We are now in the eleventh month of the coronavirus pandemic, almost 3,000 people are dying each day from Covid-19, and public health officials say that the worst is yet to come. Another 200,000 Americans could die before the vaccine puts an end to this plague.
My wife Charlie is about 75 years old and I have just celebrated my 73rd birthday.. We are both in the “high risk” age category and Charlie is also in the “high risk” medical category: if one Covid-19 germ gets into our house, Charlie will probably die and I might.
The way things work with this pandemic is that a person gets sick, goes to the hospital, is put in quarantine, and their loved ones never see them alive again. There is no opportunity to give them a farewell kiss or tell them how much they are loved.
It sucks.
This very scenario occurred a few weeks ago when our next-door neighbor Marcus caught the coronavirus and, within ten days, his wife of 46 years was left a grieving widow.
This fate could befall either Charlie or I (or both!) in this coming year. We’re hoping to last those few more months until the vaccine is available to us but…you never know. One germ in the house and we’re done.
Charlie could get sick tomorrow, end up in the hospital, and I’d never see her again!
And so, I would like to take this opportunity to let her know, and let her kin and friends know, what a wonderful human being and wife of 46 years she has been.
Charlie has a lot of relatives, friends, business clients, and acquaintances that love her, that’s for sure. However, they have no idea of the treasure that they’ve been blessed to know: she’s a one-of-a-kind angel that only comes along once in a while. I am the luckiest guy in the world to have spent the last half century with her.
Charlie was lucky to have been raised by good parents who instilled strong values in her. She was not a good student in school, suffering from what is now termed “attention deficit disorder” and “dyslexia”. I’ve noticed this deficiency over the years which manifests itself in slow learning which she then overcomes by hard work and doggedness.
I’ve also noticed that her mind never shuts off; it’s as if she needs to mentally juggle ten balls in the air at all times.
It’s no wonder that she has constant stress issues, upset stomach, migraine headaches, heart problems, and the like. I wouldn’t want to live like that, but Charlie has accepted her fate and…excels at what she puts that busy mind to.
And she’s the hardest worker I’ve ever known.
When I met her in 1973, fresh out of the Air Force, she was a well-loved nurse at Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina, California. She was also a mother of four young boys courtesy of an 8-year marriage to a cheating, beer-guzzling louse who physically and mentally abused her. Charlie was working double shifts at the hospital to save her home from foreclosure and put food on the table for the boys. Needless to say, she was overwhelmed with happiness and gratitude when Prince Charming (me) arrived to help out.
I could see the diamond-in-the-rough: she had a heart as big as Texas.
Working as a team, the two of us embarked on the American Dream, bit by bit inching ourselves up the socio-economic success ladder. Charlie always worked while we were married, first as a nurse, then later as a Chiropractic Assistant, then as an office girl in an Orthopedic clinic, and then as a “Girl Friday” in the office of a Psychiatrist. (Somewhere along the line she even had a stint working with my brother Terry at his bus sales company in Orange County.)
Charlie was a well-regarded member of the staff at the orthopedic surgery practice in Corona when the office manager went down with lupus. Charlie stepped up and helped out in the back office. There she put her tenaciousness to work as a “skip tracer” to reduce the company’s bad debt. One of the surgeon partners then asked her if she could “do the books” on an investment venture of his. I found some “freeware” accounting software and taught her how to use it.
That started her bookkeeping career. It wasn’t l long before she was doing the billing for all of the homeowner associations in the upscale Bear Creek community where we had just moved. Now, she wasn’t a nurse anymore but, rather, she had her own business. At the same time, Charlie became a well-known actor in the social atmosphere of the Bear Creek Country Club, serving on the social committee. She then became involved in the fledgling Assistance League of Temecula Valley. It wasn’t long before she became the fundraising guru and did so well that she was elected President in 1997.
All of these social contacts and excellent word-of-mouth recommendations helped Charlie’s business secure new clients. Later, she got involved with the LeTip International business networking group in Murrieta where she quickly became a main cog and in short order was elected President of that organization. By this time, she was a business dynamo.
Along the way, she developed a lucrative tax preparation business that has grown to about 60 regular clients. She’s an I.R.S.-sanctioned preparer, something she is quite proud of.
In about twenty years, from 1988 to 2008, Charlie’s bookkeeping/tax prep business grew from $0 annual gross to about $200,000. Not bad for a one-person shop, operated out of her home.
The reason for her success, in a nutshell, was the same reason that had made her a good nurse: dedication. If you were in Charlie’s hands, you could rest easy because someone was looking out for your interests 24/7. I always joked with clients that, when they hired Charlie, they not only got a bookkeeper but also a “second Mother” who was available to them at all hours, on weekends and on holidays. She was essentially an “on-call business nurse” and her clients loved it (and her).
I hated it but put up with it, because it fulfilled Charlie.
She’s been in this role for over three decades now and, thank goodness, for a number of years now our son Jonathan has been taking on more of the “grunt work” while Charlie has focused on client “brushfires”, audits, and tax work. Charlie has passed on her skills and wisdom to Jonathan and he’s really done a great job reducing the stress on his 74 year-old mother.
Will she ever quit the business? I doubt it; maybe if she goes blind or deaf. The thing is: she loves the personal contact. She’s a “people person”, and her business quenches her social needs to a great extent. Our son Jonathan will probably have to pry the remaining parts of her business from her dead fingers when the time comes!
