Rutabagas of a Feather Flock Together
In memory of Beverly Fitzsimmons Neal Darmour
Maureen Neal
1. Beloit Girl Is Bride in West (from Beloit Daily News, July 1944)
The marriage of Beverly Jo Fitzsimmons, 607 Minnequa Ave., Pueblo, Colorado, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. O.W. Fitzsimmons, 1059 Fourth St., Beloit, to S. Sgt. Thomas V. Neal, Jr., son of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas V. Neal, San Antonio, was solemnized at Trinity Lutheran Church in Pueblo Friday, July 7, at 4:30 p.m. The Rev. Paul Stephan officiated in the single ring ceremony and Miss Berenice Johnson of Beloit and Clair Vincent were attendants.
For the service the bride wore an aqua blue and white print with white accessories and gardenia corsage. Following the ceremony a wedding dinner was served to the bridal party and several guests at the Whitman Hotel. The bride, a graduate of St. Mary’s in Madison, is an X-ray technician at Corwin Hospital in Pueblo and will continue with her work there while the groom, a radio man with a bomber crew, goes out on active duty. He was attending Baylor University before going into the Air Corps.
2. From my mother’s poetry notebook, Beloit High School c. 1942
What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter,
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
— William Shakespeare
3. Wedding Day Photograph: Pueblo, Colorado, July 7, 1944
My father is lounging in an Adirondack chair, dressed in his Army Air Corps dress uniform. He has a very large Adam’s apple and blondish hair and a long, thin nose. His left elbow is resting ever so casually in his lap, right arm wrapped around my mother’s waist as she sits above him on the uphill wing of the chair. They are looking quite seriously at each other, not at the camera. My mother’s beautiful black hair is scooped up in a tidy and slightly top-heavy bun, and yes, she is wearing a gardenia corsage.
When my mother called her parents in Wisconsin to tell them what she’d done, after she had already done it and there was no going back, her father did not offer his congratulations. Instead, he said You’re a damn fool and hung up the phone.
4. I Like
I like red hair
And swing tunes
And poetry (quatrains in poetry)
And tiny new moons;
BLANK
Blue eyes
With curly lashes;
The smell of a storm—
Lightning’s flashes;
BLANK
Flowers like hollyhocks
And candied phlox;
Dirty saddle shoes
With flashy socks;
BLANK
Stars that puncture
The night like a penny;
Money—‘specially when
I haven’t any!
BLANK
Pork chops ‘n’ dressing;
Frying onion’s smell;
And the sound in winter
Of an old church bell;
BLANK
No pastel colors—
But gaudy red;
Spicy apple butter on
Fresh baked bread;
BLANK
Pleated skirts that
Twirl ‘round my knees;
Glorious sunsets—
Tall pine trees;
BLANK
High-sounding adjectives:
“Poignant” and “subtle”;
Fuzzy kittens and things
That cuddle;
BLANK
Pithy phrases like
“Stars in my eyes”;
“Footlongs” with the “works”
And salty French fries;
BLANK
I also like peace
And quiet and prayer—
Snow in my eyes;
Wind in my hair.
BLANK
Beverly Jo Fitzsimmons (1941)
5. Lost—Ladies’ black drawstring purse (from The La Veta [CO] Advertiser, Sept. 5-7, 1945)
Containing $600 in Travelers’ Checks and approximately $200 in cash. Lost in the vicinity of LaVeta Wednesday, Sept. 5. Finder please return to Advertiser office. Liberal reward.
The above advertisement was placed in The Advertiser Wednesday and an explanation of the facts brought a distinct tug to our heartstrings—maybe our readers will be affected the same way:
A newly-discharged soldier and his wife visited LaVeta this week on a recreational trip. They obtained a cottage at a local cottage camp and Wednesday morning decided to make a side trip to see the Sand Dunes in the Alamosa district. They packed their belongings and started early in the morning, but on reaching Alamosa found that the purse, mentioned in the ad above, was missing. A hurried review of their actions since leaving the LaVeta cabin established the fact that the purse had been left on the running board of the car in the packing-up operation and overlooked when they started the trip, and was lost somewhere between the cabin and Alamosa, probably near LaVeta. But here is some additional information that colors the story of the lost purse and money. The soldier was emaciated from long illness, could have been recently discharged from a foreign prisoner of war camp—we didn’t ask. The couple were on their way to the soldier’s home in Texas, but stated that he expected to return to Colorado for a long rest in an effort to regain his health and strength. The lost money probably was the savings from his period of army service, plus his discharge pay, and was the stake he had expected to use while he was recuperating. We hope some honest person finds that purse and money intact and returns it to The Advertiser. We sure will ship it on to the boy and his young wife with all speed possible, because we know he needs it badly.
