I am a collector of Amish tables given to me by men with the last gasp of their lingering affection.

One stands at the end of a loveseat in my tiny sitting area gathering dust.  It holds a vase from my neighbor, which itself holds the silk rose bought for me by my son at Disney World in 1996.  Beside the vase, I have placed a touch-light lamp that I never use.  In its shadow nestles the last existing ceramic box made by my friend Alan during a summer three or four decades ago.  I don’t know what lies inside its hidden compartment.

The other table arrives on Monday by way of UPS.  My ex-husband Dennis asked his friend and caretaker to give it to me upon his death.  She has done that.  I don’t think she knows the extent to which my heart contracted when she disclosed its bestowal.  

That table factored in a tit-for-tat, this-for-that conversation that Dennis and I quietly undertook a year or so after he had moved out of my house but before we officially divorced.  He wanted the stand mixer and traded it to me for his two cast-iron pans and his set of aluminum mixing bowls.  I have always thought I got the better end of that deal.  We quickly dispatched of the other flotsam and jetsam.  The Navajo rug that we bought on our honeymoon, him.  The print of the Buffalo River that I gave my first husband, who left it with me, and which Dennis greatly admired, also went to him.  Martini glasses that we acquired at Target, I gladly relinquished.  And so on, and so forth, yadayadayada.

When we got to the Amish table, I pointed out that he had brought it with him from North Carolina.  Ah, but you’ve always wanted it, he reminded me.  True enough, I had laughingly said on more than one occasion that I married him for his Amish cherry table.  It occupied place of  pride in our small entry area from his arrival in Kansas City until that moment more than a decade later.  It held our key bowl, a photo of my parents, and whatever notebook I dumped on it each night as I entered the house.  But I couldn’t keep it.  I helped him carry it to the van without hesitation.  

Two years later, my new romantic partner moved into the house, bringing with him, as fate would have it, a cherry Amish table.  I do not recall whether I told him about Dennis’s one.  But I might have, for upon the failure of our marriage, in half the time, he left that table for me.  It stood in the same place, the entry way to the Holmes house, until I moved to California.

I have been looking for a reason to completely rearrange the over-abundance of furnishings in the 198 square-feet of my tiny house.  When that parcel arrives on Monday, with Dennis’s Amish table shrink-wrapped in its cardboard confines, I will finally have the perfect motivation.  I will open Spotify on my laptop, load a playlist of falling-out-of-love songs, and start cleaning. 

It’s the twenty-fourth day of the one-hundred and twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Taylor Swift:  “All Too Well” Taylor’s Version

I first met Dennis Lisenby online in a Yahoo chatroom in 1997 in late winter.  He had assumed the guise of a pirate.  I played the Lady Gardenia.  Those persona shaded our early conversations and perhaps drove most of our relate for the next twelve years.

A few months after we first encountered each other, he asked me to visit him in North Carolina.  He sent a photograph so I would recognize him at the airport.  Up until I received it, he had consistently described himself as a twelve-foot giant.  He captioned the photo, “I might have lied”. The bank of lobster cages in the background caught my attention.  I asked my friend Alan, “What’s he talking about?” and Alan replied, “The wheelchair, Corinne; I think he means the wheelchair.”

I won’t try to speculate on the vagaries of our married life, or his deficiencies as a husband or mine as a wife.  I say nothing of any impact he had on my son; I do not speak for Patrick, nor do I tell any part of his story except how I might feel about events.  But I do want to share what I learned from Dennis.

He had sayings that still permeate my own catalogue of truisms.  Life is not for the squeamish, or the faint of heart, he would remind me when I grew frustrated or weary.  In his own moments of peevishness, he’d angle two fingers in the shape of a gun against his temple and spout, Nobody move or the crippled guy gets hurt.  Life strained his resilience, and eventually wore it thin, but for most of the time that we spent together he kept on trucking.  

