If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 14

Eliza thought a minute and said, "Well, at least let's use blue ones."

Everyone found the house, and Leigh liked the balloons. We stood around quietly at first, offering simple condolences-we're so sorry and he was a good man and the heart attack was such a shock. Then Ted Gregg, in a madras sport coat, white bucks, and straw boater, shuffled in with his cane and announced loudly, "He was too young. I'm eighty-four and still have plenty left." He said it again: "He was too young, I say, too young." There was laughter and nods of approval. The widow smiled.

In the kitchen, Leigh told me that Greg and his brother from South Dakota had had a little trouble getting the lid off their father's ash canister. She said their aunt Eleanor, who had traveled all the way from Alabama for her younger brother's funeral, couldn't slide down the rocks to the cove they'd hoped to use for the ceremony. They hadn't realized she'd aged. The last time she'd visited Alaska, Greg was still at Haines High. Now he's a forty-something father of two. "But it was fine really," Leigh said. "I mean, the ashes fell out okay, we read a poem, the baby cried, and that was pretty much it."

It was hardest on Greg's mother. She and his father had been married fifty years. The preacher was not always easy to live with. But he was her mate for life, and now she was alone. I told Leigh what Budge McRae had said after his wife, Clara, a difficult woman if ever there was one, pa.s.sed away: "Clara and I've been together sixty years," he said. "It may get a little lonely without her."

The party grew louder and more animated. Everyone protested when Leigh started to cut the cake; it was too pretty to eat. I found a camera, and Leigh posed, surrounded by admiring relatives and friends. The flash didn't go off, so we did it again. A baby crawled under the table. Someone let the dogs in, and Carl's wagging tail spilled a drink. Leigh talked with Greg's mother's friends and pa.s.sed plates of cake. She helped their little daughter reach a cream puff and steered a pack of boys, including both our sons, outside to play on the beach. I was on my way to the kitchen to make more coffee when I saw Greg leaning against the doorway looking at Leigh with wonder and grat.i.tude.

LINNUS SAYS NO one should get married until age thirty-five. She says if you marry any earlier than that, somebody has to give up too much. Linnus and I are sitting on my porch, our faces tilted toward the sun. Four trumpeter swans fly out over the river, on their way home to Chilkat Lake for the summer. I don't agree with Linnus. I tell her that sometimes young couples survive, and argue that Chip and I have been happily married for twenty years and that we were fresh out of college when we said our vows. She rolls her eyes and says, "You guys are like in the first percentile."

We both know the apparently happy couple who just split after twenty-eight years of marriage. They seemed a perfect pair. They matched. They looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife. They had a cool house, neat kids, and a good dog. They camped in exotic countries and hiked on local trails. I heard that the wife was the one who wanted a different life, in a warmer place. The children were grown, so she decided her job was done. Linnus heard that it was mutual, that they just decided not to be married anymore. We don't say more about it. Neither of us really wants to know the details. We are both a little rattled by the bad news on the small-town rumor network.

After my conversation with Linnus I can't sleep. Sure I am happy, but perhaps Chip is the one who feels he's had to sacrifice too much. That's why, when Chip looks up from the taxes a few days later and grumbles that he doesn't know where all the money goes, I burst into tears. Suddenly I see the pantry loaded with cans of corn, cereal, and dog food like a weight chained to his ankle. The next morning at breakfast we have an argument about nothing. I feel terrible. He looks confused. There is no time to talk; he's late for work, and I have to fix school lunches.

We're going to Whitehorse for the weekend. The girls have a swim meet there; Christian has an orthodontist appointment. Now I don't want to make the five-hour drive or spend the weekend away, and I say so on the phone to Chip at midmorning. He tells me it's too late; he's already arranged for Steve and Linnus to watch the animals and has booked the rooms. The rooms? Usually we all camp out in one. Now he says, "I got a room for the kids and a room for us."

I put on earrings, pack the cooler, and clean the kitchen. It is sunny and fifty-eight degrees, a great spring day, when we head out the road. The children settle in the back seats of the big Suburban. I think about our first car, a 1981 Chevy pickup as plain as a green rubber raincoat. We bought it just before our wedding, which took place in an Episcopal church in New York. During the vows Chip struggled with the old language of the Book of Common Prayer, saying, "I pledge thee my truck" instead of "troth." We drove that truck all the way to Alaska and it's still here-and so are we.

AT LAST COUNT, 171 swans returned to the Chilkat Valley this spring (including the cygnets, which stay with their parents for a year or two). Many migrate annually to nesting sites on the lake. My friend Debra finds their feathers floating near her dock, or lying on the lawn. She keeps a vase full of them on the piano in the same room at her Chilkat Lake lodge where she had us all for dinner the night before her wedding. The remote lodge is accessible only by boat or plane, so we all slept over to be sure we were on time for the morning nuptials. Debra, who is older than I am and had never been married, met her Greg (there are a lot of Gregs around here), who was alone when he came to Haines, at a community choir concert. Greg sang a solo, and Debra played the piano.

