A Passion For Gold: An Autobiography

15. Mij

Chapter 15 Mij The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. —albert einstein, What I Believe How do two souls unite after sixty-four years apart? It is simply this mysterious universe around us. In the spring of 1992, I received news that would have a profound effect on my life. I was visiting my sister Margaret in our hometown of Omak, Washington, and she had heard from friends that Marjorie Courtright Ogden, now widowed, was living in Tucson, Arizona, and that her brother, Don Courtright, my old friend, was visiting his sister. I hadn’t seen Don since our high school days, when we spent hours huddled over a shortwave radio we had built, listening to transmissions , so I asked her for the telephone number there. One of Marjorie’s daughters answered the phone, and she said, “Don just left for the airport to go back home to Frederick, Maryland, but Mother’s here, do you want to talk to her?” I thought Mother? Memories swirled in my head. “Mother” was Marjorie, Don’s sister, the popular, sweet, smart, attractive brunette whom I had secretly admired. I’d never found the courage to indicate how I felt, nor had I seen any evidence that she was interested in me, although I could remember a high school theater production during which Marjorie had playfully held my hands as we waited offstage for our cues to enter. In the fall of 1928, Marjorie had enrolled at Whitman College. The following year I had begun my studies at Washington State College. Our paths hadn’t crossed again in more than sixty years. On one of my visits home, I had heard that she was engaged to a young man at Whitman, and in 1932, I learned that they had married. Now, sixty-four years after we’d held hands backstage at Omak High, my heart began to race at the thought of speaking to her. With some trepidation and a strange, schoolboy nervousness, I said, “Yes, I would like to speak with her.” Perhaps Marjorie felt nervous, too, because for some reason, she told me later, she informed her daughter that she would take the call in another room. When she answered, I said, “Hello. Do you remember Ralph Roberts from Omak High School? We graduated in the same class in 1928.” She said, “Of course, I remember you.” I then chatted, asking meaningless questions, while a feeling of excitement seemed to build inside me. I finally asked if she ever came to the Northwest. “Yes,” she said, “I usually spend six months a year in Gig Harbor, Washington.” So I said, very casually, “Maybe, I can drop by sometime and see you. I now live in Seattle part time.” She mentioned that she would be attending her Whitman class reunion in May but would be back on May 20. As fate had it, I was needed in Seattle just about then to sell a duplex I owned; I was preparing to move back to Nevada. I dropped in on Marjorie at Gig Harbor. There we were after sixty-four years, practically a lifetime of building and living our own dreams, and learning to survive when some of them shattered. She asked me in and we began to talk, taking turns filling each other in on what we had done in the long years apart. We did not come close to finishing our stories that day. We agreed to get together again, and as I said good-bye and headed to Nevada, I wondered if this strange turn of fate could possibly lead to anything serious! I found myself seeking excuses to return to Seattle or, more precisely , to Gig Harbor. We saw each other in July and again in August 1992. By then, we’d finished telling each other our stories, but the sparks of mutual attraction had flared into life again after all those years, and I felt no desire to snuff them out. Neither, I was pleased to discover, did she. We had each lived full lives with abundant measures of joy, pain, passion, and reward. From our experiences, we had gained a deep appreciation for life, and we knew how precious and infinitely more enjoyable it is when it’s shared with someone. So we Mij 187 dispensed with protocol, polite games, and...