He would off-road in a motorized wheelchair or an old Blazer or his high-top van.  He kept his martini glasses in the freezer next to the AA batteries.  Every pencil on his desk aligned with the blank pads.  He turned his computer screen off at night.  He folded his socks.  In the first few years of our married life, until an accident set him back a year or two, he changed the oil in his car despite the fact that he had to lower himself onto a flat dolly with a rope wrapped around the door handle.  Why pay someone to do it if I can do it myself, he reasoned.

We visited a neuro-psychologist after an accident that had left him clinically dead for two six-minute periods.  She told us, Look at it this way.  He was brilliant before the incident; now he’s merely bright.  I know that frustrated him, just as that ghastly twelve-month period of dependence on me drove him bonkers.  But he kept at what he could.  We still ate dinner with an atlas and a globe in those days before Google became a verb.  He still wrote sharp, clear technical papers for the team at work, or at least, they assured me that he did.  

In our time together, Dennis built an accessible garden in our backyard to mirror one about which the Charlotte Observer had written back home, with a photograph of Dennis in his manual wheelchair pruning a vine.  He orchestrated the construction of the wheelchair ramp that he himself designed. Years later, after a wild ice storm sent a tree crashing on the 100-year old porch, he paid my first ex-husband to build a new, grand outdoor space.  He had asked me to identify the best carpenter in town, and I gave my honest response.  The two of them spent an entire summer drinking beer in the front yard and complaining about me, more or less good-naturedly.

In the summer of 2008, my son went to Mexico and Dennis took a fateful contract in Ohio.  Alone for the first time in 17 years, I started a weekly missive to a listserve which morphed into my initial blog, The Saturday Musings.  A few years later, from his post-divorce abode in some Ohio town, he sent me an email in which he stated, without pretension or hesitation:  I’m reading your weekly posts.  I’m thrilled you finally found your voice.

Dennis once tried to talk me out of the marriage that he had proposed by telling me that it would turn out badly for me.  He envisioned his own end as it ultimately came, a long slow slide into his last days.  He wanted to spare me that.  Yet fortunately, he acquired a good friend in Ohio who sat beside him in those final hours, and sent his spirit soaring.  Debbie talked to him, and wrote about him, and kept me informed since the hospital had called me upon his admission two days ago.  We’re divorced, I had said.  But you’re listed as his emergency agent, they kept telling me.  I gave them Debbie’s number and then called her myself.  I have never met her, but I believe she helped release his spirit in the final hours.  I walk with her in love tonight.

Life challenged Dennis in ways that he hoped no one else would experience.  He sought solace in destructive forces, and ultimately, they might have hastened his death.    Looking back, I can’t forget or excuse some of the choices he made and the paths down which he chose to traverse that visited sorrow upon me.  But I still think of him as a 12-foot giant — clumsy, perhaps; hurtful at times; and occasionally, a thoughtless destroyer of small villages beneath his feet.  Also, though, his towering stature lifted him above the ordinary, into the heights of the glorious.  He had a certain nobility of spirit that shone through any failings that might have plagued him.  Life gave him lemons, and he grabbed a bottle of gin and put a twist in it, with a touch of vermouth, just a little bit dirty.

It’s the eleventh day of the one-hundred and twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.  

 

Dennis R. Lisenby

03/13/1951 – 07/11/2024

I HOPE YOU’RE DANCING IN HEAVEN.

P.S.  I’ve never been so honored as when his friend Debbie asked me to write his obituary, now linked above (click on his name).  She added a few important details, perfecting my draft.  I walk with her in love today and every day in his memory.

My eyes ache from straining not to cry. At some point this afternoon, I realized that the only child to whom I would ever give birth turns thirty-three on the morrow.  Over two thousand miles from the Airbnb in which I sit, my little boy lives his life in a city condo just blocks from Lake Michigan.  I can hear his voice; and with a strain on technology, I can see a blurred image of his face.  But I cannot hug him.

