She nodded, smiled, and kissed me. “Yes. I vividly remember how terrified I was when I saw that bear running toward me, but then I saw you standing on the deck of the cabin with a rifle against your shoulder. You appeared so calm; like shooting a running bear was something you did all the time. I was still scared, but I had little doubt you would do whatever it took to protect me. And you did.”
We found a Cabernet Blanc with overtones of pear and a hint of persimmon. Those flavors and its smooth finish complemented the fresh salmon dinner we had prepared together. We began our Sabbath celebration with Joan and Samantha each lighting candles and chanting the blessing.
I chanted the blessing over the wine then suggested, “We should sing the Shehechianu because I’m certain this would be the first of many Sabbath dinners we would be celebrating together. It also thanks God for allowing us to arrive at this day.” I could see tears forming in Joan’s eyes as we sang the beautiful prayer together.
Samantha recited the blessing over the lovely Sabbath Challah Joan had baked. Each tore a piece off the Challah, dipped it in salt, and ate it. Joan said Samantha participated in Sabbath as soon as she was big enough to help, making Sabbath special for both of them. Samantha even told me a little about this week’s Parsha—Bible reading.
As we began eating our soup, followed by Joan’s homemade gefilte fish, Joan and I debated the lessons to be learned from the Parsha.
“This is as special as our first Sabbath in the cabin,” Joan told me.
“As soon as I saw you at the mall, I prayed the connection between us was still there.”
The first Sabbath together meant so much to us because we were celebrating it as a family. Even the candles seemed to glow brighter than usual.
When Joan walked into the room with pumpkin pie for dessert, Samantha surprised us by saying, “Meyer, you’re going to enjoy this pumpkin pie. It has minnows baked in it.” And then she laughed her melodic laugh. My house was finally becoming a home as it filled with Joan and Samantha’s laughter.
After dinner we all read in the family room. Joan read a story to Samantha about Miriam. Then when Joan and I went to bed we performed the requisite Sabbath Mitzvah—a couple of times, as it happens.
Chapter Seven ~ Prelude to a Really, Really Long Kiss
A couple months later, on a cool, fall Northwest day, Joan and Javier, my gardener, were cleaning up some of the flower beds around my yard. There was a light breeze coming off the lake and large cumulus clouds glided across the sky, occasionally blocking out the sun.
Although Javier was being paid to take care of the gardens Joan found it therapeutic to have her hands involved in gardening and insisted on helping. She was looking and feeling much better than when I had first ran into her at the mall—she had so much more strength. We began working out together each morning during her weekend visits to my home.
She reported to her doctor that she no longer needed her sleeping pills. He asked what had changed and she told him she was in the best relationship of her life.
Her doctor told her, “Isn’t love grand?”
I couldn’t help but wonder if the garden would become Joan’s new canvas. The world seemed to brighten for her when working with plants.
While her mother and Javier worked, Samantha was busy helping them with her own child-sized garden tools and wheelbarrow and when I had finished some work in my office I joined them outside.
I took out a hoe and loosened the soil in a loamy eight-foot by two-foot flower bed. I had a bag of spring bulbs and yelled to Samantha, asking if she could help me.
She ran over to me with her little hoe on her shoulder. I started to tell her not to run when holding garden tools, but her mom beat me to it.
It was getting late in the afternoon and the temperature was dropping. Samantha’s cheeks were getting rosy from the cool air as I had her write her name on a small board. I added an apostrophe ‘s’ and printed the word garden after it. I attached the board to a stake and placed it at the edge of the flower bed.
“Now it’s officially your garden.”
I showed Samantha a picture of the flowers that would grow from the bulbs we were planting. “After the bulbs come up in the spring, we will plant more flowers and some carrots in your garden.”
We worked side by side and I showed her how to place the bulbs in the depression I had cut in the soil and taught her how the bulbs needed to be right side up.
“Are we going to cover them up with dirt?” Samantha asked.
I said yes.
“But how will they know which way is up?”
“Gravity will tell them.”
“You can’t feel gravity,” she informed me.
So I picked her up and threw her into the air and caught her. “See, gravity brought you back down to me or you would be headed to the moon by now. Did you feel it?”
“I’m not sure. Ummm…maybe you should send me up there again so I can check.”
I kept throwing her up in the air until my arms ached and Joan accused us of goofing off.
“We are certainly not goofing off.” I thought for a bit then added, “We’re performing a science experiment.”
She and Javier looked at each other and laughed hysterically.
I heard Javier tell Joan in his thick accent, “Mr. Meyer he’s more happier now you visit. Before you and Samantha coming over, him quiet and angry. And he no smile so much. I tell him one time, why you want to be alone in this big house, but he no answer. But now you and Samantha is coming over, dat big house; it fit you family. I know now, he have dat big house waiting for a familia. Sometime he look at you guys and he smile big—I think his head going to break. He so happy now.”
Joan smiled at him sweetly.
After a pause, Javier continued. “And Mr. Meyer, he sure adores la pequeña, Samantha.”
