Mourning becomes memory, part 2

Carolyn Kay Marquardt

August 10, 1949 – May 23, 2017

   If you asked those who knew Carolyn, they would tell you what they remembered most was her laugh. I remember it as a great full body dry heave of joy. They would also mention her hugs. “Huge sister hugs,” Marianne describes them.

   That Carolyn exuded joy was something well remembered by her nephew Sean.  “She was almost always smiles from cheek to cheek; this happiness tended to resonate with everyone around her, and aside from being a very fun and outgoing auntie, this was probably another of many reasons I always looked forward to her company.”

   Upon our return from our last European trip, someone asked me if I’d met any interesting people. Carol stifled a laugh; I thought the question, asked of me, was rhetorical. While I do prefer to travel invisibly, and ask only that humankind for the most part act the same, some personalities strike you in a profound, if unobtrusive way, that you’re happy to deactivate your cloaking device and meet them openly on common ground.

  I believe most tourists to any place on the globe at one time or another, confront the same question: what would it be like to live here full time. A number of these tourists went on to do it and then write about it. I’ve read several of these well-written memoirs (Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence always comes to mind first). They’ve all taken me on amazing journeys, but have wound up at the same terminus for me: Don’t do it.

Those who knew Carolyn’s travel photos and are now viewing Carol’s on my blog may have noted a marked similarity in photographic eye, color and composition. This has come as a bit of a surprise to Carol, as she has seen several of Carolyn’s Shutterfly books.

   “They’re so beautiful and professional,” Carol has remarked. “It was her hobby.”

    I set out almost immediately to spoil Carol once we began our new life together. I had spent five years with Carolyn perfecting the dynamics of spoiling a human being, and I was confident I had command of the basics.

   The first roadblock I ran into was serving Carol’s morning coffee in bed. When word had gotten around I was serving Carolyn her coffee in bed, I was approached by a semi-distraught husband who told me: “Because of you, I’m getting up even earlier now just to keep up.”

   On May 3, 2018, Carol and I met for the first time, following a two-month long “courtship” via email and PM (Instant Messenger). Having been a reader of my blog dealing with widowhood and solo travel, both from a point of view of self-deprecation that could be as withering as it was pinpoint accurate, there was a pretty good chance Carol’s initial interest was professional. I believe I can help him, I imagined her thinking. That made Carol different from all the other readers, whom I took for granted believed I was beyond help.   

   We were part of a tourist horde heading for Trevi Fountain, and Carol could sense I was not in a Sammy Cahn frame of mind. It was getting late in the afternoon, and we hadn’t had lunch. That put me in the somewhat unromantic mood to just get to the damn fountain, throw the keys from our love lock in the stupid water and be done with it. Not exactly the kind of atmospheric hook Cahn might have been searching for banging out the notes to his famous tune on his piano.

  Maybe the reason I gained weight on this Italy trip has to do with what I did in between walking and eating. What I did in that in between time was sit. I did a lot of it, too, as I recall. There was no walking we did (unless it was to a restaurant) where I didn’t keep a sharp eye out for a bench, a bench with a good back too.

 During our month in Italy, we walked 135 miles, according to Carol’s misfit. The entire Italian peninsula is 600 miles long. That means in the course of walking to and from train stations and hotels, or to see stuff, or to figure out how we got lost and then on to pizza restaurants, we covered the equivalent of 22.5% of the entire peninsula. Looking at the east-west axis, we darn near walked the the entire 150 mile width of Italy.

  There was that day in my living room, when I was clipping my toenails, and one of them catapulted into the air and hit me right dead center of the bald spot on top of my head. Prior to that, I had had no idea that the curvature of a toenail (my big toe toenail does resemble the aerodynamics of  a boomerang) could produce such a perfect bend-it-like Beckham trajectory when clipped. (Okay, too much exposition?)