Summer of Love fling matures into marriage
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/07/LV181BHTNU.DTL
Louise Rafkin, Special to The Chronicle
Sunday, February 7, 2010
It was 1968: Arnie was 22, on vacation from Connecticut with friends,
sleeping in Golden Gate Park or Tilden or on the beach. Nancy was
from Marin, and just 16. She had hitchhiked in to the city for a free
concert on the Marina Green, where she met the long-haired, charming Arnie.
Music played, and substances were passed. Soon Arnie, now 63 and in
the wine business, suggested that Nancy come to his car to "see his
poetry." Aha. The next day they met up again. Then, for five days
straight, they bummed around, weaving among the throngs on Haight
Street. "A blur" is how Nancy, now 57 and an artist, describes that time.
But their spate of summer love wasn't to be entirely groovy: Nancy's
father was the chief of police of San Anselmo. He went in search of
his runaway daughter, and, amazingly, found her in the Haight.
"You'll never see my daughter again," he told Arnie as he carted
Nancy away. "Actually, I'm going to marry her" was Arnie's reply.
Back home, Nancy was inconsolable. Her mother, who was divorced from
her father, agreed to drive her to visit her beau. Thinking him a
nice enough lad, they planned for Arnie to win over Dad by taking
Nancy on a "proper date." But that plan was thwarted when Arnie was
detained as he hit Marin; Dad had put an APB out for his car, and he
was threatened with arrest. Soon a "friendly" officer was escorting
Arnie and his mates to the California border.
Yet even as he was headed home, there were daily letters and calls.
Arnie's car blew up outside Chicago, just before the '68 Democratic
convention. ("Our long hair was really not looked kindly upon," he
remembers.) Over the next few months, the young couple declared their
love to all, and to appease their still unconvinced parents, they
announced they would marry.
"It was a time when no one believed in monogamy, let alone marriage,"
Arnie recalls.
"But we knew it was real," says Nancy.
So in December of her senior year of high school, after having spent
only five days together, Arnie came west. When Arnie exited the
plane, Nancy didn't recognize him: He'd chopped off his long hair.
After their wedding, Nancy went east to attend high school in
Connecticut, while Arnie completed college. The first of their two
children was born three years later.
Now settled in Nancy's native San Anselmo, the couple have shared 41
years together. "A freaking long time," says Arnie, laughing.
"It was a risk," says Nancy, who can recall a moment when they had
only 12 cents between them, "but at the time everyone thought only of
today - no one believed there would even be a tomorrow."
"We were only certain of our uncertainty," says Arnie. "We didn't
know anything, but neither did anyone else."
On the time:
Arnie: "Vietnam was happening, and our friends were going to war."
Nancy: "So we grew up fast, and we grew up together."
--------
Cancer diagnosis brings two friends together for journey of a lifetime
http://www.kansascity.com/238/story/1725854.html
By DONNA TRUSSELL
Feb. 05, 2010
And when the wind was in the south
She'd say, "I smell the sea!"
She changed. The white and gold grew dull
As when a soft flame dies
And yet she kept until the last
The sea-shine in her eyes.
From "Cerelle," a ballad by Margaret Bell Houson, 1929
~ ~ ~
My first thought when I got up this morning was: I don't know how to
do this. I don't know how to let a friend die.
Just a few months ago, Lindy Elizondo and I were gazing out over the
Grand Canyon. We were on the proverbial "trip of a lifetime," a
30-day rail pass from her New York and from my Kansas City to points west.
Today, I look at the photographs I took there's Lindy, there's her
12-year-old son, Danny, there's me, there's the canyon and it all
seems like something from a dream that's slipping away. Amazing how
quickly you fold back into your old routine.
But today, I'm making a special point to remember.
I've had friends die before. Just about every cancer survivor has.
But this was different.
I didn't meet Lindy because of cancer. I knew her from long ago.
Long, long ago from the Summer of Love, in fact. Technically, a few
years later, but this was Texas, not California, and the acid-rocking
was still in full swing, albeit with a twang.
In June 1973, I was 19 years old and Lindy was 18. We'd both moved
into a student co-op four blocks from the University of Texas. Lindy
had a waifish quality, but also a gutsy sense of adventure and an
appreciation of life's abundant absurdities. I liked her right away.
That summer, I was getting over my first heartbreak, and I had needed
someone who could see the good in me. Lindy was that friend.
