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The Artist’s
Almanac
February 2011
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There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.
In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on
each other;
only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet
stretches
when you can savor belonging to yourself."
- Ruth Stout
Falling snow is more exciting than
fallen snow. It started mid – afternoon and by dark the cedar limbs
are draping white and the magnolia leaves stand out in detail. There
is no telling how long it may go on and we might even get out of
school or work and have to sit home by the fire and read Tolstoy or
Walker Percy. Once it starts melting, which is pretty soon in our
part of the country, it turns tawdry and we track brine onto our
carpets.
But this quiet February
afternoon it is beautiful. I’m looking forward to Valentines
next week and a spring thaw. My valentine to good wife was
published in the local newspaper yesterday, and is reprinted
here for you.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I met Claudia Owen at the State
Beta Club convention when we were juniors in High School. She
was from Covington, a place in faraway West Tennessee I’d never
heard of, I from Gallatin. We were both running for state office
and were introduced by our sponsors in the lobby of the old
Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville, where we were too busy
passing out campaign cards and greeting voters to take much
notice.
The next night there was a dance
in the ballroom of the Hermitage Hotel. From my first dance with
her I knew - here was someone unlike anyone I had ever met in my
life. I was literally swept away and dizzied by the encounter.
We talked far into the night,
and by the time we finished breakfast together the next morning
we knew we had a lot more to talk about. We exchanged pictures,
met again at the convention next year and spent every minute we
could together, given the duties of office and the silly skits
we had to perform in the talent shows on the stage of the War
Memorial Auditorium.
Then came the most serious
threat to our relationship we ever knew – college. I was a
freshman at Vanderbilt – she at Southwestern at Memphis, today’s
Rhodes College. There were distractions for both of us –
fraternity and sorority, dances, other people. My fraternity
brothers from Memphis told me of her popularity there – favorite
of the fraternity parties, Homecoming Queen, and of her busy
social life. I figured I was sunk. I stopped writing and she
turned my picture to the wall. I was flunking out of college,
facing the draft, strangely lethargic, and adrift.
Then, a letter from her told of
a forthcoming event at Middle Tennessee State College where she
and some of her sorority sisters would be appearing onstage. I
went, saw her at a distance and was once more overwhelmed by my
strong attraction to her. We talked, resumed our letters and I
invited her to a fraternity house party at Montgomery Bell State
Park.
As we sat in a rowboat on the
still lake that night, the stars swirling overhead, I remarked,
“The boat is no longer drifting, is it?” She whispered in my
ear, “Neither are we.”
 That
summer Stokely Dismukes and I were drafted and shipped off to
the hot, sandy, pine barrens of Camp Rucker, Alabama, for basic
training. The night I awoke on the garbage rack pulling K.P.
among a strange potpourri of people the likes of whom I had
never been exposed to represented a new low for me.
I pulled a weekend pass and rode
all night on a Greyhound bus to Memphis to be with her. My
proposal to her that night in the back seat of a taxi at the old
Cotton Boll drive-in restaurant on Crosstown was, “will you wait
for me?”
“Of course I will”, she replied,
and the trajectory of my life turned up once again.
She kept my fraternity pin
secretly from then until graduation, and we regarded ourselves
as engaged, even as she continued her social life.
From there I went to Japan, and
then to the front lines along the 38th Parallel in Korea. Even a
world apart we were together in our thoughts and correspondence,
where I shared in letters with her the great adventure - the
temples, landscapes, the exotic tastes and smells of the Orient.
I shipped her Noritake china, Mikimoto pearls, silks, and
Japanese paintings which we still use. Two years of letters
allowed us the time we needed to express in writing our longing
for each other, our values and our preferences, so that by the
time I came home we had the details pretty well worked out and
were ready for the good times.
The wedding was attended by all
her large family, my best friends and even my High School
teachers, the Burrums and the Baulches. We were married in a
Baptist Church in Covington by her minister uncle.
During the six years from our
first meeting in 1949 to our marriage in 1955 neither the
separation of distance, different schools, college rivals, nor
even a Korean War, a world away, were able to make either of us
forget the other or the joy of recognition at meeting our better
selves that first night. Neither have fifty-six years.
Our lives have been filled with
miracles. No one can adequately describe the awe of experiencing
the birth of a child. We have had five such miracles, and eleven
grandchildren. Compound miracles.
After marriage I returned to
Vanderbilt on the G.I, Bill where I made straight A’s. Claudia
supported us with her work at the Tennessee State Library, until
the birth of our first child. After graduating in 1956 and six
years of work for Price Waterhouse, I joined a fellow staff
member to found our own local CPA firm. There I worked very hard
and built a 25 man firm, from which I retired in 2000 to paint
and write.
I married my best friend. Every
rendezvous is thrilling, we are still best friends, and we have
lots of things yet to talk about and to explore together. Her
garden always blooms, her table is set to welcome guests, and
her hearth is ever warm.
She is the hub of our expanded
family, and no important decision is made without consulting her
experience and wisdom. Certainly not by me. She tempers my
follies, celebrates my little triumphs, hears my hopes and my
complaints, nurses my wounds, gets me to the right place on
time, and keeps me from looking seedy.
A wise friend once observed to
me that it is not possible to know whether a man was a success
until you knew what it was he intended. My intention was sealed
the day I met Claudia. The success of realizing it has proved
more exciting than youth’s fondest imaginings and has numbered
me amongst the richest of men.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * Happy Valentine’s Day
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Several subscribers have
asked us about availability of volume two of our three volume
series on the Founding of the Cumberland Settlements. The book
is finished and it goes to the printer this week. It is
scheduled for delivery in May. As a subscriber to The Artists
Almanac you are entitled to a special prepublication discount of
10% on Thoroughfare for Freedom, a 17% discount on
The Land Grant Genealogy, and Free Shipping and Postage on
either or both. Details to follow by separate email.
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Bill
Puryear, Artist