For their wedding service, a dozen of us sat on the lawn in front of the lodge, in chairs from the dining room. The ceremony began when the bride's sister-she's a ma.s.sage therapist in California-stood on the gra.s.s in front of the lake and summoned "the powers of the universe" to bless the union. Behind her, steep mountains reflected in the lake and a cutthroat leaped just for the fun of it. The groom's brother-he's from Minnesota-solemnly read a Lutheran invocation. Joanne recited a long nature poem that I think was really about s.e.x. Whenever any of us want to remember the wedding, we say a line or two that stayed with us. Like the one comparing the evening sky to "stretch marks on the black-skinned belly of the night" or "sucking stones."

Greg and Debra stood, holding hands. They looked right in each other's eyes and exchanged direct, personal vows. It was intimate and brave. They are adults who had seen young love come and go. They knew what the sacrifices and rewards of a shared life are, and wanted all of it, every day-forever. When they finished, Debra's old friend Mel, from Anchorage, p.r.o.nounced them husband and wife, and the rest of us wiped our noses and blinked back tears. We cried because we were happy, and because people we loved were happy, and because we were all happy in love together. Only adults weep with joy. Children don't. They haven't learned how rare moments of true happiness are.

That night, the bride's parents, John and Erma Schnabel, hosted a reception in town at the Elks Club. Families, friends, and neighbors joined our small wedding party, dancing all night long to a Cajun band from Juneau. I watched from behind the punch bowl as Chip twirled J.J. until her braids stuck straight out, and those good tears came back. Debra's brother Roger gave the couple a new pickup for a wedding present. There's a red stripe, four-wheel drive, and cup holders. It's a lot nicer than the truck we left our wedding reception in.

THE ONLY FANCY extras on that pickup were Chip's tape deck and stereo speakers. Chip still likes his road tunes. And now, as we drive past the turnoff for the Chilkat Lake boat landing on our way to Whitehorse, he puts in a CD. It's Little Feat. I hate Little Feat. But it's a gorgeous day and we are driving to the Yukon on the prettiest road in the world. And we have our own hotel room.

Chip has been watching the war and tells me about it. I think it is reality TV gone mad and say so. I see every American soldier as a son or daughter, and every Iraqi mother with a crying baby as a distant relative. Chip says, "I look at the troops and wonder how I'd do in the same situation, that's all." I think about the time when I was pregnant with Eliza and a car in front of us flipped off the road into a swamp. Chip stopped our car. One man was dead, another unconscious. Chip carried him out of the water and gave him CPR until an ambulance came. The injured man lived. I look at Chip now and know he would do just fine in a war. I tell him so, and he squeezes my hand.

Two hours later we stop at the only store in Haines Junction. I buy a c.o.ke. I drink c.o.ke only on road trips. This is because I want to stay alert but won't drink bad coffee. Chip will drink warm brown water with powdered creamer. While I sip the c.o.ke, he tells the children with amazement, "Your mother has come a long way." When we were first married, I was a vegetarian. On the cross-country drive to Alaska, I wouldn't touch bacon or eggs, and certainly never soda. "She asked for fruit and granola at every truck stop in America," Chip says.

It's Chip's turn to drive and I pick the music, someone we both like-Lyle Lovett. We saw him in concert in Seattle when I was pregnant with baby number four and Chip was running a marathon. He felt like a gazelle and I felt like a hippo and he wanted to cheer me up.

In Whitehorse that night, the kids order in a pizza and watch TV in the hotel. Chip takes me to a fancy Greek restaurant. We eat pasta and drink wine and, after checking on the sleeping children, head to our own room and behave like newlyweds.

In the morning, we get breakfast out of the cooler in the kids' room. I tell the children that this is how movie stars and famous athletes eat on the road. "It's called room service." They are in junior high and don't believe me. Chip says I'm crazy, but I know it's the good kind of crazy, not the after-twenty-years-of-marriage-I can't-take-it-anymore kind of crazy.

The swim meet is not too long; the orthodontist visit, painless. The children go shopping, and we go for a run next to the Yukon River. I am able to match Chip stride for stride. "Not bad for an old lady," he teases.

"Not bad for a bald guy," I shoot back.

We all go out for pizza and a stupid Adam Sandler movie because it's rated PG-13. There's no movie theater in Haines, so we take one in when we can-even when it's really dumb.

On the way back, Chip drives first. I want to hear Canadian Broadcasting's Sunday morning radio show. He wants to listen to a country station. Instead of arguing, I look for a CD, and Chip says he already has one, and turns up my favorite love song sung by one of his favorite singers. Merle Haggard leads and I sing along, in my out-of-tune way. Chip doesn't mind, because he likes the words as much as I do. "That's the way love goes, babe..."

WHEN WE GOT home from Whitehorse, I had an obituary to write and a wedding to go to. Debra's uncle Marty Cordes had died. When I asked her about Marty, the first thing she talked about was his marriage. She said, "It was never just Marty. It was always Marty and Allie." Debra's uncle Marty kept that special look in his eyes for his wife, Allie, almost until the day he died. His last year was difficult, and he slipped into the fog of dementia. For more than fifty years, though, they'd remained a starry-eyed duo. And they'd looked great together-like Lombard and Gable or Bogie and Bacall. Marty was handsome and witty. Allie was trim and stylish in her scarf and sungla.s.ses. Writing his obituary, I learned that Marty was the first man in this working-cla.s.s town to wear Bermuda shorts. "I like to think of Allie and Marty as bohemian," Debra told me. "They had Scientific American and Playboy at their house, which when I was growing up in Haines made them very different." It still does.