Lindy and I basked in the glow of our first summer in Austin, when
half the students go home and the city takes on the ambience of a
large village.
These were heady times. One co-op member was reading nothing but
Faulkner. Not for class. She just wanted a Faulkner summer.
Soon, Lindy fell in love with a fellow co-op member named Charlton.
By summer's end, the house next door had came up for rent. Lindy,
Charlton and I quickly claimed it.
The house was old and had gas heaters, walls stripped down to bare
wood, a front-porch swing, big trees and a built-in kitchen table and
benches. It was perfect.
In retrospect, I can see how a best friend sharing quarters with a
new couple was just asking for trouble, but such was the era in which
we lived. Rules were for boring people.
A year later, Charlton and Lindy got married and moved out, and I
went my own way. But for a little while, we three were a family.
After a few years, Charlton and Lindy divorced and later both
remarried. Lindy divorced her second husband, too, but this time she
had a son, whom she was raising with her longtime boyfriend.
I tracked Lindy down in 2002, when I was nine months out of my
diagnosis of Stage III ovarian cancer. My survival statistics were
bleak, and I wanted to say goodbye to old friends and thank them for
their kindness.
•••
Now, in the summer of 2008, it was Lindy who needed someone. She was
scared. She'd found out she had cancer.
From what she described, the cancer did not sound early stage or
indolent to me, but I tried to play that down. If I've learned
anything about this disease in the last eight years, it's that cancer
is unpredictable.
After she finished treatment, she called to ask me if I would
accompany her and her son on a trip to the Grand Canyon.
"Please," Lindy said. "I can't do it without you."
My husband didn't want me to go.
"Too bad," I said.
The morning of July 13, 2009, Lindy, Danny and his buddy Montana, who
would accompany us the first two weeks, made their way to Grand
Central Station in New York and boarded a westbound train. A day
later in Chicago, they switched to the Southwest Chief.
After a 24-hour stop in Kansas City, we four entered Kansas City's
Union Station to begin the first leg of our trip to canyon country and beyond.
Danny and Montana were giddy. So giddy, in fact, they were running
and leaping over lobby benches like Olympians clearing hurdles. Their
squeals echoed through the cavernous building.
Hmmm. Two boys, aged 12 and 13. Signs of attention deficit disorder
and God knows what else. What have I gotten myself into?
Too late now. Like a roller coaster, once the safety bar locks and
the wheels are turning, there's no way out but through.
In the past, I'd always traveled trains by coach, but Lindy has a bad
back, so she sprang for a sleeper. Lindy said the cabin was tiny,
with no room for a suitcase or even tote bag.
Surely she was exaggerating, I thought. But no, Lindy was quite
right. The "roomette" was exactly the size of the lower berth. Floor
space might accommodate a pair of shoes, as long as they were
arranged horizontally.
I took the upper bunk, which felt like a yoga mat on concrete. Around
5 a.m., I gave up and joined the other sleepyheads in the lounge car
waiting for the dawn to break and the café to open.
First stop was Albuquerque, N.M., where Lindy used to live. She
wanted to take me on the Sandia Peak tramway, where the mountain is
hot desert on one side and lush Alpine landscape sunny and 68
degrees on the other.
On top of Sandia Mountain, the boys seemed to forget their fear of
heights after they saw the ski lift $7 for a round trip. Montana, a
city boy from the Bronx, kept looking around in all directions. He'd
never before seen long grass rippled by the wind or a royal-blue pine cone.
At the gift shop, the boys bought rubber snakes, which they spent the
rest of the day snapping at each other, followed by yelps of pain and
howls of sadistic joy. After an hour of this, I turned around and
said, "No more snake slapping!"
Then I said, "You know, you could have lived your whole life and
never heard that sentence if you had not come here with me today."
Back on the Southwest Chief, we headed toward the main destination of
our journey: the Grand Canyon.
It was dusk when our shuttle pulled up to Yavapai Lodge. All around
me, I heard unfamiliar languages and accents, which made me acutely
aware that I was standing in a special place, that people have
traveled long distances to get here.
The boys were hungry. The canyon would have to wait for tomorrow. But
we did make it to the storied El Tovar hotel that overlooked it. I
walked to the low stone fence and looked into the blackness.
I shined my flashlight down the canyon. Danny, Montana and I could
make out ledges and small trees growing out from the canyon walls.
Then my light would get swallowed up by the dark.
"You see that, boys?" I said. "You see where the light disappears?
That's the Grand Canyon."
