The Stranger Who Changed My Life: A Short Love Story
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In 1983, I was traveling
with a tiny theater company doing vaudeville-type shows in
community centers and bars—anywhere we could earn $25
each plus enough gas money to get to the next small town in our ramshackle
yellow bus.
As
we passed through Bozeman, Montana, in early February, a heavy snow slowed us
down. The radio crackled warnings about black ice and poor visibility, so we
opted to impose on friends who were doing a production of Fiddler
on the Roof at
Montana State University. See a show, hit a few bars, sleep on a sofa: This is
as close to prudence as it gets when you’re an itinerant 20-something
troubadour.
After the show,
well-wishers and stagehands milled behind the curtain. I hugged my coat around
me, humming that “If I Were a Rich Man” riff from the show, aching for sunrise
and sunset, missing my sisters. What a wonderful show that was—and is.
A heavy metal door swung
open, allowing in a blast of frigid air, and clanged shut behind two men who
stomped snow from their boots. One was big and bearlike in an Irish wool
sweater and gaiters; the other was as tall and skinny as a chimney sweep in a
peacoat.
“… but I’m just saying, it
would be nice to see some serious theater,” one of them said. “Chekhov, Ibsen,
anything but this musical comedy shtick.”
“Excuse me?” I huffed,
hackles raised. “Anyone who doesn’t think comedy is an art form certainly
hasn’t read much Shakespeare, have they?”
I
informed them that I was a “professional shticktress” and went on to deliver a
tart, pedantic lecture on the French neoclassics, the cultural impact of Punch
and Judy as an I Love Lucy prototype, and the
importance of Fiddler on the Roof as both artistic and oral
history. The shrill diatribe left a puff of frozen breath in the air. I felt my
snootiness showing like a stray bra strap as the sweep in the peacoat rolled
his eyes and walked away.
The bear stood there for a
moment, an easy smile in his brown eyes. Then he put his arms around me and
whispered in my ear, “I love you.”
I took in a deep, startled
breath—winter, Irish wool, coffee, and fresh-baked bread—and then pushed away
with a jittery half-joke. Something like, “Watch it. I have pepper spray.”
“OK,” he said with a broad
baritone laugh. “Come for a walk, then. It’ll be nice.”
I shook my head. Alarm and
skepticism warred with spreading, unsteady warmth behind my collarbone.
“Walking around in the freezing dark with a total stranger is not nice,” I
said. I tipped a glance to the well-worn gaiters. “Planning to do some
cross-country skiing?”
“Riding my bike,” he said,
and then added without apology, “I’m between vehicles.”
He held the heavy door open
expectantly. I moved the pepper spray from my purse to my coat pocket and
followed my heart out under the clear, cold stars.
“What are you reading?” I
asked, because that question always opens doors of its own. I was in the habit
of asking the nuns at the bus stop, a barber who paid me to scrub his floor
once a week, elderly ladies and children at the park. To this day, I ask people
who sit beside me on airplanes, baristas at Starbucks, exchange students
standing in line with me. Over the years, “What are you reading?” has
introduced me to many of my favorite books and favorite people.
The
bear had a good answer: “Chesapeake. Have you read it?”
“No,
but I love James Michener,” I said. “When I was 12, I fell in love with Hawaii and vowed that if I ever
had a daughter, I’d name her Jerusha after the heroine.”
“Big book for a
12-year-old.”
“We didn’t have a TV. And I
was a dork.”
He laughed that broad
baritone laugh again. “Literature: last refuge of the tragically uncool.”
“Same could be said of
bicycling in your ski gaiters.”
The conversation ranged
organically from books and theater to politics and our personal histories.
Having embraced the life of
an artsy party girl, I was the black sheep of my conservative Midwestern
family, thoroughly enjoying my freedom and a steady diet of wild oats. He’d
spent a dysfunctional childhood on the East Coast. A troubled path of drug and
alcohol abuse had brought him to one of those legendary moments of clarity at
which he made a hard right turn to an almost monkish existence in a tiny
mountain cabin. He’d built an ascetic life that was solitary but substantive,
baking bread at a local restaurant, splitting wood for his heating stove, staying
out of trouble.
“That probably sounds
pretty dull to you,” he said.
“Agonizingly dull, but
don’t worry,” I said, and then patted his arm. “Maybe someday you’ll remember
how to have fun.”
He shrugged. “Maybe someday
you’ll forget.”
We talked about the things
people tend to avoid when they’re trying to make a good impression: hopes
subverted by mistakes, relationships sabotaged by shortcomings. My bus was
leaving in the morning, and we would never see each other again, so there was
no need to posture.
Fingers and chins numb with
cold, we found refuge in a Four B’s Restaurant and sat across from each other
in a red vinyl booth. We had enough money between us for a short stack of
buckwheat pancakes. A few morning papers were delivered to the front door, and
we worked our way through the crossword puzzle, coffee cups between our hands.
The sun came up, and we emerged from Four B’s to discover a warm chinook blowing in. Already the eaves were weeping, icicles thinning on trees and telephone wires. This is what Montana does in midwinter: clears off and gets bitter cold, and then suddenly it’s as warm and exhilarating as Easter morning. Don’t believe it for a minute, you tell yourself as the streets turn into trout streams, but the sheer pleasure of the feeling makes a fool of you. You forget your scarf and mittens on a hook behind the door. You know it’s still winter, but that’s just what you know; the chinook is what you believe in.
The bear held my hand
inside his coat pocket as we walked in silence back to the parking lot to meet
my company’s bus. Before he kissed me, he asked me if I was ready. Ready for
what I have no idea, but ready is how I felt. I was stricken with readiness.
Humbled by it.
“I hope you have a
wonderful life,” I told him.
“You too,” he replied
before nodding stiffly and walking away.
The bus lumbered through
the slush and labored over the mountains to a fading Highline town where we
were booked to play a quaintly shabby old opera house. The guy at the box
office immediately pegged me as a party girl who’d been up all night and
invited me to go to the bar next door for a hair of the dog before the show,
but I could not for the life of me remember why that used to sound like fun.
Later that evening, as I
did my shtick out on the foot-lit stage, I heard the bear’s distinctive
baritone laughter from somewhere in the audience. After the show, he was
waiting for me by the door. I didn’t bother asking him how he’d gotten there.
He didn’t bother asking me where I wanted to go.
I can’t endorse the idea of
love at first sight, but maybe there are moments when God or fate or some
cosmic sense of humor rolls its eyes at two stammering human hearts and says,
“Oh, for crying out loud.” I married the bear a few months later in a meadow
above his tiny cabin in the Bridger Mountains. We weren’t exempted from any of
the hard work a long marriage demands, but for better or worse, in sickness and
in health, that moment of unguarded, chinook-blown folly has somehow lasted 30
years.
We laugh. We read. I do
dishes; he bakes bread. Every morning, we work through the daily crossword
puzzle. Our daughter, Jerusha, and son, Malachi Blackstone (named after his
great-grandfather and an island in Chesapeake Bay) tell us we are agonizingly
dull.
We listen to their
20-something diatribes and smile.
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