My Rolladex empties.
Tonight, the only “A” is gone. Jean Applegate died yesterday, a year after her husband Clarence. I’d worked with Jean at our human resources development agency. We shared the office outside the Senior Center Parlor. And between us fielded the gamut of questions and misbehaviors and hard luck stories that such a Center attracts. Jean brought to her job enormous compassion, a wicked sense of humor, matchless diplomacy, and a keen eye for the can-you-believe-it coincidences. I learned from her.
Beyond our time in that small office, Jean and her husband Clarence began inviting me to their Helena Valley farm house—just for fun, for Easter egg hunts, for Thanksgiving fellowship. For bologna and pickle salad sandwiches. Together and with their children, they offered the rare acceptance that comes with clever repartee and kind, spot-on teasing.
I’ve told you the story of my first tattoo. But I didn’t tell you that Jean was my partner in tattooing crime. Nine years my senior, she asked our hippy artist to inscribe a little mouse holding a rose on her bum. Her choice had particular and private family history. She presented a photo of that new “decoration” to her family the following Thanksgiving. And Clarence encouraged us never to go to “lunch” again.
Jean and Clarence were among the guardians I’ve treasured in this life. The champions. Friends, certainly. But friends who have taken me under their wings. Whose wisdom and “mothering” and straight talk and advocacy (but never sermonizing) sheltered me. Some have been older; all have been sage and giving.
I think tonight of my parents’ friends. The ones we welcomed for an impromptu dish of ice milk or a firefly illumined evening visit. The ones in whom my parents confided and whose secrets they held too. The Lloyds, the Kellys, the Sundquists. The farm families, the Dreshers and Hays. The couples whose lives Mother chronicled in her weekly letters. The ones I visited when I flew back to McPherson. The particular litmus test of those to whom Dave was introduced in his first Kansas sojourn. Those couples tracked my life. Knew enough when I stopped by to ask important questions. Offered rides from Wichita if my dad couldn’t meet a plane. Shared the agonies of Mother’s death. Not as present in my life as some of my guardians, but steadfast and available as anchors in and from my growing up.
Aunt Helen and Uncle Mike had been Mother’s friends and guardians through college in North Manchester and her teaching years. We inherited them–and all the wise shepherding and playfulness they offered. Mike, most comfortable in his striped, blue mechanic coveralls, ran Mike’s Standard Service in the Loop—a tongue-in-cheek play on Chicago’s grander address. Helen taught first grade. The fourth upstairs bedroom in their red brick Civil War foursquare held magic: paper-mache children and bulletin board characters. When Sonja and I went to bed during our visits, no topic was off limits for the adults in the living room below. In high school, I was granted a solo visit with them—a singular “grown-up” trip that strengthened their role as guardians to me too.
In my single, fated year of high school history teaching, two couples kept me on an even keel. My landlords, Olive and Roger. And our neighbors a quarter mile away, Sarah and Nevin. Church of the Brethren folks with long histories in the area and their own families grown. The couples vied, a bit, to be the better guardians.
Roger and Olive’s farm had been the gathering place for cattle donated by Brethren families across the nation, waiting to be shipped in relief efforts to post World War II Europe. My apartment had been their daughters’ bedrooms. Olive’s vegetable and flower garden fed us in all possible ways. The little pond that Roger had built, the perfect place to meet in gathering dusk. Roger and Olive managed that difficult trick of granting me privacy and being available.
Sarah and Nevin invited me to stop in every school afternoon for tea and debriefing. And listened with the gentlest care to the day’s difficulties and victories. With them, I could always just sit. Hear their medical trials. News from their children. Let their unspoken but full acceptance steady me for the evening.
I’m remembering Betty, the young, widowed Gettysburg National Park secretary who tucked me under her joyful and practical wing. Whose dime store set of blue willow ware still appears on my table. Who whispered her enchantment with Francis long before he proposed and spent her pre-wedding slumber party at my apartment. Who sorted out park politics for me and, with minimal disrespect to her bosses including the superintendent who fell asleep in his own meetings, helped me learn what guff to tolerate and what to avoid. How to “be” in that male ranger world.
Barry and Gay remain fast friends, whatever our distance, and, in D. C., were true guardians as well. They had an unerring instinct for when I needed the hubbub of family, a Christmas tree hunting trip, or a dinner together. I retreated to their guidance when my aging Dodge Dart misbehaved and to their couch and caring when my heart was broken.
I count myself uncommonly wealthy in friends. Many of whom have slid along that spectrum from laughing compatriots to guardians. Ron and Claire, for instance. Who else would have introduced me to my now favorite musicians AND allowed me to hide out in their basement during one colonoscopy prep. Or let me sit quietly in their backyard still stunned after Dave’s death.
Walter family friend Kay appeared on my doorstep right before Dave’s memorial service and from that moment on folded me into her life. She’d known all three of Dave’s previous wives, his parents, and the dynamics of their behavior—and how it might have enveloped my life.
Ivan and Carol, friends built on the elixir of laughter and shared interests, became guardians after Dave’s passing. They knew when to call and what delicate topics to tackle with their steady-eyed honesty, when to come for a visit or invite me there. I recuperated from surgery under Carol’s care.
I have known the blessing of guardian moments from long-standing and new friends: Sue and Jeff, Birdie and Nick, Martha, Rebecca, Alyssa, Carol, the Lenmarks, Jean and Bryan. Friends who, when I experience a rough patch, offer critical information and their best judgments. The navigation we all need once in a while when we are overwhelmed. Now, I try to listen for that flicker of silence—that moment when a wise friend wrestles with what might be a hard truth and then speaks it. Or extends more than even the framework of friendship invites, the shelter of their concern.
In some intuitive way, Jean and Clarence Applegate shared that very essence of guardianship: kind, matter-of-fact caring. For as long as I can, I will listen for Jean’s voice in my memory, and her laugh, and her love. And hold close the guardians who remain in my Rolladex or might join it. ©
