Here are photos of us before we met. I think the picture of Janet was taken at her first job after college graduation. She was the public relations officer for an educational cooperative in southwestern Virginia. The picture of me was taken in college. As you can see, I had a drinking problem back then.
Actually, I didn’t have a problem drinking from public water fountains, but I had a friend who was a photojournalism major who liked to talk people into doing silly things in front of a camera. This one is not so bad. He talked another guy into lifting his shirt and contemplating his bellybutton. And, believe me, that person really should have kept his shirt down. A young woman in the journalism department told me it was beneath the dignity of the student newspaper editor to do anything that frivolous. I hated to tell her, but there was no dignity in being the editor of the student newspaper in east Texas. It was a part-time job that paid my tuition for one semester.
I never asked Janet what was going on when her photo was taken—it was a Polaroid—at her job. I don’t know if somebody was testing out the new office camera or if it was for a bulletin board with pictures of all the employees. Talking about a job with dignity, that was her job. The organization, Dilenowisco, pooled the resources of five school districts to get things done that would have been too expensive for any individual district. They were Dickenson, Lee, Wise and Scott counties and the town of Norton. I listed them not so you would know exactly which groups were involved but to show that after forty-five years I still remembered the details from Janet’s job.
When I look at her what I notice now is how delicately thin her arms were and the innately sad shadow across her face. Here we were, half a continent away from each other. I was so desperate to please anyone that I stuck my face in a water fountain and she—to me, at least—looked so lonely.
For forty-four and a half years I hope I was able to keep her from feeling sad and lonely, especially in those last terrible days when her cancer spread to her brain. The last day she was coherent Janet begged me to get her out of that hospital room because the woman in the next bed insisted on watching the television news station with all the “bloviators.” A nurse gave her a sedative and soon the bloviators didn’t upset her. When she was transferred to Hospice Janet seemed to be sleeping but when she heard my voice she grabbed my hand. On my last visit I didn’t know if she could hear me, but I whispered to her to get her rest because soon she would be busy as my guardian angel.
I didn’t know when the impulse would come over me to stick my face in a water fountain again, and I needed her to watch over me.