Mary-yum 


What do you say when someone calls to tell you that you can't die yet? 

I met Mariam in my eighth grade study hall. She had bucked teeth and braces, zits and thick 50's style eyeglasses. I loved her instantly, and I haven't stopped loving her for the intervening 50 + years. We, along with six other teens, were not socially popular, so we made our own protective environment.

Mariam and I and one other friend were constantly inventing things to do. Playing tricks on others and each other was a big occupation. During our high school years we faked several shocking events, including a hijacked car, a visit from aliens, and a murder on a rainy night. We sat in drive-in restaurants and consumed our share of hamburgers, fries and cokes—the unpopular hangers-onto fifties pop culture.

Mariam went to the "party school" at Athens, Ohio and majored in theatre and dance; I went to liberal arts Marietta College and studied math, science and philosophy. But we stayed locked in each other's lifetime care. When I graduated, I got a job at Republic Steel in Cleveland, Ohio, and gradually, I moved my friends up there with me. Mariam and I and another guy and gal stayed close. I got her her first job out of college, at the Medina County YWCA.

I went off to grad school in math, but two years later, Mariam and I ran off to Miami, Florida to stay with Mo and Jim Heltmann for a couple of months. Never did finish the masters in math. We had formed a friendship with Mo and her sister Toni when we were in Cleveland. Mariam used to complain that people kept spelling her name wrong: Miriam. So Mo always addressed her letters to "Mary-yum."

But I went back home and then to grad school and eventually became an education professor. Mariam got herself a makeover and glamor photographed on a couple of suitcases with a travel poster behind her. She developed a career as an entertainment director on cruise ships and riverboats, and later tried her hand at TV production. It would be fairer to say that she kept reinventing herself in the entertainment industry, ever creative and unstoppable.

I spent one week with her when she was an actress in Thelma White's Studio in LA, another when she was the assistant to the producer of the Merv Griffin Show. More recently, when Stephen and I were visiting in New Orleans, Mariam got us on the American Queen for a 5 day cruise at a very reduced price. Another time, we watched the St. Louis Fourth of July fireworks display from the deck of the Delta Queen. She came to St. Louis for my 48th Birthday Murder Mystery Party.

Fate struck hard several times, car and bike wrecks, family losses, broken bones. Just when life seemed determined to do her in, she reinvented herself first as a tasty freeze and hot dog stand owner, next as the purveyor of a coffee house and now as a real estate agent. She continues to wage a life-long battle with a somewhat arrested form of muscular dystrophy.

Always I can't go too many weeks without calling Mariam; checking in, rooting her on. It's like we're twin souls, and I could just have easily gone off on her path, but I got called elsewhere. Like the entangled paired electrons of Alan Aspect's experiment that proved Einstein wrong, whenever something changes in one of our lives, the other life immediately responds.

Her latest project is to build a million dollar house for herself in California. Barriers and environmental restrictions galore, but she is inching, no millimetering her way towards her goal.

The other day, I thoughtlessly said to her (in a phone conversation) that even if I didn't make it, I wanted her still to have Stephen out to see her new house when it is done. (Well, I HAVE been having a bit of a tussle with pulmonary hypertension.) So this morning, she called me back. Told me that I couldn't die yet. She still needs to know I am here. Said that the one thing she wants to be able to do yet is to show me her new home.

Ok, Mary-yum, since you asked me so nicely, I'll try extra hard to do you the favor of visiting your new house when it's done. God, are you listening? 

Posted: Sat - May 6, 2006 at 10:53 PM          

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