Speaking of children, my Superwoman wife is also a very loving and dedicated mother to her sons. She instilled her strong work ethic and dedication into the boys as well as family values. They all love her and appreciate her in their own ways and come to her for advice, solace when things are bad, and financial help from time to time. I can’t imagine what their lives would look like if they hadn’t had their Mom on their side whenever their luck ran sour. She’s a rock of support, and they know it and appreciate it.
Charlie and I have had quite an adventure over the past forty-six years. We’ve had our ups and downs like any marriage, but 99+ percent of the time we’ve been happy, supportive, loving, and working as a team to accomplish goals that we’ve set. Like everyone, we’ve changed somewhat as we’ve gotten older and so we’ve become more fragile and crankier. Not a day goes by that we don’t have an argument, typically about something minor or petty. One or both of us will blow off steam…and then we’ll go back to what we were doing. At the end of the day, though, we will climb into the bed, kiss each other, and get a good night’s rest.
We’ve tried hard to observe my parent’s good advice: never go to be mad at each other. We might have failed at this a few times but, then again, we’ve gone to bed together each night for 46 years…uh, almost 17,000 nights!
It might amaze other people who know us that we’ve gotten along so well over the years…because the two of us are so different. And we are…total opposites…in many, many ways. However, we are alike in probably the only way that really matters: we love each other.
As John Lennon sang, “Love is all you need.”
We have striven to find things in our journey that we can enjoy doing together. For example, we both like to travel and we both like to renovate/decorate our home. We both enjoyed doing things with our boys when they were young, like camping, going to the beach, getting involved in Little League and scouting, etc. We both worked as a team on the discipline of the kids and insisting that they put in an honest effort at school. We are proud of the results of that effort: all of our sons are doing well and seem happy. What could be more satisfying?
When I met Charlie, she hadn’t really been anywhere or done much except work and raise her young children. Beginning in the late 70’s, she and I began to travel a bit, like camping with the kids, which we both liked. Then probably around 1980 we took a 7-day cruise in the Caribbean with some neighbor friends and had a great time. We were hooked. Since then, the two of us have taken a couple dozen cruises (Caribbean, Mediterranean, Mexican Riviera, Alaska, New England), train-traveled throughout Europe with son Ron, spent a lot of time in Mexico, Italy and Spain, owned a Mexican timeshare for many years, spent a wonderful Thanksgiving in Tangiers (Morocco), and have owned several RV’s which we’ve used to travel around the United States.
We’re not done, as of 2020. If we don’t croak from the coronavirus before the coming Summer, we’ll be hitting the road in our 40’ Class A motorhome with the dogs in July, to our favorite RV destination: the Oregon coast.
Speaking of dogs, Charlie was not a “dog person” when I met her: she had some bad memories from her past. We got the boys a dog when they could handle one and enjoy it, and we all enjoyed “Chewey” during the kid’s teen years in Riverside. But then, Charlie and I went “dog-less” for about twenty years after the kids moved out and we focused on our business careers.
I retired in 2003 and spent almost five years helping our son Tim and wife Shanon to babysit their young son Craig. We had a great time together. When little Craig finally went off to kindergarten, Charlie thought I would be lonely…so, with some misgivings, she bought me a Boston Terrier puppy.
And, as they say, “the rest is history”.
Charlie became a dog person. In fact, she became so much so that we adopted another Boston Terrier a couple of years later. Move forward to 2020 and we have…three Boston Terriers! Charlie absolutely adores those dogs and they sleep next to her on the bed at night! We have a California King bed and I can’t cuddle with my wife!!!
Anyway, as the saying goes, “A happy wife means a happy life.”
By the way, Charlie is big on surprises, as in extravagant gifts to her hubby. One year she invited me to lunch, and when I went downstairs from my office to met up with her, she presented me with the keys to a new car, a Pontiac Fiero. On another occasion she connived with an acquaintance to buy me a horse. And, later, on my 60th birthday, she showed up with a Boston Terrier puppy (“Booger”).
She just loves me, what can I say?
We do have a happy life here in Mesquite, Nevada. Despite swearing never to have another “girlfriend” (because of the pain of leaving same, like we did moving from So Calif), Charlie has a number of them here in Sun City, as well as quite a few acquaintances and business clients. She can’t help herself: she likes people and people like her. We held a party for three dozen neighbors within two months of moving here (Christmas 2018), held an even larger one the following year, and would have probably topped that this year if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
Those lucky souls who have befriended Charlie have no idea what they now enjoy: a buddy and soulmate who they can count on through thick and thin. That’s just the way she rolls.
We have several neighbor couples that we socialize regularly with and this enables Charlie to keep up with the local gossip while she spends a lot of her time talking to clients over the phone, “Facetiming” with son Jonathan and some of the kids and grandkids, and participating in “Zoom” videoconferences with her siblings. She loves that stuff.
I don’t know how long the two of us will continue to avoid the Grim Reaper. Right now, we’re fairly healthy for 70+ year-old codgers, with one foot on a banana peel.
One of us will eventually head off to the Promised Land and leave the other one broken-hearted. It’s almost too painful to contemplate, but we all must do so at some point.
If my time comes before Charlie’s, I want her to know that my marriage and time with her was “the time of my life”, that I was so proud to have been associated with her, and that I wouldn’t have changed our time together one bit.
What a lucky guy to have enjoyed a lifetime adventure with an Earthly Angel!