A Full Circle Love Story

My parents’ love story is by no means an epic romance, or a romance at all really. Their marriage was in fact something that probably should never have happened. But it is still a love story. They met as fresh-faced 20-somethings, both off on very different ventures into adulthood which, by happenstance alone, brought them to the same geographical location at the same time. My mother was a post-college graduate seeking literary inspiration from mountains, an ideal that was instilled in her early on in the stories of Heidi’s adventures in the Alps. My dad, a rebel, was seeking to escape to a place where the road was open and adolescent legal troubles would not follow. Both wannabe hippies in their own rights led them to Santa Fe, New Mexico in the late 1970s.

Their paths merged when my mom, mechanically disinclined, took her lime green Volkswagen Karmann Gia to the autobody shop. Her upbringing along the flat and swampy lowlands of the Gulf Coast had not prepared her or her transmission for the steep, rugged, and intermittingly icy Sangre de Cristo mountain range. My father, on the other hand, had grown up on a farm, amongst motorcycles and tractors on the banks of the frigid Michigan coastline. He could wield a screwdriver before he could write his own name.

My mom walked into the autobody where my dad worked on the outskirts of town. This is the part of their courtship I must improvise, but I imagine that mom garnered immediate attention with her straight dark hair striking against her fair skin, wearing a feminine and flowy summer dress. And my dad would have garnered an equal amount of attention with his long Tom Petty-esq shaggy hair and grungy jeans. The gist of the first encounter I am told is that my mom’s transition had gone to hell and she had not changed her oil since she left Texas.

My mom had traveled to the desert alone, leaving behind a family who never wanted to leave the spot they grew up in. My dad had moved the southwest with his two sisters, all wanting a fresh start. They piled everything they owned, which was not much, into an old pickup truck complete with a rocking chair strapped to the top. My mom fell in love with this family who was all about adventure and experimentation… the likes of which I am going to pretend to be naïve. My dad’s family was equally smitten with my mom who they saw as the grounding my dad needed.

The four lived in a wood cabin on the banks of the Gallinas River in Las Vegas, NM, the land where outlaws Jesse James, Doc Holliday, and Billy the Kid notoriously once roamed. A wood-burning stove heated the three rooms they shared. My aunts waited tables at the local dive, my dad continued working at the local body shop and my mom worked for the local newspaper. It was a meager, but cozy existence for years.

Life went on and my parents eventually got married and bought a trailer closer to Santa Fe, where my brother was born. I came a few years later. Our home merged onto an open mesa, with no obstructions, just open space where the only thing seen on the horizon was where the blue sky met the desert ground. Things became rocky in this house. My dad was in school and my mom was eeking out a meager salary as a substitute teacher. Rocky times turned into rock bottom at some point, and we restarted our lives in California where my parents divorced within a year.

Growing up from this time forward, my parents were simply separate people and it was difficult to see them ever having been together. My friends who knew them both would often incredulously inquire as to how my parents had come to be in the first place. My mom had continued down her literary path, taught English, became active in her synagogue, was strict, healthy, and a completely different person than she was back in the log cabin along the Gallinas River. I think women often do this in early adulthood, conform to the person they think other people want them to be.

My dad, on the other hand, thanks to my mom’s encouragement early in their marriage, finished his nursing degree, the first and only college graduate in his family to do so. He stayed on a steady path for a long time, but by and large, continued on the same quasi-reckless path his life had taken since childhood. There were parenting disagreements that were never actually hashed out, rather left to me and my brother to maneuver on our own. We chose which house we would go to and when, causing anger and guilt by all parties, which true to form in our family, remained unspoken. My parents were simply on different planets and we had to maneuver between the two.

I moved away from home as soon as I was able and have stayed away for many years. I have always been concerned about leaving my parents alone because, at this point, they both were just that, alone. My dad had remarried and divorced and my mom remained single. But somewhere in the not-so-distant past, they reconnected. Not romantically, but through a love that I can only describe as two people who have always respected each other and have the shared experience of children. Now, when I worry about my dad’s health, my mom visits him and brings him food, and lets me know how he is doing. When my mom’s brother suddenly passed away, my dad was the first one to her house to offer her a sympathetic ear and a ride to the airport.

Over the last few years or so we have made a tradition of all going to my mom’s house for Thanksgiving, a holiday we had never celebrated in the traditional sense before. I fly in from wherever I am living, my brother drives over with his wife, we bring friends and other family. My dad joins us every year as well and the first thing he always does is slip into my mom’s garage to check her car’s oil. And at some time during dinner, he will give her a light-hearted jab for not having checked her oil in over a year. And after dinner, he always changes her oil.