6. Diogenes Can Quit Searching (from The Pueblo [CO] Chieftain, Sept. 22, 1944)
Don’t tell Tommy Neal, recently discharged soldier and now a reporter for the Durango Herald-Democrat, that there are few honest men.
Mr. and Mrs. Neal, en route to Durango last week, stopped in LaVeta. Later, after arriving in Walsenburg, Mrs. Neal discovered that her pocketbook containing $800, Neal’s Army savings, had been lost in LaVeta.
Without much hope they placed an ad in the LaVeta paper. The ad yielded prompt results. Charles Bruce, driver of a LaVeta milk route, found the purse and returned it.
7. Black and white photograph: Birmingham, Alabama, 24 Dec. 1937
My father is 15 years old, almost 16, and dressed in a tie and top coat, rubbing a snowball into his mother’s face from a position slightly behind and above her. Snow, yes, you can hardly believe it. In Birmingham! Snow on the bushes by the front door, snow on the trees by the porch, snow on the ground, snow in his hands. She is wearing a church hat, a print dress, and an overcoat, and I don’t know if she is happy or not. She is laughing but maybe it’s more embarrassment than cheer, I can’t tell which. She is trying to stave off the snowball in the face with one arm, but I am pretty sure she doesn’t succeed.
Doc and Nana. Doc whose pocket watch I stole from on top of the dresser at 339 13th St. in Durango, the one time they ever came to see us, when I was 8 or 9 and old enough to know better. Nana, who died of a heart attack while sitting on a bench outside a bank in downtown Birmingham, waiting for the bus to come.
8. Black and white photograph: Beloit, Wisconsin, c. 1946
Ora and Amelia, a.k.a. Mr. and Mrs. O.W. Fitzsimmons, standing in the sun in their Lutheran Sunday best: He is handsome, jaunty in a snapped-down fedora and brown overcoat, trim and crisp and clean; Amelia, the grandmother I never knew, is wearing a street-length fur coat with collar, hat with flowers and veil, entirely practical black lace-up square-toed shoes. On the back, Amelia writes to my mother, by way of explanation,
I have my purse in my arm—looks kind of funny as if I had a big fur cuff. I don’t look near 70
(do I). Or do I?
9. Durango, Colorado: January, 1946
My father writes, on the back of the photograph, Me and Fitz on the [Fort Lewis] Mesa, taken last fall. He is thin and dapper in a caramel-colored top coat buttoned up all the way and a striped tie and a beautifully crisp pair of trousers flapping in the wind. My mother is wearing a red dress and an open black overcoat and black heels, her eyes closed, a thin smile. The ground around them is dusty and dry, the path full of rocks and low-lying pinyon. There are dark storm clouds in the valley behind them.
10. A note from my father, July 1952
Dearest Fitz,
Good for you. Just got telegram from Irene and have written your dad and my folks and will drop a line to Arline first thing also. Sure am glad it was a girl. We are pretty lucky. You will have to write me and tell me all about it as soon as you feel up to it. Frankly, I don’t know what a husband is supposed to write to his wife when she has just had a baby and he is 12 or 1400 miles away. But I am awfully glad and love you and know that you must be glad it is all over with. We will let you rest for a few years now while we get those two little ones to the point where they don’t tear down the house. Wish I could be there with you today. Love you Fitz xxxxx tommy
11. On Our Anniversary (florist’s card sent with red roses, c. 1963)
Beverly,
I know the last 18 years have been rough for you, at times,
because of me—but I want you to know that I love you very
much & I know that the next 18 will be happy ones for you.
At least, I will try to make them so—and they will be happy
ones for me as long as I am with you. If I had it to do over again,
I would pick you above everybody else.
Happy anniversary, Tommy
12. Durango, Colorado, May 1970
When I answer the phone, no one says anything. I learn later that the held breath on the other end belongs to my father. He is trying to call my mother to tell her that he wants a divorce. This in spite of the weekend visit they just had in Topeka, Kansas, perhaps meant as a reparative tonic for their 26-year marriage, which had been at a low point for, say, at least the last three or four years. Could have been longer—much, much longer—depending on how you count the lost time, the empty spaces, the wrecked holidays, the thrown fork, the shouting and the sadness.
