Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [31]
In what can now be seen as some sweet irony, my mother was known in her youth to repeatedly state that she didn’t care who she married as long he wasn’t a farmer—in fact she once declined a marriage proposal from a barge worker after he told her he had saved nearly enough money to buy his dream farm. Mission accomplished, then, when in 1963 she wed my dad—a freshly minted chemical engineer with job prospects in Minneapolis. They met via the alphabet, which placed them proximal on the Eau Claire Memorial High School homeroom seating chart: Perry, Peterson. He first caught her eye with his assiduous study habits; every morning he’d take his seat, crack his books, and buckle down. She later found out that he was cramming for his first-hour Spanish class.
Mom was smart, proper, and devout, having professed her faith in the Truth at a young age. Dad was smart too, but he was a worldly boy, and although he was pleasant and quick to grin, he sometimes comported himself as a potty-mouthed hotshot. Short, small, and quick, he was a champion wrestler. He wore his hair buzzed close to his scalp. This accentuated his ears, which were small but curled outward in the manner of Frito Scoops. In testament to his skills as a grappler, the vulnerable ears were not cauliflowered.
My mother was shy to the point of pathology, but she did possess reserves. Once—unbeknownst to Mom—her socially active cousin placed her on the ballot for class secretary. Mortified when she learned of the conscription, my mother’s immediate inclination was to decline, but then she decided she would just smile and say hello to everyone in the hall, and she was elected. My father claims this same proactive cousin attempted to set him and Mom up when they were freshmen, but Mom says she never knew of this.
All through high school then, my mother and father began the day together but never dated. On graduation night, they wound up at the same house, with a group of other students gathered for—as Mom once described it while rolling her eyes and shaking her head—“a learned discussion.” When the colloquium concluded late in the evening, my father wanted to take a different girl home, but missed his chance when she left with another boy. Dad drove Mom home instead. Somewhere on a dark road, he ran out of gas. Oldest trick since the invention of the internal combustion engine, really, except that he honest-to-goodness did run out of gas. They walked the last three miles. The county had recently graveled the roads and Mom ruined her heels. The young couple reached my mother’s house at 3:00 a.m., and she woke her father to ask if she could borrow his car and a can of gas. Grandpa said sure, fine. He trusted her. By the time she got back home again, it was 5:00 a.m. At around that same time my father was waking his parents to explain where he’d been. They accused him of lying.
The same group of students gathered again the next night, but according to Mom the discussion wasn’t as fun. That night Dad drove the other girl home.
The other girl didn’t stick. Later that fall, when Mom was in her first year of nursing school and Dad was a freshman at the local state college, he asked her to homecoming.
In Mom’s words, the date was “a great fiasco.” She agreed to go to the football game, but as she was already a member of the Truth, which had strictures forbidding dancing, she refused to attend the dance. Furthermore, Dad had been drinking the night before, and was certain Mom could tell. She says he couldn’t wait to get her home and off his hands. At the door, she invited him in for cocoa. I delight in the image of my dad blowing on that hot chocolate, his