Marty named his only son, now a banker in London, Omar, after his and Allie's favorite poet, Omar Khayyam. At the memorial service, Omar quoted the famous lines that summed up his parents' marriage:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness-

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

At Sat.u.r.day's wedding, the bride was twenty-one, the groom perhaps a year older. Not much younger than Chip and I were when we got married. They said their vows with clear, honest voices full of hope and love. The groom gazed at his high school sweetheart as though this was the moment he'd been preparing for his whole young life. He looked, one friend said afterward, as though "there was no place he'd rather be."

At the reception I sit at one of the tables in the park and look at the big red-and-white striped circus tent swelling and contracting in the breeze off the water, and think it looks as if it's breathing, or maybe it's a heart pumping. I think about how I went from my parents' house to living with Chip, without much of a gap in between. I wonder how different my life would have been if I hadn't done that, if I would even be the same person. Was Linnus right about waiting until thirty-five?

There are days when I can't get into the bathroom, the music blasting from my children's bedrooms sounds like a battle of the bands, the dog pukes fish guts on the rug, and the washing machine makes an alarming clunk before a cloud of smoke belches out of the laundry room-days when I question if this is the life G.o.d planned for me. And there are nights when I've cooked another meal for seven and am doing the dishes while Chip is going out the door to work on the sailboat he is fixing up or to an a.s.sembly meeting, and I resent the division of labor at our house. Then I feel as if I'm stuck in an old Donna Reed Show rerun. Only instead of salon-groomed hair and an ironed dress, I've got on a baseball hat and sweaty running clothes.

But right now, on this beautiful afternoon, I wouldn't change a thing. The praise band from the Haines Cornerstone Foursquare Gospel Church is playing one of Anne Murray's old country-and-western hits. I hum the words: "Could I have this dance for the rest of my life?" Little Leaguers, back from the game and looking for their parents, run through in uniforms, grabbing plates of fruit salad, sandwiches, and paper cups of lemonade. Christian checks in, flushed from his team's victory. Eliza and Sarah coax J.J. and Stoli into a line dance. The groom grew up twenty miles up the Chilkat River in the Tlingit Indian village of Klukwan, so there are also plenty of Alaska Natives here, too, both as guests and in the wedding party. Outside the tent, little children run in circles and nursing moms sit on chairs, chatting. After the ceremony, we'd all blown bubbles instead of throwing rice, and now a dad blows more for a delighted toddler.

Then Chip comes up behind me and asks if I'd like to dance. He looks at me the same way he did when we got married. The same way Steve looked at Linnus in their less than conventional wedding, the same way Greg looked at Debra, and the same way the groom looked at the bride in the church today. It's also the same way Leigh's husband looked at her when she cut the cake after his father's ashes were scattered, and the way Marty looked, I'm sure, when he read Allie poetry. I bet it's the way swans look at each other when they are about to take flight. It's what Bonnie Raitt wants us to hear when she sings, "Your sweet and shiny eyes are... like meat and potatoes to me."

There is no secret to being, as Linnus says, in that "first percentile," that minority of young couples who stay together for life. It's as simple, and as complicated, as keeping that look in your eyes.

DULY NOTED

A foot of light, fluffy snow fell Monday night. Tuesday afternoon the temperature rose fifteen degrees and the wind shifted to the south, creating perfect conditions for surreal, tumbleweed-like s...o...b..a.l.l.s on the school fields and the wide beaches at the bottom of Cemetery Hill. The white b.a.l.l.s also rolled down Main Street as if being pushed by unseen hands, prompting one onlooker to suggest that the angels were bowling. Some grew to the size of basketb.a.l.l.s before they became too heavy to move.

Friday night singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor made fans at the Chilkat Center laugh and cry with his sentimental tunes. Livingston tries to come to Haines every year to visit friends Bart and Lenise Henderson. He opened the show with a story that's well known to locals. At the airport, a van driver offered him a lift to town. He asked where he was going. Livingston said, "To Bart and Lenise's." That was all the direction needed. Livingston told the audience, "That just doesn't happen anywhere else. This is a very special place." Later in the show he said Haines was "quite simply the loveliest place on earth."

Haines has been chosen by Outside magazine as one of the top ten towns in America to live in if you are a millionaire. The editors of Outside said Haines is paradise if you don't have to make a living here.

Prom night was a success for the Haines High senior cla.s.s. Prom king and queen Ben Egolf and Liz Scott reigned over a court that included prince and princess Wes Hoffman and Eliza Lende, duke and d.u.c.h.ess Joey Jacobson and Amy Gross, and butler and maid Nik Hura and Sarah Lende. "What Dreams May Come" was the theme of the Sat.u.r.day night ball. The school gym was "dreamily" decorated in blue and silver with an artificial pond and waterfall and a dramatic castle-gate-style entrance.

If I Saw You in Heaven