“I know,” Joan said. “And she adores Meyer. She’s loath to disappoint him. If she says something nasty to me, Meyer gives her that look of his and she knows immediately that he is upset with her—and she’s just crushed. And if Meyer tells her that her behavior hurt someone’s feelings, that’s good for a fifteen-minute cry. She can’t wait until the weekends when we can spend time here. She even calls him after her storytelling group at the library each weekday morning, so she can tell him about the story she heard that day. He was in a meeting with a client on Thursday when she called him. He interrupted the meeting to talk to her. One day she decided to draw a picture about the story she heard so she could give it to Meyer the following weekend. With all the expensive art in his house, he emptied an entire wall near the entry to make space for Samantha’s artwork.”
“Well, you know,” Javier said with a big grin on his face. “That’s what fathers do.”
I smiled at Javier’s words. He was in my corner.
Javier left for the day and we all went into the house to clean up. Joan brought up what Javier had said about fathers.
“Well, I’m not really her father,” I reminded her. “I mean, you haven’t caught up to my thinking about our future as a family yet.”
“Okay. Okay. I give up. I surrender.” She slid her arms around me, caressing the back of my neck. “I, without any doubt or reservation, want to spend the rest of my life with you, Meyer Minkowski.”
Samantha looked at us confused.
While gazing at me with an expression of love, plus one hand still on the back of my neck and the other around my waist, Joan said, “Samantha, we have to start planning a wedding.”
“Great! That will be fun. Who’s getting married?”
* * *
Around dinner time I made an announcement. “I think we should have some Champagne tonight.”
Joan looked at a grinning Samantha and appeared as if she thought we might be up to something.
I poured champagne for myself and Joan and ginger ale in a champagne glass for Samantha. She could barely contain her excitement. “Go ahead, Mom, drink your champagne.”
Joan cl
early suspected a trick. As I handed her a champagne flute, I concealed the bottom of the stem with my hand. Then as she took her champagne, she noticed the engagement ring tied to the stem with a bright pink ribbon. Her jaw dropped then she smiled.
“Joan, will you marry me?”
She was too busy crying to answer, she just nodded, and I put the ring on her finger. We embraced and shared a long kiss.
“You guys kiss too much,” a mildly disgusted looking Samantha said.
At dinner that night Joan explained to Samantha, “When Meyer and I get married you and I would live here with him. We would move all of our things over here.”
“Everything?” Samantha asked.
“Everything that we wanted to keep,” Joan reassured her.
I asked Samantha, “Do you want to live here?”
“Well, that might be okay. I like my room here, and I like being close to the lake, but I don’t like your library.”
I couldn’t believe she said that. I was devastated. My library was a large, two story room with walnut paneling, floor to ceiling book shelves, plus a Hickory and Brazilian cherry wood trimmed circular stairway to the upper level. Architectural Digest came to take pictures of it. It was the part of the house that I was most proud of and took the most time to design when I built it. If that room couldn’t put you in a mood to read or study, nothing could.
“What don’t you like?”
She elaborated. “All the chairs are too big and it doesn’t have a desk my size so I can draw pictures. And it doesn’t have a shelf that I can reach to put my books on.”
Now, that made more sense. I solemnly promised by the next time she visited there would be Samantha-sized furniture and shelves in that room.
In the middle of dinner that night, a realization coalesced in Samantha’s mind. Her eyes grew large and a broad smile spread across her face. Samantha looked at her mom, and at maximum volume she screamed, “When you marry Meyer, I’m gonna have a dad!”
Later that evening, after Samantha had gone to bed and the Sabbath candles had burned out, Joan and I proceeded outside to one of the balconies overlooking the lake. I poured a glass of wine for each of us and we cuddled together in the cool evening air, wrapped in a Pendleton Chief Joseph blanket. It’s a bright, colorful, warm, and soft blanket and even when the late-evening breeze picked up it didn’t penetrate the blanket and take away the warmth we’d created by being wrapped around each other.
I asked Joan if there was anything special she wanted me to do when she and Samantha moved in.
In a serious tone she told me, “Well, you have to promise to hold me every night just the same way you did when we were at the cabin. I know you do that now but that must continue. Whenever we’re reading you have to position yourself so that we’re touching—and there have to be lots of evenings where we just sit and hold each other.”
“Is that all?”
“No,” Joan smiled, “we have to find things to laugh about every day.”
“Oh man, I knew it was going to be tough to be your husband, but I didn’t think you would be so demanding—but for you and Samantha I guess I’ll have to manage.”
In actuality I subscribed to the same family happiness philosophy as my father. To wit: If the wife is happy, then the family is happy. With Joan as my partner, all I had to do is make sure we did things as a family and she would be happy and therefore our family would be happy.
* * *
The next day Joan brought over a carload of her paintings. I had cleared a wall at the entry, opposite the wall I had set up for Samantha’s artwork.
“I painted this when I was a junior in college.” Joan opened a box and pulled out a large painting. “The assignment was to paint a childhood memory. I agonized for days over which memory to depict. The day before the assignment was due; stood in front of a blank six-foot-wide by four-foot-tall canvas, struggling for an idea. And then, as if a flood gate opened, the entire painting cascaded into my mind.”