At any rate, when it’s not my mother who answers the phone, my father breathes into it for awhile, then hangs up. He calls again in five minutes, same result. And again ten minutes later, and yet again, until I am pretty sure that some psychotic killer looking for teenaged girls to maim has got a bead on me, because I am alone in the house and it’s getting dark.
I call the police, who tell me to stop answering the phone until my parents—emphasis on the plural—are home. But I already know it’s not likely that the two of them will be in this house at the same time ever again.
And they’re not.
13. Wedding Day Photographs: Durango, Colorado, 24 January 1971
I actually have no idea how my mother came to know, let alone marry, Mike Darmour.
But funny thing: Here he is in a brown suit made of the shiny kind of material that was popular for special occasions in those days, and he’s wearing spit-shined dress cowboy boots, a pink and gray-striped tie, gold cufflinks, a thick Masonic ring on the right hand, simple gold band on the left. I’ve never seen him without the moustache and sideburns or without the glasses, the kind that are supposed to go dark in the sunlight and lighten indoors, except that they never do get all the way clear inside the house, giving him a shady, cat-ate-the- canary sort of look. He’s a bit on the short side, round and beefy, and hairy (despite his bald forehead) in a way my father never was.
In fact, he and my father are totally opposite numbers.
Mike is a La Plata County deputy sheriff and a truant officer at the high school, and it’s just possible that he tracked me and my ski team friends Antonia and Mary Jo all the way to Purgatory Ski Area one day in the spring of our junior year. But that was before he married my mother.
What was she thinking?
She is marching down the aisle to the guillotine, apparently. Eyes straight ahead, shoulders back, aqua street-length dress with a pleated skirt twirling her knees. Cutting the cake afterward, she sends a so-there, fuck-you look primarily to my father, wherever he may be, but also to the whole world, head cocked slightly, eyes thin and challenging. Note: She would be absolutely appalled to hear me say that. But it’s true.
In pictures of the reception, she and Mike are penned in, backed up against the wood-paneled wall, nothing to do for it now but eat the cake, swallow the champagne, and go forward with the grit and the grind of the day in their veins.
14. Rutabagas of a Feather Flock Together (Mother’s Day card, c. 1980s )
My mother always tried to come see me, wherever I was living. These visits were only possible without my stepfather Mike, because he did not want to dig in someone else’s garden, float through a slow summer’s day with a picnic at the pond and a handful of crumbs to feed the ducks, drink vodka tonics while the casserole cooks, sleep with cats on a bed with a homemade quilt on it. So he would stay home, and my mother would come alone. When I lived in Gunnison and Grand Junction and Gateway, each time she rode the Greyhound bus from Durango to Cortez and over Lizard Head Pass to either Montrose or Grand Junction, and I would pick her up from there. I remember that when I had to put her back on the bus to go home, it always hurt my heart to see her standing in line all by herself and then waving goodbye from the bus window as it pulled away.
One year, she managed to come to Pagosa for two whole days in late September. She arrived on a spectacular Friday afternoon and the two of us went out to watch the high school football game, then headed home to my house on Lewis Street as the sun went down and the afternoon turned crisp and cool around the edges. She made us a little dinner—maybe chili cheese dogs and potato salad, something no one else liked but the two of us—and I made a fire in the wood stove. After dinner, we left the dishes in the sink and played African gin on the floor by the wood stove, never able to decide for sure whether a player should be able to pick up the whole discard pile or just the card on the top. Hoyle’s Rules of Games says only the card on top, but we decided that we should be able to go whole hog on the entire pile, because then the game will last a lot longer, which means that we will have plenty of time to talk and talk and talk.
In the morning, we drive up Four Mile Road with the chain saw and the two black dogs and ham sandwiches and home-made chocolate cookies and lemonade. We roll down the windows and throw our elbows out, breathing in the smell of a Saturday morning in September in the mountains—warm sun, willow and birch and aspen leaves down on the dirt road, hint of dampness in the woods. The sky is unbearably blue and clear through the aspen trees, which are at their peak, some red, some green, some orange, some a fantastic shade not of gold but of bright backlit yellow.
