Vows Eternal

The Pillsbury, Connecticut, graduating class of 1938 didn't have much to dance about as the country was still slogging through a nine-year national economic depression. Duncan Arbuckle had even less to dance about at prom as he had no date, so he sat in the bleachers with the other come-alones while his coupled classmates jived to Sammy Kaye and Jimmy Dorsey records played through a loudspeaker.

Although unlucky in young love, he was lucky in war because he came home intact. He took advantage of the GI Bill and in 1947 the veteran was hired as an inventory clerk for a shipbuilding contractor.  He eased into the new middle class lifestyle sprung from decent wages that allowed ordinary Americans to afford the new products that American industry was manufacturing once the global carnage was over.

Duncan bought a two-story clapboard house on a corner lot, hoping to carry his bride over the threshold some day who was not from Pillsbury because local girls bored him, always did. He preferred big-city gals because they seemed cosmopolitan, intriguing, and alluring, like the mademoiselles he helped liberate.

One evening that year, in September, after work, he decided to stay in Samford to grab a bite before his 45-minute commute back home because his taste buds needed a break from another tv dinner. He settled in at the counter, ordered the day’s special, and noticed the pretty blonde in the booth across the aisle. Who was this fair, literate creature reading the Hartford Courant–and why was she sitting alone? And who knew this would be the last evening meal they would eat apart from each other for the next 73 years?

Bonnie Simmons was by herself, she said, because her fiancé was killed at Normandy and she wasn't ready to date again, but she did accept Duncan’s offer of a piece of pie, and then to meet him again the next night for dinner–same time, same place–but sharing the same booth this time, and, indeed, accepting his proposal for marriage a year later. She gladly took his name the following May and the Pope’s edict to be fruitful and multiply to heart, bearing and rearing six kids.

Duncan Arbuckle kept track of nautical nuts and bolts, commuting back and forth, until he retired at 62. Bonnie raised the tribe until the baby of the family graduated from Pillsbury High in ‘83. Their lives were remarkably unremarkable like most other middle-class families, with the occasional good times/bad times and holidays thrown in, breaking up the rut. Now with the kids and the monotony of work gone, they enjoyed a comfortable life of retirement and an unspoken, quiet love.

The couple celebrated their fiftieth anniversary of keeping their wedding vows; then their 60th. And their 70th. On March 16, 2019, Bonnie Belinda Arbuckle died peacefully in her sleep.

Her husband felt abandoned, betrayed, and lost–no, more than lost–he was stumbling around in this new dazed reality without a road map. The kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids consoled and visited him as often as they could, but with their busy lives of their own, never often or long enough, it seemed to him. As long as he was able, he wanted to stay in the home he bought after the war for 28 5. 

In the early morning of the first anniversary of his wife’s death, in that time of pre-dawn when the sun is just beginning to stir from just below the horizon, yawning and stretching for another day of work, Duncan Arbuckle stirred as well, sitting at the foot of the bed; odd, because he didn't remember how he got there–at 96, the grinding of his old bones alone should have woken him up. Even more odd, he turned around and saw himself still sleeping! Even most odd, Bonnie materialized through the charcoal mist, looking cosmopolitan, intriguing, and alluring in the dress she married him in.

She wrote on his mind’s Post-it note that she could not speak but he could ask her anything telepathically. His question was if she had loved him. Bonnie stepped forward, hugged her husband deeply, stepped back, and exploded in a shower of glimmering lights—no, in a burst of rainbowed photons, as if fired from a rainbow photon cannon.

The sun, up-and-and-‘em, woke him up at seven-thirty when a few of its rays found a crack in the curtains. The old man ached out of bed wondering if his out-of-body experience was real or just a heavenly dream.

The second year of all-alone living was worse than the first. Last year the old dog learned new tricks: how to work the washing machine, how to pay bills, a remedial crash course in domesticity; this year the Medicare vultures picked him apart–he ‘needed’ teeth pulled even though he hadn’t had a steak since Bonnie died; he ‘needed’ expensive medical tests; he ‘needed’ a whole new regimen of prescription pills. Pushing 100, he needed a whole new everything, but didn’t particularly want to bankrupt the American healthcare system getting it all repaired.

In that second year, reality hit after the fog of the first year burned off. Always drilled to ‘be a man’, Duncan never cried–not as a boy when Dad lost his job in ‘29, not through four years of killing Germans, not as a worried husband or father. Now he bawled himself to sleep most nights, his face buried in Bonnie’s favorite pillow. Now he hobbled through the house talking and complaining to the walls, his new soundboard, and talking and complaining loudly because his hearing was fading as fast as the rest of him. Now there were always new challenges–”how the hell do you set the clock on the goddamn microwave?” Now there was talk of putting dad in an assisted-living facility because he was becoming a little too much for them to handle.

In the early morning duskiness of the third anniversary of his wife’s death, a frail Duncan Arbuckle again found himself on the edge of the mattress staring back at himself lying in the hand-carved oak bed Bonnie’s parents had given them as a wedding present back in ‘48. Our sanctuary–over 26,000 cozy nights together. His ancient eyes, with their creeping macular degeneration, panned the family photos on the matching oak bureau. Great kids, great wife, great life! He surveyed the room and the bed again and the dead man lying in it who used to be him.

Now Bonnie stepped forward through the ethereal shadows, beaming, thinking to him: a job well done! She took his hand, then the bride and groom exploded in a shower of glimmering lights—no, in a burst of rainbowed photons, as if fired from a rainbow photon cannon.

Love the one you're with.

By CraigE

From: United States