Her hands made sweeping gestures around the canvas as she spoke. “I painted this huge, black X from corner to corner. My paintbrush seemed to have a mind of its own—in the upper triangle, I painted this young boy and girl on their knees intently staring into a stream to see the minnows that swam there. Then here, on the right, the same young people painting scenery and assembling model railroad cars. In this lower triangle, they are wrapped around each other while they dance slowly at a junior high dance. The left-hand triangle has a group of adults leaving a train platform while one little girl has turned back to wave to a friend who is still on the train.”
Her eyes glanced quickly at me then back at the canvas. “I’ve never put it on display to sell. It has spent most of its existence in this box, but now that we’re together again…I want the spirit of our long-ago childhood and train trip to be the center of the art space.”
On a two-dimensional surface, she had captured the joyous spirit of our childhood. I lifted the painting and hung it in the center of her space. More times than I can count, I look at that painting, feeling surrounded by our childhood experiences.
I took her by the hand. “I have some things for you to see in my storage room.” A few lights turned on in the storage room and I pulled a poster-board-sized box out of a corner and took a shoebox down from a shelf. As I opened the shoebox, Joan smiled when she saw it was full of index cards.
“My mom saved these for me. These are the index cards from our visits to the library.”
“This is great. I can make a collage out of these.”
“My folks insisted that I save them.”
From the larger box I pulled out the poster boards that Joan had painted for the scenic background for our basement railroad.
Her eyes opened wide as she saw the old poster boards.
“My mom also packed up all the cars, buildings, and scenery.”
“Oh wow,” Joan kept saying as I opened a large carton and carefully unwrapped one Joan-decorated and Meyer-built car or structure after another. It was as if I was unpacking little pieces of our childhood that we could see and hold in our hands.
With joy radiating from her face, and her hands on my shoulders, she decisively declared, “You’re going to have to make some room, baby. The Joan-Meyer-Meyer-Joan Railroad is coming back to life.”
I replicated the train table my father created for us and gradually the JMMJ Railroad did start coming back to life. Whenever we wanted an indoor project with no time pressure to finish, we would create more scenes on our miniature railroad. With modern electronics and lighting, I seemed to be continually wiring tiny lights in buildings and railroad cars. Years later we could run the railroad at night without turning on the room lights. And the audio she insisted on—don’t get me started on the audio.
Someplace along the line I realized, even as adults, it didn’t matter what Joan and I were doing or where we were doing it. As long as we were doing it together, we were happy. Happy, in our vocabulary, means laughing and loving each other, plus finding joy in each other’s accomplishments and the accomplishments of our children.
A few weeks before our wedding Joan told me, “Samantha has a question for you. We’ve been talking about it and I’ve decided to let the two of you work it out.”
I crouched down to Samantha’s level. “When can I call you Dad?” she asked with a look of anticipation spreading across her face.
I’d been thinking about that as well. While I was obviously developing a father-daughter relationship with Samantha, I wasn’t her biological father. I was concerned about this, as I didn’t want Sam’s memory to be forgotten. I had already planned to visit the Vietnam Memorial Wall when Samantha was older so she could see Sam’s name on the wall.
“Well, it’s your choice,” I told her. “When you feel comfortable calling me dad then that’s when you should call me dad. It would be a huge honor that you would want to call me that. But we’re not going to forget your birth dad.
“So, it’s my choice?
”
“Yes, it’s your—”
“Okay, Dad!”
I scooped her up and she wrapped her little arms around my neck. I held her tightly—in part because of the bonding moment we had just shared, but truthfully, also because I didn’t want her to see the tears in my eyes.
The wedding was a wonderful affair. Not just because of the food or the decorations, or even the people that came—but because I was finally joining my life with Joan’s, and little Samantha’s too, of course. Now, truthfully, as much as I like to think I have a way with words, I decided that Samantha herself would be the best choice to describe the festivities.
The following are her words, her recollections, and I promised her I would write them as she dictated them.
* * *
Well, finally my mom and Meyer were married today! Mom awakened me early and told me to shower and brush my teeth really good so I would have a pretty smile. Outside in our backyard, they set things up in front of the lake. They had a big white tent with the sides rolled up over the covered swimming pool and some men and ladies set up chairs and tables in there. Mom said we would have dinner in there after the ceremony.
Nathan Rifkin is at the wedding too, but I don’t like him—he’s a boy! Except that he’s the son of Dad’s first cousin, Dov, so Mom said I should be nice to him. He’s a few years older than me, and his father is a Rabbi. Nathan talks to his mom in a language called Yiddish and to his dad in a language called Hebrew. I can’t understand either of the languages, so I just talk to them in plain old English.
Nathan comes by our house after supper a couple times a week to learn algebra from Dad. My mom studies Torah with Nathan’s dad then too, and he was teaching me the Hebrew alphabet also. They said Nathan’s a math prodigy. I think that means he’s really good with numbers. Dad and Nathan seem to have lot of fun playing algebra together.
Finding a Soul Mate (Meant to be Together Book 1) Page 9
