Cold Extremities ... Warm Memories ... and Slip-Slidin' Away....

The Looking Glass
by Jennifer Johnston

Inside Phong Nha Cave, Vietnam ... now a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Super Bowl Sunday ... day without end ... unless you're really involved with one of the two teams playing, or at a really great party!!! I haven't watched a Super Bowl since the last time Dallas won (Super Bowl XXX, back in the mid-'90s) ... and even then, it wasn't as much fun as it used to be back in the 1970s, when we knew and partied with some of the players. It was a day to give thanks for our DVR and PPV. Among other things, we watched an interesting History Channel "Cities of the Underworld" ... that particular episode focusing on Vietnam and documenting the tunnels at Cu Chi (claustrophobia to the max!!!), the underground complex at Vinh Moc, and the beautiful caves at Phong Nha, a redoubt of the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War.

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, ice came to Dallas, and most of North Texas and Oklahoma, along with great swaths of the Midwest. Those were days to just hunker down with a book, or watch TV, to sit in front of the roaring fire in reverie and remembrance. We got down our photograph albums ... of the two of us (separately and after we met) when we were younger, of our children when they were children and later as they matured into married parents of their own progeny, of our travels all over the world ... sharing "do you remember" stories with each other once again. In late afternoon, we even roasted marshmallows in the fireplace (something we hadn't done in years) and that evening enjoyed fresh blackberries in heavy cream, conjuring decadence as we gazed at the ice outside. But mostly we just enjoyed each other's company, and felt wonderfully blessed again by the good outcome of Yahn's recent health problems. Of course at our age, "health problems" will likely become more and more frequent, absent any sudden severing of the invisible cord tethering us to this life ... but for the moment, I digress....

As I frequently do at reflective times in winter, I flashed back to the Bobcat band bus trips to away games, or competitions ... somehow the memory is always of cold weather on the old bus, its heater struggling mightily to stay up with the penetrating chill, friends huddled together under blankets and talking, breath coming in cold clouds from our warm mouths ... or frequently, a group joining in singing really old songs ... of course the round, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and Let Me Call You Sweetheart, Bicycle Built for Two, Goodnight Irene, You'll Never Walk Alone and Sentimental Journey ... mostly songs of our parents' and grandparents' generations. I can hear the sweet harmonies of the King twins, Jean and Joan, with Linda Jane Denny, Carol Fromm, Dana Purcell, Katherine Crain, Marilyn Baker ... Eddie Huddleston and Larry Harris and Ronnie Day and Gary Dorman and Gale Sisco blending their voices with those of the girls. And gradually, after sitting back in Freshman shyness, the rest of us would join in ... Linda Kay, Pat, Clara, Sheila, Linda Sally (Lynn adding her voice a year later).... In my memory, we sounded pretty darn good ... and the melding of notes and tones always seemed to give us a sense of warmth, and camaraderie and belonging.

I also thought of winter in Childress itself ... the main memory being of a howling, haunted, biting wind ... blowing cold through the streets and across the fields outside town. Perhaps the memory is just sharper because that wind cut such an crevasse into my young mind ... but I don't remember ever being as cold in my life as it was every time a "Blue Norther" roared into the Panhandle. It just seemed that there weren't enough layers ... coats and scarves and hats and mittens ... to keep that cold from slicing to the bone and then settling there, chilling you from the inside out. Sometimes, if it was cold enough and windy enough, the car (like the band bus) was simply incapable of warming its occupants, occasionally curtailing the nightly ritual of riding around, dragging Main and down through the Fair Park and around the Dairy Mart ... and the only thing that would dispel that misery was to head for home, where there was a warm fire and warm faces and warm hot chocolate if I asked my grandmother to make it. (Somehow it never occurred to me that I could actually make my own hot chocolate ... after all, Frances Long had taught us how in Home Ec. But, as I've said before, I was unbelievably spoiled by my Mamaw....)



Photograph by David Lombardo

One winter in the early '60s, there was an ice storm in Childress. There were a few such storms during the years I lived there, but this one is lodged prominently in memory because the wise cancellation of school for a couple of days seemed to me and Linda Kay and Lynn and Pat and Linda Sally the perfect time to go out and deliver band candy that we had sold that Fall to raise money for new uniforms. Off in the Studebaker we went, full of teenage immortality, and I remember slip-slidin' all over town ... fortunately the only things we collided with were curbs when the ice clawed the car's traction into submission ... although we did have a couple of scary spinouts. As we knocked on the different doors to deliver the candy, people looked at us as if ... as they frequently expressed ... we were "nuts" for being out on such a day. My grandmother's BFF, "Sis" McClendon (Max's mother) actually tried to forbid us from leaving the warmth of her living room ... but we exited laughing and sliding on the sidewalk, tempting fate once again.

When it is cold, I always recall with silent tears the loss of a truly twindred spirit with prodigious gifts but a crippling duality of nature and a paralyzing inability to seize and truly embrace the possibilities of living, to find out what might have been, who "signed off" from growth and life (though he continued to breathe), who once dreamed of love and fireplaces and drifted powder and ski lodges in the heat and the horror and moral ambiguity of Vietnam....

