Friday night, December 18, 1970 was a busy, “Christmas is nigh” sort of night in Atlanta. The city, like its people, was dressed in its Christmas best, adorned everywhere with holiday lights and ribbons. The sound of bells could be heard nearby and ringing in the distance, a constant cue to smile, laugh and enjoy those around you. Stores all over Atlanta were open late to accommodate Christmas shoppers, and theaters and restaurants across the city were packed with patrons enjoying the holiday season. The evening had been cold, and the night promised to be colder yet.
I had switched off my car engine only five minutes earlier, around eleven o’clock. The cold had already started to seep in around the windows and edges of the doors. Frost was forming on the windows, and cold was now spreading throughout the car.
I reached to turn on the radio, then pulled the collar of my heavy wool coat up snugly around my neck. Sitting in the dark I anxiously watched the gate at the park entrance, a thousand feet away through the trees, for a sign of approaching headlights. I knew it would be Mary Ann. Who else would be venturing into the old, out-of-the-way park so late on such a cold and dark night?
Top-of-the-hour news broke crisply into the night air from the car’s lone dashboard speaker. Lester Maddox, Georgia’s colorful governor, had walked off the set of the Dick Cavett show an hour earlier. Cavett, according to the news report, had insulted all white Georgians who had voted for Maddox in the gubernatorial election, referring to them all collectively as bigots. Lester asked Cavett to apologize to the people of Georgia, an invitation which Cavett declined.
The Maddox walkout was the hour’s top story on the eleven o’clock radio news. Four shorter news items and a Goody’s Headache Powder commercial later, Cliff Nobles & Co. rode “The Horse” into a “three in a row powerplay” to start the march toward midnight. It was Christmas in Atlanta and a dark, winter night in the park.
On the seat next to me was a small box wrapped in red paper with a simple white bow. Inside the box was a small bottle of perfume and a smaller sheet of parchment on which I had written, in my most practiced Spencerian script, a passage from Euripides Andromache. Even to this time the passage remains my favorite in all of literature:
Past our telling, the ways of heaven.
The gods accomplish the unforeseen.
What all awaited fails of achievement,
While God arranges what none can dream.
A Christmas gift and a prayer, both wrapped nicely by a smiling woman at Rich’s department store were inside the box. Mary Ann would need the prayer in the dark days and cold nights that certainly lay ahead, and she would need hope to cling to—hope that God would in time arrange for us what only we dared to dream.
We would have an hour together tonight, no more—an hour alone sitting together quietly in my car, our breath freezing in the air in front of us each time we’d speak. Stars, obscured in the night sky by dark, billowing clouds, were outdone by twinkling Christmas lights adorning houses just beyond the park’s perimeter. Electric stars of every color sent their tiny lights twinkling through the trees, flickering in the darkness where I sat a quarter mile away, waiting for the first sight of Mary Ann’s headlights.
She’d be there soon, and we would huddle close together, my right arm around her and a wool blanket pulled around us, as we talked, planned and dreamed. The hour would be gone far too soon.
When the time came for her to leave, Mary Ann would write our names backwards in the frost on the windshield as she always did, then she’d draw a big heart around the names—all backwards so that I could read it as I drove home.
It was what we did every Friday night after Mary Ann finished her shift and made the drive to Perkerson Park.
That night so many years ago came into my thoughts tonight when I realized that Christmas is almost upon us, sooner this year than ever before. As I get older, Christmas arrives just a bit sooner every year. As you get older, it will for you too.
Age, I have found, plays another trick with time. At least, it has for me. The passing years have slowed the way memories replay in my mind. Memories play more slowly now, affording me time to examine each one carefully like a jeweler exams a precious stone through his loupe.
I savor the colors, flavors and sounds of those distant years—days painted in a palette of colors all new for 1970. I close my eyes and smell the unmistakeable fragrance of Mary Ann’s hair as she sat with her head on my shoulder, and I feel her soft fingers nervously intertwining with mine as the limerence of youth threatened to explode the air in those bittersweet nights.