I spent the day fooling around here and there on the coast.  I fixed breakfast in a rudimentary kitchenette and then took myself to the Chit Chat Cafe.  My son called as I circled the block looking for a parking space.  As with most of our conversations, we touched on both light and deep subjects as car after car tarried by my window.  They gestured; I shook my head; they drove past.  Eventually, we said goodbye and I walked towards the cafe.  

A young man crouched on the sidewalk.  Before him, an array of paintings formed a square.  I watched as he started on a new piece, with spray cans and a bent paper cup as a guide.  He made thin lines with the tines of a plastic fork.  As I stood there, a group ascended the stairs to the cafe and one man said to another, “Are you here for the chit-chat or the coffee,” and the artist met my eyes.  We both chuckled, softly, simultaneously.  

Did that sound pretentious to you, I asked.  He smiled.  I don’t think he’s from around here, he allowed.  You can tell.  The tourists make jokes about things we don’t necessarily think are funny.

I told him that I liked his work.  He said, Please, take one.  I demurred.  I’d want to pay you for it, I said.  He shook his head.  You stopped and looked, he remarked.  That’s payment enough.  Many people walk by like I’m invisible.

I picked two, one to send to my boy in Chicago, and the other for my friend Rachel.  I handed him a bill from my wallet and he thanked me.  We chatted for a few minutes.  He told me he had been named for his Mexican grandmother’s surname, Cruz.  It means ‘cross’, he told me, just in case I might not have known.  

I took his works back to my car.  As I returned, three women and their dogs stood in front of Cruz, who had selected a painting from the sidewalk and handed it to one of them.  She thanked him and continued along the path, as I climbed the stars to the Chit-Chat Cafe, where a smiling barista made me a truly superb Americana.

It’s the seventh — but somewhere, two thousand miles from here, the eighth — day of the one hundred and twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

 

 

The wonderful Ms. Ruth and the stalwart Demi offered to work the shop for me.  With a long-awaited Stanford appointment scheduled for Monday, I had to be on the coast — or near enough — so I took myself out to dinner in Pacifica.

My Airbnb host recommended the place, mostly for the view.  He steered me right on that score.  The food claimed to be Peruvian, but I’ve had better 2500 miles due east in old Overland Park, Kansas.  But one glance out the windows as I approached my deck-side table delighted me.  Such majesty we do not have in the Heartland, and never will, unless I can get some traction on my idea to flood the plains between Topeka and Denver.

Bland food and spotty service could not mar my pleasure at gazing over the ocean.  Not even the sad little ramekin of half-inch wide packets of generic iodized salt (3 to a customer, since Covid, ma’am) rattled my calm.  With a book and a cold passionfruit drink, I occupied that chair for more than an hour, nibbling on the under-seasoned quinoa that had been touted by the server as “basically Peruvian fried rice”.  Neither fried nor particularly tasty, nonetheless the cold dish came home in a box with the similarly boring plantain chips.  I’m frugal even in my excesses; besides, I have salt in the cooler and that dish will warm nicely in the microwave for tomorrow’s dinner.

My hosts left the windows open.  Cool air tinged with fog drifts through the room.  Pleasant paintings of beach scenes adorn the walls.   The sight of them pleased me; most of these temporary digs have boring prints or tourist posters.  The husband of my host couple described the suite in which I’m staying as having been designed to house his visiting parents in their early retirement.  He looked a bit wistful as he admitted that they don’t come much these days.  His mother did the paintings.  She has a deft hand and a keen eye.  I can hear the song of the sea as I gaze at them.  

Tomorrow I will make breakfast in the tiny kitchenette, toast with avocado and some nuked scrambled eggs since there’s no stove-top here.  I brought my own coffee.  I forgot to ask if the tap water drinkable but I’m going to take my chance.  I had to park a half a block down the hill, and I didn’t feel like hauling the jug of water that we Delta dwellers always seem to have in the back of our vehicles.  

With a full day between now and my reckoning with Stanford’s Infectious Disease department, I should be rested for the drive into the city.  My spirit will certainly have quieted.  I already feel that sense of homecoming that my Pacific always brings me.

It’s the sixth day of the one-hundred and twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.