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yet another memory (yam)

Mary Ruth Gunn

Lately, for some reason, I've been thinking alot about Mary Ruth Gunn.



I'm only guessing, but, I think this picture was taken sometime around 1992 (my beard was alot fuller and a whole lot browner back then).

Mary Ruth was one of my first real friends. She was much older than I and I got to know her when she started to accompany my flute solos in high school. We would practice at her house and then go down into the basement and shoot pool and talk and talk and laugh and tease each other and so on. But, in hindsight, I realized that Mary Ruth was being my first real mentor in Life. She would engage my mind by steering conversations into areas of philosophy or life situations; she would lend me books, saying "You really should read this, Douglas!" (I still have a never-returned copy of G.K. Chesterton that she lent to me).


I remember that we used to exchange gifts and that I always bought her some of the Irish enameled porcelin (you know, it has lots of shamrocks on it and the enamel goes from greenish to bluish in different places). I always wondered if she really liked that stuff or whether she was just being polite (knowing that I, as a still rather naive person, thought that it was just about the prettiest stuff you could ever buy ... I still feel that way).

I remember various musical moments that we both treasured for the rest of our lives. Going on the bus to Indianapolis for the state contest. We played Kennen's Night Soliliquoy and, even though it had a wicked piano part (she would turn the page and be greeted by a chord that went from the lowest range of the piano all the way up to the tinkly high notes (after which I would play a very fast credenza starting from the high range of the flute down to the lowest), we really, really liked this piece the best. At the state contest, we were the last ones to play after what must have been a very, very long day (for the judges, that is). When I started to play, the judge got out of his chair and went over to the window and just stared outside for the duration of the piece.

It was so late, though, that we immediately rushed to get back to the waiting bus and everyone asked "Well, how'd you do?" and I opened the scoring sheet and found he had given us a perfect seven. What made that really wonderful, though, was that on that piece, Mary Ruth and I were so in synch, so in tune with our spirits, that it seemed time and space ceased to exist ... indeed we ceased to exist ... there was just the music and we wanted it to never end. I've only had that happen a few times since and it is a real gift to have handed to you.

I remember another musical moment with Mary Ruth that wasn't so inspirational, but which probably had more lasting memory power; we played Chaminade's Concertino for my high school graduation. Somewhere in the middle of the piece, Mary Ruth turned the page and then stopped playing and looked at me with a completely blank and "deer in the headlights" look. It seems that the pages had somehow gotten mixed up and she didn't have a clue where we were. For years afterwards, however, she would tell the story that she looked at me and I had such a peaceful look that "All will be well" and she then found her place and we started to play as if we were merely starting the "second movement" (of this one-movement piece).

I remember, though, that my only thought at the time was "What in the HELL is going on with you, Mary Ruth?" Peace was the farthest thing in my panic-ridden heart (remember all my classmates and their parents were sitting in the hot gymnasium watching us and I still have no idea what Mary Ruth was reading in my face!

I could go on and on (well, I already have, haven't I), but let me click the years forward a bit. I eventually went to college, got married, moved to Connecticut and lost track of Mary Ruth (she had moved, too). Then, in 1992 (I think?), during a trip back to Indiana, I was driving down the little dirt road that parallels the shore of Lake Michigan and I saw a group of people assembling a bluebird house in their driveway. As I kept driving, I was thinking that the matriarch of this family group looked alot like Mary Ruth, so I put the car in reverse, backed down the road and stopped to ask directions (even though I didn't really need them). Hearing her voice, I was pretty sure that it was, indeed, Mary Ruth and so I asked "Mary Ruth?" She looked at me completely puzzled (remember, the last time she saw me I was perhaps 25 years old, skinny, no beard), but, when I told her who I was, it was (again) like the sun came out for both of us.

We sat and talked and talked and laughed and teased and (now) cried. She told things I had never known. When she was very young, she had eloped with her cousin - they were very much in love, but his family hunted them down, brought them back home and had the marriage annulled. She remarried and had a great marriage with (I think) a daughter and a son. After many years, however, her husband died of a heart attack and her daughter (now grown with a child of her own) died of brain cancer (and the long duration of her suffering put alot of strain on her relationship to Mary Ruth). She still had her beloved harpsichord, but it wasn't tuned because she could no longer play. She had had some kind of brain seizures in recent years which left her uncertain about even the next moment in Life. She was pretty down about life at that point, since it had done a pretty good job of giving her a few significant blows.

I saw her once more a few years later when I brought my youngest son with me (he was just a toddler at the time). I remember that she had a huge brandy snifter full of clear, colored marbles and that Ben had been hypnotised by the beauty of the sun shining through them and that Mary Ruth gave the whole shebang to him without hesitation (the snifter broke a few years ago, but the marbles are still in my kitchen window in an Erlenmyer flask ... waiting for Ben).

