed away in some hidden place for its protection.

Years would go by without any contact between them. During that time, the five dollar bill would sit in a dark dresser drawer or in a shoe box on a shelf in the garage until either Nora or Allen would get it out and mail it to the other. They each had their lives with work, kids and spouses. Neither had the courage to learn about the other.  Not once had they ever spoken by phone. But neither of them had the courage to let the memory of their seven months together die.

When they met that day on the beach, it had been just six weeks since Allen had returned from his tour in Vietnam and was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army.  Before spending ten months and eighteen days trying to stay alive in combat, he had first survived the early stage of that draft lottery in December of1969 but was not so lucky when they were drawing the final numbers. Student deferment did not hold much weight in those days so while most of his friends were starting college after graduating high school in 1968, he was drifting, scared to start college for fear that he might then have to leave before he could finish. By the time he was discharged, his friends were starting their final year of college. He was drifting again after he came home in 1971 just as he had done for that year and a half before being drafted but he believed that upon his return, he had to uphold an obligation to his parents.

What he worried about most during his days in the marshes of Southeast Asia was the agony he knew his parents were feeling while waiting for their son to survive. So  when he finally made it home, he spent as much time as he could with them at their new house in Fernandina Beach, Florida where they had retired. Allen still considered Northern Virginia to be his home since that was where he had lived his entire life and he ended up back there once he felt that he had given his mom and dad a big enough dose of him. When he was convinced that they had replaced their image of him among the mangroves, teak and bamboo in Vietnam with a vision of him smiling, sipping beers at Roscoe’s on the pier, he could then leave them and go back to Falls Church.

It was during that transition time that he fell in love with Nora. She was the first woman to give him the chance to learn secrets about women that he wished his father had taught him.  Nora did not teach. She simply created opportunities for him to gain knowledge and that gave his subsequent marriage a better chance of surviving.

Nora and Allen were walking down Las Palmas Ave one day when he suggested they stop at Kilwin’s for ice cream. She insisted that she didn’t want anything but he ordered a chocolate marshmallow milk shake for himself. He asked repeatedly if she wanted anything and she refused again and again. After offering her a sip as they stepped into the street, they continued to pass the sixteen ounce cup back and forth, each partaking equally over the next five blocks until it was empty.

It took Allen a while to understand that it was not a question of whether or not she was in the mood for ice cream that day. She wanted only one thing which was to share.  She wanted him to enjoy giving her what was his and for the two of them to savor it together.

After three months of seeing each other every day, he was getting eager to move his life forward and so he took a job driving a forklift at a warehouse in Arlington. He worked longer shifts four days a week so that he could take three-day weekends and make the seven hundred mile drive to see her. That distance might have been one of the reasons things ended between them but it was more than just the ten-hour drive.  During the rest of his life, whenever he would think of her, the same thought echoed in his head:  When the potential goes away, so do I. 

He kind of blamed one of Nora’s male roommates for their demise. That guy had always sent Allen subtle jealousy messages which made Allen question what might have been going on between those two. But if he had to point to a specific reason for why he stopped making the long drive to see her, it was because of that one weekend when she ordered him not to come. She told him that she had just gotten word that her mother had received a positive diagnosis for cancer and she had to visit her in Tampa.

Allen had nothing but sympathy for her until he was talking with Nora’s brother who told him that their mother’s diagnosis had been negative. Never in his life, before then or after, had Allen ever been saddened to learn of a person’s negative cancer diagnosis.  Allen never confronted Nora for an explanation. He gave her time to reverse her story and reveal the negative diagnosis but she never did. That was when he created the mantra that he carried with him from that day forward:  When the potential goes away, so do I.

But he never stopped believing that the two of them had enjoyed a special, unexplainable connection for all the years that followed. It was a closeness that extended way beyond the ritual of exchanging that five dollar bill.

“It was a myocardial infarction,” is what Nora told Allen when she informed him during their phone conversation that she had recently lost her husband. She hoped the cause of death might go over his head but he knew the term and it scared him.   “You’re going to be ok,” she said but she did not know that. Sitting in the hospital room in Alexandria, Virginia he was telling himself that he might be on the last leg of his journey on planet Earth. It was not the first time in his life that Allen had felt that way.  He was ready to die when he boarded the C-130 in Okinawa in 1970, destined for an undeclared location in Vietnam.

“What prompted you to call me,” he asked. He was certain she would tell him that she had an overwhelming urge that she could not explain. He wanted her to tell him that she had felt some kind of metaphysical impulse that something was not right with him. He wanted her to confirm their cosmic connection.

“Do you know what today is?” She asked.

“What do you mean?” he replied.

“What’s the date?” He knew right away since it was the date he had been admitted for surgery.

“The 23rd”

“What month?”

“Do you really think I’m that feeble-minded?”

“What’s the month?”

“May”

“What’s the year?”

“C’mon.  Really?

“Well?”

“It’s 2022”

“We made a pact.”  At that moment he remembered. It had only temporarily slipped his mind. He thought about that pact often over the years. Sometimes on New Year’s Day he would acknowledge to himself that they were one year closer. They were at his parent’s house in May of 1972 and he was getting ready to get in his car and drive back north. “Do you remember what I asked you?” Allen did not say anything. “I asked you if I’ll see you again. Do you know what you said?”  Allen stayed silent. “You said, ‘of course.’ I wasn’t sure I could believe you. So we made a pact.” Allen remembered very well. “I said, fifty years from today. If we don’t talk again, fifty years from today, we will connect. No matter what. You agreed. So here we are.” Allen had agreed to that pact but he always thought he would see her again soon after driving away that day.

Since that day in 1972, Allen had told himself that what kept that five dollar bill going back and forth and what made her pop into his thoughts so frequently was that there was some sensory channel through which they remained connected. At that moment, she was telling him over the phone that it was the calendar that brought them together on that day in 2022. It was not because he had somehow summoned her in his hour of need or because she had picked up on some paranormal hunch that he was about to undergo life-threatening surgery.

But what he needed at that moment was whatever faith he could muster in order to keep himself alive so he told himself that despite the pact between them which he fully acknowledged as a practical arrangement, there was something more, something other worldly that had always existed between them. It worked. That belief gave him strength. The surgery went well. He survived and he concluded that Nora had some role in that outcome.

When he was in Vietnam, he never thought about the future since there was one hurdle standing between him and tomorrow which was to not die. Until he could leave Vietnam alive, there was no point in even contemplating any possible image of his future. He had the same feeling after he and Nora ended their phone call. He had one obstacle in his path which was his surgery and recovery.

Five weeks after his surgery, Allen was walking two miles a day with his wife and exercising with dumbbells to build muscle mass. He was tempted to let Nora know that he was feeling strong once again but he knew that it was best to let the silence between them return. A package arrived one day from Jacksonville. Inside was a man’s watch and a note from Nora that read: “It belonged to my husband. He would want you to have it.” Tucked in the box behind the watch was the crisp five dollar bill still fresh after fifty years of isolation from the hazards of the world.