We gather a load of wood, but in a slow, leisurely way, cutting truck-length sections of aspen and spruce that have already fallen so close to the road that we can bump them into the side ditch and then into the truck and not have to roll them through a lot of underbrush. When we’ve got a full load, we eat our lunch on the tailgate of the truck and watch the dogs chase squirrels and camp robbers that hop and peck a little too close to the chocolate cookies. Then we head for home by way of Plumtaw Road, traveling at dustless, wakeless speed through the river of late afternoon light. My mother breathes in a big gulp of the crisp fall air and says, Oh my, aren’t we lucky. Aren’t we just so lucky.
15. December, 2018 (Grand Junction, Colorado)
It’s been almost two years since my mother died, and today for the first time in a long time I open the back door to ice on the step, gray snow clouds thick and deep in the southwest, no leaves on the locust tree, a few inches of snow on the ground and on the roofs of the houses across the alley. The snow hangs on by its toenails to the bare branches of the tree, and it’s beautiful. My mother used to say that when you see snow sticking to the branches like that it means it’s going to hunker down and snow all day, which is a good sign, because I just hate it when it breaks up in late morning, say around 10 o’clock, and the blue sky comes out and it stops snowing and starts looking like an ordinary winter day.
On this particular morning, because it smells like snow and ice and a tiny whiff of pine smoke, I suddenly see myself again on that January morning, opening the back door to go get Addie Mae and slipping on the ice on the step, like in a slapstick Three Stooges movie, both feet flying completely over my head, landing hard on my butt, not even capable of rolling over and getting up because the ice is so thick. I lie on my back, the snow falling into my mouth, and I think OK, I have just broken my tailbone. It’s the worst possible time, because I have absolutely got to drive to Durango today. I slide on hands and knees to the grass, which is not as slick as the cement of the stoop, and then I manage to get one foot and then one knee inside the door, although Addie Mae is still skating around on all fours out on the sidewalk.
We take a look at the weather and realize Red Mountain is closed, Coal Bank and Molas are closed, Lizard Head is closed, Highway 141 to Gateway and Naturita and Slick Rock is a sheet of ice. Twelfth Street in Grand Junction is also a sheet of ice, for that matter, and nothing moves outside. I call my mother and get Deidre, who takes a long time to get her on the phone. I say I have fallen on the ice and the roads are terrible and I just can’t come today, but I will come tomorrow. My mother says, Oh honey, I don’t want to worry about you out on the road today. You just come on when you can, and don’t you worry one bit about it. She takes the time to take a breath. And then she says, I’ll still be here tomorrow.
We eat a grilled cheese sandwich and wait for the ice to clear so we can go out and shovel without falling down. At about two o’clock, I decide I need to venture out to True Value for some salt for the driveway and the sidewalk. For some reason, I take a long, long time to figure out what brand of de-icer is best, because I don’t want to kill the grass or the trees, but on the other hand, I just have to be able to get out of town tomorrow. I buy my de-icer, drive gingerly down 12th, creep around the left turn onto Chipeta, begin a slow sideways slide down the driveway toward the garage. I come even with the back door, and Lyn is standing there crying with the phone in her hand.
It really does hit you like a punch in the gut.
I get into the garage and then cling with both hands to the workbench, with the pliers and the screwdrivers and the socket wrenches and the four kinds of hammers and the gas cans and the smell of dust and WD 40, and I see the little brown box of garden seeds my mother gave me one Christmas, with the packets of four o’clocks and carrots and Blue Lake green beans and a jar of her own dried hollyhock pods and the ZipLoc bag of homemade banana peel fertilizer.
But she is gone for good and she is not coming back.
I know this right away, except that I don’t. You never do.
16. Parable of the Sower, c. 1988
It’s spring, and my mother and I are sitting at the dining room table in my old house at 1404 White Ave. in Grand Junction, examining flats of tomatoes and carrots I started from seed that now need to be thinned so that what’s left will be sturdy and garden-ready in a few more weeks. I know we have to pull out at least half the plants, but still, I hate to see them go, since I am so proud of myself for having got them to come up at all. So I turn the thinning task over to my mother, who starts in on the tomatoes. A farmer—hmm, that’s you, Reen—went out to throw some seed in the ground, she says. And some fell on the rocky ground—here she pinches out three or four tomato seedlings—and some fell on, let’s see, the thorny ground—here she takes out several more—and some got too close to the sidewalk and got burned up in the hot sun. She hovers over the last few she wants to chuck and says, with two raised eyebrows, And some fell on soil that needed but didn’t have your mother’s special homemade banana peel fertilizer to help them along. We crack up laughing.
Oh, yeah, I say. Let all who have ears hear. Then we both take a shot at the carrots.