Then a few years later, I got a letter from her son saying that he had found an unopened letter from me in her effects ... she had, indeed, had another one of those brain seizures and, after spending some time in a nursing home, had died. He also told me that she had always talked about me to her family and friends. Boy, did I cry when I read that letter (I'm crying right now).

Anyhow, the thing I really wanted to share here, was the letter that Mary Ruth sent to me after my mother died. My mother died when she was 49 years old and I was 20 years old. The letter that Mary Ruth sent to me probably had more to do with shaping who I am now that even Tolstoy or Beethoven or Nick Meneakis (my high school algebra teacher). I carried it around for years, folded up in my wallet, until it started to fall apart. I quoted from it many times in my life when her words were just perfect for other situations. It's now in the relative safety of my home filing system (which means that noone will ever, ever be able to find it again). I just typed it out this morning and, well, here it is:

Jan. 14, 1965

Dearest Doug,

I have been meaning to write to you everyday but you have been so almost ever-present in my consciousness that I keep feeling that I have, if you follow me. I have prayed for you and for your father Perry. I do not know what small winds of comfort this inspires, if any, and I do not know that it does any good, I only know that if God can help you through these bad times and bring you some measure of comfort or relief or even resignation, then I want Him to do so. Thoughts do wing and touch and love is transportable and we have always been good friends in spite of the division of our years. I was never really so much second-mother to you as friend and friends are sometimes harder to find than mothers. Just know that I think on thee and wait without impatience or demand to see you whenever you are in the mood. I have no words of help. Life is strange and not always sensible or understandable except as history is understandable … only in the long view … for it is not history until it is past and so sometimes do the things that happen to us seem to gain some meaning, some added significance, some pattern, some reason … only in perspective. I cannot at the moment see any sense to your mother’s death but perhaps she was spared unbearable suffering, perhaps God needed her light somewhere else … but seldom do things happen without sense even when the world seems its’ most mad and irresponsible.

I know that you are more concerned about your father at the moment than yourself. I wrote to him. I should like to know him better. Your mother and I always meant to “get together” … we thought, as foolish people always think, or even just people always think, that there is lots of time. There is never any. There is only the moment … to know, to look at one another, to love in. This is what the author of Our Town says so poignantly and pointedly and it is a lesson we should learn. To really see one another now this moment, and not only each other but life and things and smell and feel and allow life to touch us … not wildly or recklessly or with any licentious abandon, but with attention, the attention of a scholar and with the understanding of a philosopher and with the love of a poet. Then only do we not waste each other or our lives. One night when my father had had a heart attack and I was frantically riding to Chicago to the hospital on the South Shore feeling that it was slower than walking and that I would never get there in time to see him alive (this was not hysterics, the doctor summoned me to see him die, he thought) a thought came to me almost as tho my father were beside me being the good friend he had always been and it was simply this … that it really did not matter. He and I had loved one another greatly, simply and honestly, enjoyed one another and that really there was no more to be had anyhow. We had had the all and no one could ever take that from me. Perhaps you and your mother had the “all” too and no amount of time could have increased your affection nor your pleasure in each other. It is a great deal to have had and more than many ever find in their relationships. It does not mean that you never disagreed, nor ever misunderstood one another, but that always she was really “with” you in the best sense of the word and loved you with all her heart and had great pride in you. That is all there ever is! Your parents’ marriage was a very good one. Weep not for them. Again perhaps that is all there ever could be. Perfection is never forever. It is sad that it ends this way sometimes but it is no sadder than some of life’s tragedies, that are really tragedies when two people marry and remain strangers and lonely all their lives together. They had something good and knew it. This is a triumph over all of life and the grave.

I have been wandering on and not being very wise nor putting well what I am trying to say. If I am not clear, it is because I have not thought all of this out well. It is only to tell you the little I know. If I should never see you again, you would remain quite real and good to me and my friend. When something is real, it is indestructible in our minds and hearts. Does that say it?

Probably not! Know that I love you dearly with no strings nor demands nor ties. I am delighted to know that we share mutual friends in the Youngs. Mrs. Young is one of the finest women I have ever known. She is most fond of you. It comforts me to know they watch over you.


Wie immer,

Mary Ruth Gunn

Wie immer? As always!

(during my 1992 visit, I told Mary Ruth how much this letter had meant to me, but she couldn't remember it. When I got back to Connecticut, I sent a copy of it to her, saying that I was guessing that her own words might just possibly be of comfort to her now).