The Girl I Got

 

 Author's Note:

    I married above my station in life, but not blindly. Of course the girl was nice looking, but her dad had to be a fisherman, and he was. Her mother had to be a good cook, a good housekeeper, and in every other way have her life in order, and she did, and then some. Such had been the men and women in my life, and I was just barely smart enough to see the advantages of that lifestyle. On the other hand, the girl had plenty of options of her own. There were two Division 1 football players in her life; two or three young men Hollywood handsome, and a future millionaire or two. She picked me. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

        Fiftieth wedding anniversaries, you know, the "Golden" ones, grew on her family tree like ripe figs on a biblical tree. There were summers that seemed as if all we did was go to the big celebrations; hours spent eating white cake with sickening pure sugar icing, small plates of cashews and powdered sugar mints, lime in color, then going home starved to death, but homage paid to an event rarer and rarer in today's world.

        Came time for the fiftieth with the girl I got, and about six months before D-Day, one evening at the kitchen table she looked at me across the table, levelly, no warning, and said, "I don't want a big party for the fiftieth." I didn't have to ask her, "Fiftieth what". I had been dreading the moment, but with my mouth shut.

        "Are you serious?", I asked.

        "Yes, as serious as I can be."

        "What would you rather do?"

        Here was a curveball whose stitches I had not even begun to read. I had no idea what might come next.

        "I want you to take me up North, out of the heat, just you and me to a cabin where we can fish if we want to, or just stay in and eat good food, read books, listen to the loons, and me play solitaire. No portages. Absolutely no, portages. Can you arrange that?"

        There had been portages in her life with me. She knew all about them, as far north as the Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan. Oh, my goodness.

        "Yes, I can." And I did.

        About a month ago, leafing through an old cookbook for a recipe, the following story, written for my old newspaper column in 1995 (I think) fell out from where Pam had apparently tucked it away, for no apparent reason. You may have noticed my use of the word "old" twice in the previous sentence. It's because I am old. The girl I got is not.

                                                                             "The Girl I Got"

        I get questions from time to time. All sorts. It's apparent some people are interested in what kind of woman would marry a guy like me. Here's the kind of girl I got.

        One time years ago when we were still in college, Ronny and Sue Gage, Pam and I planned a an early March fishing-camping trip down where Big Sandy Creek empties into Lake Texoma.

        The guys would wade trotlines, and the girls would cook over the campfire the catfish we took off the lines. It went pretty much exactly that way.

        One night way below freezing, Ronny and I rolled up in blankets on the ground next to the fire while the girls did the same on the front and back seats of Ronny's old '49 Merc.

        According to the girls, the air circulating clear around the car body made its interior colder than fifty shades of arctic hell and much colder than our bed on the ground. I don't know. That's what they said. It's possible.

        What I do know is that when Ronny and I got up at daylight to run the lines, our wet jeans from the day before were frozen solid as planks where we had draped them to dry over a big, leaning sycamore.

        We laughed, sorta', yelling at the girls not to look as we struggled them on, remembering there were parts of your body God never intended to get cold.

        While were gone, the girls got up and started breakfast. While doing that, some of the previous day's catch began to flop and splash around in a five gallon bucket where we had stashed them until we got ready to clean them.

        Pam put up with the commotion for a little while, got tired of it, and then went over to the bucket, pulled out the biggest offender, about a five-pound channel cat, and started whacking it on the head with a heavy wooden-handled butcher knife. The fish quieted down, and Pam went back to making breakfast.

        Sue, a city girl from way back East who had never seen a live fish outside of an aquarium, was shocked into stunned silence by the violence that had spun from this small little blonde girl. Pam never noticed. She was too busy with eggs, hash browns, and a campfire. Finally she did notice the silence and looked up.

        "What's the matter" she asked, concerned. "Did you hear something?"

        "No," Sue said. "I was just thinking I hope you don't get mad at me."

        That's the kind of girl I got. If something needs whacking, it gets whacked.

        Some years later, that same bunch of people set up a fishing camp on an island in the middle of a flat calm, ebony-black Canadian lake whose shoreline was jagged with spruce.

        It was dark and the end of a day filled with thousands of canoe strokes. While the girls readied supper and tidied up camp, Ronny and hiked over the island's ridge to pick up driftwood on the windward side. While we were gone another, all male, canoe party showed up at the island's other end, took offense at the girls setting up camp on what they presumed to be "their" island, and one of the members began to dress the girls up one side and down the other with the kind of language you're used to hearing out of marines wrestling sailors in a Tokyo bar.

        The first foul language sent Sue scurrying to the back of the tent for cover. It brought Pam right to the front of the tent. "Sir!" she yelled right back at the offender, "Your mother would not be proud of your language!"

        It was the perfect thing to say to an educated moron. When Ronny and I rolled over the hilltop with big sticks in our hands, his friends began to apologize for him and were dragging him off towards their own camp at the other end of the island, making excuses about his recent workload and the alcohol.

        "Well", said Pam, "see that you keep him civil, and there won't be any trouble."

        Sue said later she was not surprised. Anybody that would whack a catfish over the head would do the same to a lawyer. She was right about that. That's the kind of girl I got.

        Recently, when the x-rays came back with a shadow in the wrong place, and the surgeries began, lots of us got worried. Coming out of recovery, foggy with anesthetic, the first thing she asked me was, "How are the kids?" That's the kind of girl I got. 

 © 2021 Conrad M. Vollertsen