Pen Pals

For three weeks David and I roamed around Europe, going from country to country without any communication with David’s father, back home in Chicago.  In those days long distance calls were expensive.  I never considered making a trans-Atlantic telephone call. 

The World has changed.  In Mesquite, Texas, the other day I was pushing my cart down the grocery aisle in Target when my cell phone rang.  Gertrude was calling from New York to ask how I was doing.  “Fine,” I said, and we chatted as easily as if she had been walking beside me as I went looking for cottage cheese. 

We both have health problems.  We agreed: “Getting old is miserable.  But we are still alive.”

Thirty years ago we would have kept in touch solely by mail.  In high school I had a pen pal in Connecticut.  Marcelle and I wrote letters back and forth every few weeks until each of us married, then it was every few months.  My family moved to Michigan, and Marcie and her family came to Detroit to visit her sister.  The Creans brought their three children and spent an evening with us.    Marcie sat holding her baby on the blue couch (the one I still have in my living room), while I sat in my rocker cuddling David, who was only a few weeks old.  

Today Marcelle and I are old ladies, widows living in retirement homes.  I came back to Texas; she never left Connecticut.  We still keep in touch via the U.S. Mail.

My cousin Billy Stephenson also had a pen pal.  During the 1930's Billy wrote to a boy in Rotterdam, Holland.  When World War II came, Billy’s older brother Richard was drafted into the Army, went ashore in the Normandy invasion, and fought across Europe with the U. S. Infantry.  He wrote to Billy, “Don’t go into the walking Army.”   Billy joined the Navy and died of meningitis during boot camp.     

After the war Kees Bouw wrote from Rotterdam asking, “What happened to Billy?”   Billy’s mother asked me to answer the letter.  That’s how Kees and I became pen pals.   For the next twenty-plus years we wrote letters, telling each other about our marriages, the births of our children – the Bouws had two, we had three – and all the trivia of daily life.

When Wally gave me the tickets to Frankfurt, I wrote to the Bouws and said, “I am coming to see you.” 

At the time it seemed perfectly reasonable to send a letter announcing that David and I would arrive on a certain date.  Now that I think about it, I am ashamed by my audacity. 

We left Bruge on a cold, rainy morning – there are lots of cold, rainy days in Northern Europe – and drove across Belgium.  As we approached the Netherlands border, I told David, “Get out our passports.”   Without any check point or even a sign asking us to slow down, I drove into the Netherlands going sixty miles an hour.

I drove on to Rotterdam, confident of a welcome from these Dutch people I had never met.  Marie Bouw was alone when we climbed stairs to the fourth floor apartment.  A tall, heavy woman with a plain, Dutch face, she did not speak English, but her smile welcomed us into our first visit in a European home.