The Rosy Bottom Bar and Grill

Chapter Twenty-eight
1999
Francis Priscilla Norton Rubinking Stansky

If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t marry
her for the world if he were not quite sure that
he was the best person she could by any possibility marry.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “The Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table,” 1858

It seemed like the decades just kept rolling on, one after another.  The new millennium was fast approaching, and the world was excitedly preparing for the festivities of celebrating that extraordinary phenomenon of being alive when the century changed.  The forecast was grim in a computer-run society as the purveyors of that sort of information predicted a crisis approaching Armageddon, because computer programs had not been programmed to recognize 2000-anything.  They even coined a name for it—Y2K.  Those of us prone to believing everything we hear, stocked up on everything from food and water to gas and cash, just in case the entire computer world collapsed upon itself at the prospect of running a date anything greater than 1999.  People purchased generators so that if the power went off, they could still follow the crisis on their televisions, and laugh at those of us who had not had the foresight—or money—to prepare for disaster. 

Nothing happened.  The world continued to turn just as it always had.  Actually, the rest of the world continued turning as usual on January 1, 2000, but in 1999, my world, which had been humming along, singing the same lonely tune for a very long time, was shaken to its chunky soles. 

Let me explain that.  I refrained from wearing cute little slick-soled shoes anywhere near my home, therefore chunky soles, so I would not fall on the rocky walkway to my house in Meadow Bluff.  That meant the jump seat of my four-wheel drive truck, needed to manage the driveway to my house, was full of work shoes, with cute little slick soles and heels, so I could change shoes when I hit pavement in the city.  Just thought I should explain that, but let me go on and tell you what happened.

My brother, Roger, and I had a childhood to forget.  It took me awhile to come to grips with that.  That, and a bad marriage that ended in the sudden and dramatic death of my husband.  Then my grown children, Macky and Joe, moved away from Colorado, leaving me alone on the mountain with my little dog, Maggie. 

Deciding the best thing to do would be to sell my house and move to…well, I had no idea where I would move to, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Until I remembered I would need to clean out the attic if I moved.  That realization set me back a little.  I notified my realtor, Irving Standsky, that I guessed I really wasn’t quite ready to sell.  He was most understanding and helpful, and took that as a sign he didn’t actually want to be a realtor, and returned to Arizona.  That’s the abbreviated version.

Over time, Irving would pop into my life unexpectedly, see that I was still struggling along, disappear for a time, then boom! call to go to dinner.  I didn’t know what to make of it; therefore, I made nothing of it.

Until Irving showed up, out of the blue, with my daddy.  My daddy’s name is Tommy Norton.  He deserted us when we were small children.  Nothing was ever the same again in our lives.  The whole thing went to hell in a hand-basket and pretty much just kept bumping along in that basket for most of the rest of my life.  Until Irving decided that my daddy’s disappearance was the missing link to my past, and went and found him and dragged him to Meadow Bluff with him to explain to me just why he’d done what he did.  That was pretty big.

Bigger still was when Irving asked Tommy for my hand in marriage, got down on one knee with a ring and a date, and we got married in the little country church across the valley from my house. 

Irving wanted to know what I would like to do for my honeymoon, since with my first wedding, there was no honeymoon, just a baby.  It didn’t take me long at all, since I’d had a long time to think about it, to decide I wanted the ‘55 Chevy Bel-Air that Roger and I had driven to Colorado from Missouri in 1962 to be restored, and I wanted to take the trip backwards.  The car had been in the shed in back of my house for several decades, covered with a tarp.  We got it out of the shed and off the mountain, by a miracle, and to a restorer who agreed to make it his priority.  It was ready to go and gassed up by the time we were ready to leave.  I was thrilled, like no time I could ever remember in my life.