The next morning, we walked to the rim. Lindy had the typical first reaction.
"Oh!" she said, in almost a whisper.
That was probably what I said, too, when I first saw the canyon in
1966. All I can remember from that trip is how deep and wide the
canyon was. Suddenly, I understood what people meant when they said
photographs do not do justice to the subject.
We took a shuttle bus to the part of the canyon known as Hermit's
Rest, and then we came back to the El Tovar. At dusk, Lindy and I had
a drink on the back porch while we watched the boys play and show off
their flashlights to other young visitors.
The golden lights of the South Rim walkway came on. Lindy and I said
little as we sat and watched the night fall on the canyon, the boys
and us. The next day, we'd be continuing on our journey. We wanted to
extend this moment as long as we could.
•••
In Los Angeles, we spent a few nights at the home of Charlton, his
wife, Shari, and their two children. The first night, Lindy sang
karaoke for preteen girls having a slumber party.
The next night, Charlton projected slides on his living room wall.
There was Lindy, 19 years old, and Charlton on their honeymoon in Mexico.
"Remember that hotel?" Lindy said, in the same excited voice she had
when we were young students in Austin. "It was so cheap. Just a few
dollars, but look how nice it was!"
It was hard not to notice the what-ifs hanging in the air during this
part of our trip. Charlton's marriage seemed rock solid, but even so,
this visit could not have been easy for his wife.
As we were leaving, I thanked Shari.
"Not many wives would have put up with this," I said.
She gave me a hug.
"I wouldn't have missed it for the world," she said.
Lindy, Danny and I took the Coast Starlight north to Monterey, where
we stayed for 10 days with Lindy's brother and sister-in-law, and
then spent a few days in San Francisco before boarding the California
Zephyr, eastbound to Chicago.
The train took us past Lake Tahoe, past forests of evergreens, past
rivers and through spectacular Colorado canyons.
Even Danny, who emanates the coolness only 12-year-olds can muster,
was impressed.
"I never saw anything so beautiful," he said.
He thanked his mother for taking him on this trip.
Lindy got what she'd come for. When she first suggested the trip, she
told me she wanted to prove to her son she could do more than just
lie around with a heating pad on her stomach. She wanted to be the
one to show him the Grand Canyon. She wanted him to have that memory forever.
The last two nights of our journey were spent in a luxury suite in
Chicago. When we rinsed out some clothes, we looked for a place to
let them dry, but we were a little intimidated by all the marble and glass.
"I feel like a Beverly Hillbilly," I said.
Lindy laughed and said, "There's got to be some place in this here
hotel room where we can string up a clothesline!"
What surprised me most on this trip was how easily Lindy and I found
a rhythm, and how closely it matched my memories from years ago.
While Lindy and I had some tense moments during the trip including
some that seemed insurmountable by now we were finishing each
other's sentences. Again.
Lindy and Danny had to leave for the airport early the next morning,
so we said our goodbyes the night before. Danny sat at the desk
playing a computer game, while Lindy and I reminisced about the last 30 days.
"Now I'll have to get used to having no one to talk to," I said.
My husband can be laconic. During this trip, I'd call and he'd say,
"I miss you," followed by silence. Ah, back to real life.
"Did you know you giggle in your sleep?" Lindy said.
"No!"
Soon we were making plans for next summer. Lindy will be healthy, and
I will be healthy, and together we'll travel to Italy.
Even as the words left my lips, I knew that what happens next summer
wasn't up to Lindy or me, but fate. Nonetheless, focusing on a trip
to Europe was easier than saying goodbye or trying to find the right
words to thank her for this experience.
My train to Kansas City departed in the afternoon, but I saw no
reason to stick around the hotel. The place seemed too quiet now that
I was alone.
As I surveyed the room, checking for items I'd left behind, I could
not shake the feeling I'd forgotten something important. Finally, I
realized: It was Lindy and Danny who were missing.
In the mad rush from place to place, I'd failed to notice the moment
we three had become family.
It was not the threesome of 1974. Now there was a 12-year-old son
instead of a fiancé. And now Lindy and I were older and definitely
worse for wear. But two divorces, cancer and chronic pain had not
dimmed the light in Lindy's eyes.
That I'll remember, along with the view across the Grand Canyon. And
that I'll take with me when maybe next week, maybe 30 years from
now the tables turn one more time, and I will stand where Lindy now stands.
In geology, you know, it's all the blink of an eye.
,
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