Remembering Edie

Edie and I had a lot in common. Our birthdays were a year and a day apart; we‘d lived in the same Alaska city as kids but didn’t know each other then; we both liked the ballads of Gordon Lightfoot; and we were both majoring in English at the same community college where our British literature instructor took an avid interest in the two of us, although for vastly different reasons.

Edie was also smarter than me. If I got a B on a paper, Edie got an A. If I got an A, Edie got an A+. She was a natural writer. He her prose was concise and uncommonly witty for the turgid style and fussy formats inflicted by English departments on the undergraduate hoi polloi.

I was not intimidated by Edie’s literary superiority, nor envious or sullen in the manner of morbidly sensitive English majors who have all the social graces of poison clams when encountering their intellectual betters. Hell, Edie turned me on, and I let her know it with all the subtlety I was capable of at the age of 24, when my hormones ruled my head.

She let me down gently, explaining that she and our Brit Lit instructor were lovers. She was divorcing her husband, had custody of her six-year-old son, lived in a 3-room cabin built in the 1930s, and subsisted on child support payments and county welfare assistance. In short, she was not available for horizontal fun or even an upright quickie over the kitchen sink. At least not with me, but said she could always use another pal. She was astute enough not the use the phrase “just friends,” when describing any future interaction between us, which is the Alcatraz of male-female relations. Hard to escape.

The Brit Lit instructor was also married, natch, and had three kids and houseful of Welsh Corgis. But he was a handsome devil; half Cherokee with a dark brooding manner and a Van Dyke beard that gave him a menacing Mephistophelian look that many young women with poetic aspirations find irresistible. He completed the ensemble with a closet full of turtleneck shirts, corduroy jackets with leather patch elbows and several pairs of Birkenstock sandals. The Compleat Humanities Professor.

He had discovered poetry as a Marine, of all things, aboard a troop ship bound for Korea, of all places, during the height of American involvement in that stalemated war. After the service, he enrolled in U.C. Santa Barbara where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English, followed by a master’s from Yale. Then he began an itinerant career as a teacher, refining his angry seeker-of-truth-and-beauty act at 11 year junior colleges in 11 years before settling down at our marvelous little campus in the redwood country of California’s north coast.

There were other complications, or course. A large rolling tank of female assertiveness who taught American Lit zeroed in on him as mating material and campaigned relentlessly for his attention. And Edie?  She was being wooed by a humorless biology major and poet manqué who’d spent five years in community college to avoid the draft.

Edie would sometimes invite me over for a spaghetti dinner. I’d bring a jug Red Mountain wine and we’d talk about books, poetry and listen to Gordon Lightfoot’s latest release that I’d liberated from the radio station where I worked alone as a DJ five nights a week.  She would ask my advice on what she should do about her love life. Even then I knew the last thing she wanted was advice. What she wanted was an accomplice, or at least a confidant. Edie had another male pal for the same purpose, a married middle-aged projectionist at one of the town’s two movie theaters whom she also visited at work.

Edie was definetely not a woman’s woman, yet her closest friend was a woman named Donna who served as surrogate sister and a partner in mischief.

I got snagged into one of their stunts. When Edie was perplexed about being in a pickle between her lover and her suitor, she and Donna put on their shortest skirts and made a cockteasing run at a fleshpot bar that catered to the college crowd. They met two Canadian boys at the bar who were touring America on a motorcycle. One of the boys claimed to know his fellow countryman, Gordon Lightfoot. Hearing that, Edie dialed up her erotic wattage and almost exuded a fog of mating musk. By the time last call was announced, Edie and Donna had decided to continue the party at Donna’s, which was nine miles away, and left the bar with the Canadian lads in tow, everyone piling into Donna’s car.

The night air cooled Edie‘s libido and assailed her with second thoughts. She called me at home and rousted me out of bed. In a panicked voice, she said there were “two men in Donna’s house that we can’t get rid of,” her tone implying that they were about to be raped at knife point by two Hell’s Angels.

I was at banging on Donna’s door within 10 minutes. One of the supposed brutes, who looked about as menacing as a 13-year-old, was dozing on the couch. The other pillaging Visigoth was hiding in the kitchen, trying to squeeze himself into the narrow space between the refrigerator and the wall. I sighed, looked at Edie and Donna in sleep disturbed disgust, and offered to drive the unlaid Canadian lads back to their motorcycle. “You‘re saving the dragons!” Edie wailed as I herded the frightened and bewildered boys out the door. I didn’t speak to her for a month after that.

True to form, the Brit Lit prof quit our college after a year and took a job teaching at a community college in Calgary, Alberta, and wanted Edie to move to the same city and continue to be a friend with benefits. She was still being pursued by the draft dodging perennial student too. She asked me what she should do. Well, I said, you can move to strange cold city where you don’t know anyone, rent a furnished room and wait by the telephone, or you can stay here and give your draft dodger a chance.

What she did not know about the draft dodger was that his mother was a letterhead partner in an accounting firm with offices in San Francisco, New York and London. She also owned a summer home in one of the gated communities of the Sonoma Valley wine country. I did know that, but kept my mouth shut.

Edie stayed put and eventually married the draft dodger, whose mother always wanted a daughter and who showered Edie with presents, including two weeks in London at one of Europe’s grandest hotels, Claridge’s, where visiting kings and presidents rest their weary heads, and where rates begin at $600 USD per night. She wrote to me on Claridge’s stationery reporting that she was seeing places we had only read about: the Tower Of London, Mayfair, the British Museum, and that she could not stop crying. “I was out walking around in tears from just being in London when I saw a small brass plaque on a gate. It identified the house behind the gate as the home of William Blake! That started another crying jag!”

