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THE WIND PHONE
A Last Wedding Anniversary and a Chair in a Trunk
Portland and marrow and hidden things
On June 1, 2015, my musician spouse was diagnosed with ALS. Almost four months later, we celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary in a city we’d always wanted to visit, Portland, Oregon. The following is the story of that weekend, a chapter of my memoir of that time.
In the days leading up to this trip, I suggested to Marty that we cut his hair.
We’d been watching Peaky Blinders, a television mob series set in Ireland shortly after WWI, and he’d commented on the haircuts — extremely short sides, with rascally long top. Such clean lines. Reminded me of when we first met, and I was still a hairdresser.
“I can’t wear that cut,” he said. “My hair is too thin.” That’s what a barber told him some time before. It occurred to me that if we coloured it too, then the line of “long top” would show.
With this suggestion, I could see his old spark, and it warmed my heart. I went to buy the colour the next day, in a box with a bright-eyed redhead on it. I liked to think it wouldn’t be our last anniversary, but knew that, at the very least, it would be the last with him able to walk.
We went
Marty with his flaming red hair. Me with my driver’s hat on. I had to be so conscious of my driving. I had to elicit his confidence in how I handled the vehicle, to toughen up, be assertive, aggressive even. In short, I had to drive as he always had, in the hopes he wouldn’t feel the loss of driving as much as I imagined he did.
At that point it had been about a month since the evening, post-golf, when he’d slammed open the front door of the house, calling out hoarsely for me to come and get the key out of the ignition; he’d driven, but after parking and turning off the engine, his fingers could not remove the key from the vehicle. The anger and fear in his voice had propelled me out to the driveway to pull the key — so easily — from the car.
The chair
Before we left for Portland, I secretly put the wheelchair someone had kindly loaned to us in the trunk, thinking we could experiment with that thing in another place, a…