I met my darling Yahn in the deep snows of Colorado Springs (when I probably shouldn't have been driving again) on February 15, 1967 (the day after Valentine's Day), and when I moved there to be closer to him almost a year later I took a funky (cheap!) little house in the hippie haven of Manitou Springs. The usual street approaching my house went almost straight up, and when there was snow and ice on the pavement, there was no way my little Mustang was going to make it up the hill, so getting home required a round-about approach to a street where, if I could rev the car just right and hold the pedal to the metal, I could just manage to navigate a slightly lower hill and approach the little house from the back.

Yahn and I had fun remembering the snow and ice storms that visited Dallas when we (and our children) were young ... sliding on the ice (with a pratfall or two thrown in as comic relief and fortunately, no broken bones), and making snow angels and snow ice cream with Shannon and Chiara and some of their friends.

Our first year in Houston, we went to sunny Acapulco for Christmas/New Year ... wonderful days lying by the grotto pool (with the swim-up bar!) at the Acapulco Princess hotel, which overlooked Revolcadero Beach. On our return trip, as we approached Houston International Airport, the pilot announced that the ground temperature in Houston was 18 degrees (and he wasn't talking centigrade!). By the time we got to the car (in our shorts and short sleeves ... it was 87-ish when we left) we were frozen. There was no heat on in the house (fortunately our pipes had not burst, as they had in houses all around us) so we had to crank it up and go back to the car and drive around for an hour or so until the house was habitable.

One of my favorite cold memories is of New Year's Day and night in Zurich, Switzerland (1988), where Yahn and I found ourselves on an unscheduled stopover (again with no winter clothes) on our return from our first trip to Egypt. Snow and ice notwithstanding, we were determined to see as much of Zurich as we could, so "layered up" to brave the chill. We made frequent stops in eating and drinking establishments along our route, where we were welcomed so warmly and solicitously, and after a few mulled wines and some Irish coffees, we found ourselves "toasted" indeed....

And of course there was the nonpareil New Year (1994-95) we spent in Paris ... with thousands of lights lining the Champs Elysees, twinkling in the bitter cold, as we walked among the revelers and ate dinner at L'Alsace (where we were given New Year's wishes enunciated very carefully in English by an old French couple who had determined that we were Americain), before retreating to our warm hotel room and ushering in the year watching fat, puffy snowflakes fall into the picturesque streets as we sipped champagne and kissed at midnight. One of my favorite, most romantic memories ever....

Ironically, ice and cold seem almost invariably to kindle a desire for warmth and love ... family, friends, home. I've often thought over the years that "home" is anywhere where you are carried and held in love and memory.... Of course the poet Robert Frost posited (in his The Death of the Hired Man) that "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

And as I recently sat sleepily nodding by the fire, dreaming of the soft look and deep shadows in lovers' eyes, and pilgrim souls with sorrowful changing faces (with a nod to my old friend William Butler Yeats), of course my thoughts turned inevitably to this blended autumn/winter of our lives ... "the days dwindling down to a precious few" ... more days behind us than are ahead ... the fact that we will now likely lose more friends than we will make again ... all the sad, sweet, terribly beautiful poignancy of this time and these days ... the memories "of splendor in the grass and glory in the flower" (thank you William Wordsworth) weaving ineluctably and seamlessly with our speculations and beliefs of what lies in store for us. Lest this sound just too maudlin, let me assure you that I don't dwell on death ... although I do ponder a lot about what may come ... but I recognize the inevitable. I am not afraid of dying ... indeed, I am more afraid of living longer than my body and my faculties hold out ... a "living death," in my mind, and much more frightening than the idea of my soul passing from this life to the next.



Alfons Mucha poster of Maude Adams as Joan of Arc, 1909

I believe that love transcends life ... and lives.... I believe love is eternal and immortal ... and that we will find again (and again) those we have loved. And in that frame of mind, I recently wrote a poem, the first poem I've written since high school. I will share it with you here:

Waking soft in a spectral vision—

Cloud cobra coils 'round waning moon

With ancient rhythm, cold precision—

Her somnolent gaze arrested soon

Upon a feral, darkling garden drowned

In shades and shadows, sorrow's sighs.

A silver trail on leaf-strewn ground

Lights her escape 'neath restive skies.

His whisper carries on the air,

Twin souls rejoin in melding breeze—

Their final promise tendered there

In lives reborn, past memories.

-- Jennifer Johnston Smith, 2008

General Douglas MacArthur wrote: "People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope or as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then and only then are you grown old. And then, indeed as the ballad says, you just fade away."

For now I shall choose to fade away (at least temporarily) ... before this grows to unmanageable length ... until my next post (about medical and legal matters which are becoming increasingly more important and more urgent at this time of our lives)....

Stay warm, and young, and hold love and hope and all the sweet gifts of life close to you....

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