Jeannie grew up in Pueblo, graduated from high school and college there, later owned and ran a business there. She's buried there, next to her father, and near her aunt and uncle, who passed away – one after the other – this past December and January. We knew Carl and Olga would go that way, Carl caring for – and doting on – the life-companion who for these last few years no longer knew him.
Only Irma Jean, her mother, is left, well into her eighties and alone, everyone gone. She has her cats – Karsty and Morris – both having started with Jeannie before moving to her mother's at different times and for different reasons. Irma Jean also has whatever wildlife – birds and feral cats – that she can (must) feed each afternoon at “the blueprint,” Pueblo Blueprint, Jeannie's father's business from just after World War II until he killed himself in 1978 at the age of sixty. Jeannie came home, then, from teaching, to help, and stayed until we married in 2004. The business was purchased by friends who welcome Irma Jean's daily ritual: play solitaire on a computer, feed the animals, have a can of soda, drive home. Those friends are a godsend, unselfish, they worry about her, help her when they can.
I took Irma Jean to dinner at Applebee's. It's a little awkward, what we have in common is Jeannie; Jeannie is gone.
I visited Jeannie in the early afternoon, and talked to her. I told her Shanahan was gone from her Broncos, and the young quarterback, too. That I was in Phoenix now. I couldn't stay in Salinas without her. Said I drove to Taos, was there overnight. It has changed not at all (that I could see) from the time we spent there a decade ago. Small talk. That I miss her.
I returned through Angel Fire, New Mexico and the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial there, high in the mountains east of Taos, another place we had visited together.
So many memories. Bitter-sweet. A few short years together.
“Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day , never to return..” - Laurence Sterne, from Tristram Shandy, circa 1765.