Not bad for former welfare case who'd lived in a three room shack.

She and her husband returned to northern California. He adopted her son, became serious about college, earned a master’s degree in biology, and got a job with the state Department of Fish & Game in the San Jaoquin Valley.  Edie was hired as a case worker for the county welfare office, since she knew the system so well, and her mother-in-law bought a house for the new family about 35 miles from where I had moved. I’d stop by now and then. The year was 1978.

Edie did not look well at all the last time I visited. Her surrogate sister Donna was present and appeared to have moved in. Edie’s actual sister, Bernice, had also taken up residence. A feather of foreboding touched the back of my brain.

“You look like hell,” I said. Mr. Tact.

“I’m sick,” she said.

“How sick?”

“Very.”

“Got the Big C?”

“Yes.”

“Mammary? Cervix?”  Mr. Sensitive.

“Lung.”

“How much time?”

“Maybe a month. Maybe three to six months if I take chemo, which I won‘t.”

"God damn it!" I yelled and threw my hat against a wall. Donna and Bernice looked at me sympathetically. Edie had been a light smoker. A pack of her favorite menthols would last her a week, but her susceptibility to lung cancer may have been genetic. Her father had died early from the same disease.

A month later Edie was dead.  She was 34 years old. Her husband was with her at the moment she died. "She woke up, smiled at me, closed her eyes, and that was it," he said.

What brought all this on was my recent visit to the VA hospital in Sacramento, where I was diagnosed with emphysema. I was not surprised. I’ve been a heavy smoker for over 50 years. I once asked a cousin of mine, who had been an emergency room doctor for many years, what was the greatest single cause for emergency room visits. Alcohol? Drugs?

“Lifestyle choices, “ he said.

The key word is choices. I seem to have made some poor ones. Well, shoot. The best I can do now is to take it easy and not sweat the petty stuff or pet the sweaty stuff, as another former teacher of mine once said. She died from lung cancer too. Another smoker.

I’ve almost reached my allotted three-score-and-ten of longevity anyway. Like other old farts, I’ve been wondering about an afterlife, in which I don’t really believe. But if there is one, I’ll consider Mark Twain’s counsel: “Heaven for the climate. Hell for the company.”

An easy choice. I’m accustomed to lousy climates and I’ve always been gregarious. I just hope I can go as gently into that good night as my friend Edie did. Even now, she remains a guide.

Comments?

As always, well done, poignant, up, down and around every emotion. Hang in there kiddo, I'm still smoking, 3 score plus 10 and refuse to give in. We will surprise everyone! -- Linda

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I've got a couple of friends here with emphysema, and as long as they follow their doctor's orders, they live pretty well...so, quit smoking, and follow your doctor's orders. -- Shannon
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Mike...lovely piece about Edie but I'm so sorry to hear that you are not well. I hope that with good medical attention you will be able to keep it controlled for many years. -- Soy
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It's never too late. Please, please take better care of yourself. Otherwise, who will send me such evocative stories? My life is made richer from reading what you've written over the years. Your stories, while personal, always touch upon the universal somehow, and what makes us so very human. --Tab A

Will you be my agent? -- MB
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I'm sorry to hear you have emphysema. That is a disease that can be lived with for years. I presume you know that. If you take care of yourself, and do what the doctors tell you, you may have many good moments -- and years -- remaining. -- Ann C.
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Gloomy, schmooomy.....good writin' is good writin'....all the good writers got lung disease...keep writing up til the last breath (pun intended), and never, ever apologize! you are beeeeauuuutiful...never forget that. -- Canny
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Hello Mike, just a quick word here .. 3 score isnt long enough , get greedy , get angry get a few more decades damnit..get a lung . Sorry Im so busy I'd come cheer you up wirth hookers , wine some good cannibis in cookies or brownies. Whatever it takes, buddy -- Nick and Amy in Arkansas
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Please do not leave. I need you living even if you do not write often. -- Fay
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You've never made me cry...before. -- Bach Lennon

Didn’t mean to do that. Just meant to spread a little gloom. -- MB
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Beautifully written, but so sad to hear that you're not well. Hugs, prayers,and warm, healing thoughts. -- Kerry

Appreciate that. -- MB
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Thanks. I needed this. Just posted to Facebook.-- Sum
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Another beautifully written essay, spanning details to the big unknowables. -- Galen
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As I get older, I, too, often think of my mortality, and what lies beyond. Of course, we don't really know unless we embrace the beliefs of the Believers, and, of course, that is at best something I only speculate about and raise my eyebrows. Still, there might be something to it. After all, I fancy thinking that when I go, my father will be waiting for me. I've missed him for eighteen years and I really would like to hug him again on some puffy white cloud. -- Zoey
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Nice, descriptive writing. The college scene was too much for me. That and the drugs! -- Gambatay
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Poignant ..loved it -- Juliari
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Mike, I don't know about an afterlife. I just know that people who face it with dignity are to be admired. God help us all with that. -- Wht
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I enjoyed reading the essay. I am sorry about your illness. I am thinking about writing about some embarrassing experiences for my next newspaper column. Here are two experiences that you might find amusing. When I was a freshman at Yale, I was on the front row in a psychology class. The professor started talking about sex. I fainted and fell on the floor dramatically. The professor asked a student to escort me to the infirmary. Another time I was standing in a bookstore in Grand Central Station. I was reading a passage in a book about the sex habits of French girls, and I fainted again. I later was able to enjoy sex without fainting. I do not remember what the book said about French girls. -- Ken

Gee, Ken, some women mind find that fainting quirk endearing, if it didn’t alarm them. They might even invite some of their girlfriends to watch, which could lead to some intriguing possibilities. MB