Woman: God's Best Work

Along the way to meteoric fame, Charles Dickens, aging, famous and now restless, arranged a secret “tea” with a former girlfriend who had rejected him earlier in his life.  Heavier beyond his dreams of her once figure eight, missing teeth and blushing and awkward, their tea remained tea and never a tryst.  He ushered her to the door within minutes.  Dreams and reality; the past and the present.

What is it about women that make men love them?  In “Moonstruck,” Johnny says, “men chase women because they fear death”; but some men, like Mark Anthony, actually seek death when they meet the Cleopatra of their lives.  And every man has a Cleopatra he should have run from.

My own California version of that Egyptian siren was both a figure eight and a mane of unmanageable blonde hair.  The Beach Boys come to mind.  As I’ve told my son, “what would have happened had my usually wise Oakie father said, 'Son, just what are your intentions here?'” I think pain was inevitable even if I’d had “intentions.”

It took some years and some fumbling and stumbling but I finally healed.  No balm of Gilead in beer and other girls, even a score of them were certainly no salve for the wounds and contusions of love’s war.

I finally found the True Healer, The Savior, and set out on a very different journey, inspired by a berry-brown green-eyed California girl [yes, same town, same name], who helped me get to Germany on an LDS mission.  When I returned, we married, graduated from BYU and then graduated again from the University of Oregon graduate school.  Charles Henboker’s unremarkable life kept me from sinking; Carolyn’s love and constancy, in spite of a growing crescendo of physical and emotional pain, sustained me—even when it meant moving to Rexburg, Idaho, a mere 80 minutes from Yellowstone.  Rexburgers know cold.

The last six months of Carolyn’s life she spent in the Homestead Assisted Care Facility.  Each day, for exercise, I walked the mile to The Ranch and served as a volunteer.  There I met a dozen angel-ladies whose dreams of life, lived out, perhaps, but who now found themselves in the nightmare world of Alzheimer’s disease.

After the initial revulsion of nursing home odor washed over me, I got my bearings and set to work washing dishes and helping patients move from their rooms or from the television to the dinner table.  I prayerfully and patiently and blessedly got past the smell of urine, of cooking food, and all of those things that make us human—functions of the human body that an otherwise genius Jonathan Swift could not endure—in others or in himself.  Scatology.

When I looked into Carolyn’s eyes in the moonlight on a summer evening in Escondido, I could only see a wife.  Later, after our four children arrived and we closed the door, I watched her age and suffer.  And I found I was getting a new heart—a better one—a sweeter one.  When our angel grandchildren came, Carolyn was ready.  Now a grandmother; and a good one.  I had not seen that in her eyes and her beautiful thick black hair on those days on the shores of Del Mar.

Now she and the other dozen women began to take on a beauty of their own.  I often brushed tears from my eyes when Thelma asked me tenderly, “can you tell me when Alfred is coming for me?” Or when my own Lonesome Dove pleaded with me to take her home by Thanksgiving—“at least by Thanksgiving,” she wept.

All Cleopatras become old.  Elizabeth Taylor died, and only 1 in 20,000 teenagers would even look up from a screen to say, “whatever,” or “never heard of her.” Brittany Spears will need a walker someday.

But what endures are the battle scars: The C-Section scar; the stretch marks. Those buns of steel melt into cellulite, the American obsession, the breasts lose their lift.  Gravity will win out.  Here comes entropy.

Yes, but the Human Spirit endures; the heart grows larger, sweeter.  I can still detect the faint odor of my grandma Lucy, her arms around me, hugging me as if I were the last child on earth, crooning to me in Spanish and English, her deep, throaty voice, an unforgettable serenade.  Beauty is becoming old, even when the eyes are vacant and the mind is often in another place.  Patience stamps its signature and makes our women saints.  They are the miracle: their inner and outer landscape, God’s best work.