A whistling wind played its first notes across the hood of my car as a pair of headlights turned off Deckner Avenue and passed through the park’s gate. She would be tired from her shift, I knew. She’d be wearing the clothes that waitresses wear, and she would be lovely.
She pulled her car alongside mine, and within seconds she slid across my front seat and into my arms. She was not as I’d expected. Her makeup and hair were perfect, her shoes and dress not made for an 8-hour shift. This was no waitress in my car, this was a stunningly gorgeous girl decorated more beautifully than all of Christmas.
She had taken the dress, shoes and makeup to work with her and changed in the restroom after her shift. She apologized for being a little late, then she explained.
“Everything is different for us, Prentice. We can’t go to Christmas parties or dancing like other couples, but we can dance right here in this car. We can’t have romantic dinners in fancy restaurants like other people, but we can eat this cake I brought from work right here in this car,” she continued.
“We can make more memories in the next hour than all those other people can make in a year,” she said, smiling her trademark smile and looking straight, and hopefully, into my eyes, her soft and beautiful cheeks beginning to turn red in the cold.
For the next forty-two minutes the radio was our orchestra. With our arms wrapped tightly around one another we danced without moving. We put cake in each other’s mouth, and ate to our dreams—big dreams that we dreamed together, huddled close under the wool blanket. We made a million memories a minute, and then the time was gone.
After one last kiss, she was outside the car and leaning over the hood to write our names backwards in the frost on the windshield. Then she drew a big heart around the names, laughed and blew me a kiss. Within moments the sound of her car engine broke the silence in the park, and soon her tail lights began to disappear into the night.
Our time was gone, and gone too soon.
Over the years I have never forgotten how quickly time ran out for us that night, and I know that time will one day separate us again, at least for a short while. When time is gone we’ll need memories to hold onto until we hold one another again.
When that time comes, I know where I’ll be. I’ll be sitting alone in our park, waiting and watching anxiously for the sight of headlights in the dark.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Today there is no comment, only tears in my eyes.
This is as good as the VW bus. Maybe better. just like the VW bus story this makes me crazy wondering why you were having to meet in the park and couldn’t go dancing. This may be better because with this I get to tear up while I wonder what’s going on. This is really good romantic writing. I hope all of this really happened because I want to believe in love like this!
I can hardlywait for “The Book” to be released. Do you have a date in mind?
Oo-o-o-h-h-h, this is such good reading! Thanks, MAry Ann, for posting it now, since 1) we’re only a hand’s worth of finger away from Xmas, and 2) I missed the original posting back in Sept.
As I also missed the on-going story of “Hiding across America in a VW”. Which A.Biederman’s comment reminded me of. I need to go back & read all that again. After all, I still don’t know who those evil folks (or forces?) were that you two were hiding & running from!
Still, as A. Biederman says, this story of a happening at Christmas of 1970 “is as good as the VW bus, maybe better. . . .”
Such excellent writing!
Further comment/review:
I like that quote from Euripides. And the details about the setting (of you sitting in the car at the park, while waiting for Mary Ann & then actually being together) – especially the repeated reference to her writing names & heart in the windshield frost (what a refreshing variation to the typical expression of young love written in wood of tree or fence post). For me at least, this detail captures the deep love you two felt and still fell for each other! Warm despite the chilly environs!
That word “limerence”: here is the second time I’ve encountered it, and the first one was also in “Perkerson Park” blog. Prentice, you must like that word! (Had to look up definition both times – I guess it hasn’t sunk into my brain’s knowledge vault yet. LOL)
Interesting that this piece also includes a contemporary political reference. Maddox versus Cavett. I seem to remember an earlier reference to the GA governor of that time, which also used the description bigot(s). I get the impression that Maddox was the George Wallace of GA. What’s interesting about the political reference is that if omitted it doesn’t lessen the story here, but then politics and social change are clearly important to you, Prentice.
However, let me say that your purely political-social-news postings don’t read as well as these recollections of events from your & Mary Ann’s past. Or your spiritually themed postings.
Merry Xmas to you!