INNERVENTION R I CALLED HER DOVEYS

Sixty years were not enough. You are a part of me even now in the early morning when I turn to leave and the grass on your grave is heavy with dew — I want to believe it is your tears pleading for me not to go.

I want the world to know us as that couple whose path led all the way to “’till death do us part.” I would have cared for you at your worst forever. In everyone’s life there comes the chance to fly free, to soar, to hear and touch things that pass all too quickly. Mine was when I met you.

It was but a speck of time — me (a recently discharged sailor looking for the prettiest girl in town) seeing you (the newly crowned “Harvest Queen”) standing on the corner in front of the post office — but that little tick was the beginning of my life. That confluence changed forever all things yet to come… those seconds grooved the riverbed of our lives.

A week later I asked if I could take you home from the Hilltop Ballroom. You refused, explaining you never went home with anyone except who you came with. Intrigued, I called the next day, and we had our first date at the Hilltop Ballroom. Dimmed lights, crowded dance floor, stretched moments holding each other close — we were only subtly aware when the magical song Dancing in the Dark entered our private world, filling our souls with rapture forever. I first called you “my Lovey Doveys,” and then for the rest of our days, just “Doveys.”

Others warned us we were too different.

You were a joker; I… a loner. You were fiercely political; I just voted. You loved the camera; I froze. You were a night person; I went to bed. But, we knew we were each other’s glove. We contracted “encouplelitis” early and never found a cure. It was love made in Heaven where the stars are dots in the sky, where angels dwell… and when I connect the dots, you appear. We eloped to the Little Brown Church in the Vale (Nashua, Iowa). After the ceremony, Reverend Hanscom asked us to pull a rope hanging in the corner. We pulled together, a bell began to ring, and for us, the ringing never stopped.

Everything was stacked against us from the start. I was a jobless college student, so we bought our wedding bands on the installment plan. Our brief honeymoon visit with my sister in South Dakota made us parents. We shared home duties from the start, even diapers. We were simply husband and wife with no operator’s manual and only the dictionary definition of “partners in marriage” to guide us. We took to marriage with purpose, resolve, and intent. Not a snowflake marriage — here today, gone tomorrow — we handcuffed ourselves to each other and threw away the key, mortgaging our future with daily payments of a touch, a smile, or both. We marooned ourselves in an exclusiveness no one was ever privy to. We were what young couples wish for as they walk down the aisle. The proof: If the sky were to light up with all the “I do’s” in the world, ours would be the brightest.

We engaged in spontaneous little antics bordering on the childish, making no sense to anyone except us. It was our way of keeping the edge while others went for flowers and chocolates. I would include with your lunch a few walnuts with a note that read, “I’m nuts over you.” Those were crazy and frivolous times — secret (sometimes), silly (yes), juvenile (probably) — but all our very own. Our marriage survived neither by accident nor miracle.

Fast-forward, turning tomorrows into yesterdays and making decades disappear, and a far distant future scene emerges: us on another crowded dance floor. Ladies in slacks leading guys gazing upward looking for clouds all move to and fro in an unrecognizable Lindy Hop. Every couple blissfully oblivious that — sooner rather than later — one will be a widow or widower. Now a simple routine of leaning and tottering is but a bittersweet mimicry as we — and all our retirement-home friends — try to recapture the impossible.

Doveys and I struggle to synchronize heel and toe into some kind of harmony in the crowded cafeteria with tables and chairs pushed against the walls. But in our minds, we are at the Hilltop Ballroom, and the song playing is Dancing in the Dark.

Ridiculous in our feeble attempt to relive yesterday, we clutch in a sad reenactment of the way it used to be — first dance, first kiss — neither noticing nor caring that our shuffling is more holding each other up than dancing. The last tremor and twitch of a past rhythm, we dance the night away until a bell rings signaling 9p.m. curfew. The cafeteria, where just a few hours earlier we were eating meatloaf with spoons, is closing.

The crowded dance floor begins thinning as couples depart for their separate units. We are among the last to leave. Halfway along the tiled hallway we stop and kiss. Our friend wheels by. I give him a sly wink and shoo him on his way. Waiting for the elevator we hold hands and kiss again; our touching reawakens a dream barely alive. Alone in our little world, energies soar, and we need neither band nor song, silk nor lace… just a dream fast becoming real.

Now you are gone, and I often wonder when flowers bloom, is it from your touch? Does dawn await your nod to start the day? My life is about over, but my one wish would be to wash the clothes you wore, to clean the plate you ate from, to make the bed we slept in. I shall look for your iridescence in every rainbow, your essence in each flower, a trace of your soul in every shower until I find the path to you — and we are together again someplace out there where the days never end.

Yes, the years were good… the months great… the weeks better… and the days not long enough.

Lowell Ward has lived in The Villages for twenty years. He was born in South Dakota but grew up in Minnesota before joining the U.S. Navy. He worked for the state welfare department in Minnesota for several years before he retired at the age of 50. His favorite hobby is adding to his historic newspapers collection, which he shows around Lake and Sumter counties.