Back in September, I purloined an article by Charlotte Observer writer Gerry Hostetler about my father, Les, but I intentionally left out the stuff about my mother, Trudy, being with my father until this day, which would have been my parents’ 56th wedding anniversary. My father died on August 10, 2000.
“She was the wind beneath his wings,” [my sister] Leslie said of her mother. [At my father’s funeral, Leslie sang that song to my mother.]
Les met Trudy by mistake when she was 13. He was delivering for a florist and went to Maple Street instead of Maple Avenue. “He knocked on the door,” Trudy said, “and here was this guy with a big smile and a bouquet. The flowers weren’t for Trudy…but the smile was. They wound up in school together, and when he read a book report aloud, “I was mesmerized,” she said.
When he proposed, he told Trudy, “I may be a headache, but you will never be bored.” They celebrated their 50th anniversary March 12 [2000], and though they hadn’t sung together [in public] for 15 years, the Greens [Les, Leslie and I] sang. “We fell into it, Leslie said. “People were in awe.”
“You know he was right,” Trudy said. “He warned me, but I was never bored.”
This part of the story was actually quite on target. {Don’t know about the “awe” thing.} But even recently, my mother noted wistfully using those same words, “I was never bored with him.” She was sometimes exasperated or those other things that people married a half century go through, but boredom was not my father’s thing.
Five and a half years on, my mother appears to be coping pretty well after Les, but I know she still misses him, especially on days like this.
Wish I had some digital pics of them; I’ll have to get that scanner I bought to work someday.
