The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
Editor’s Note: With this issue of The New Hope Journal we begin a new periodic series of conversations with people who live in the Vanderbilt Apartments in Asheville, North Carolina. Some of the conversations will be direct transcriptions of tape recorded interviews. Others will be slightly fictionalized accounts of several informal conversations fused together into one story. Some of the names, places and other details may be altered for reasons of anonymity when such anonymity is requested. In any case, all material will have been approved in its final form by the interviewee before it is published.
--Larry L. Dill
June 1, 2010
Call Me Madame
Love One another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
--Kahlil Gibran
I cannot paint the picture as it was.
I don’t have enough paint
And there are too many shadows to cover.
--from a poem by Sadie Sondgerath
I met Lola shortly after I moved into the Vanderbilt in March of 2010 and I sat behind her at the Symphony the very next week. The Asheville Symphony performs next door and a few free tickets are frequently offered to Vanderbilt residents. We especially enjoyed Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto. Lola asked me in the lobby a few days later If I would have coffee with her sometime and tell her the story of my life. I said that would take a lot of coffee and she laughed with her proud Spanish accent and said, “That’s ok.” I had no idea at the time that she was 14 years older than me.
The next week we walked over to the City Bakery on Biltmore Avenue. She had a cappuccino and a chocolate cookie. I had Colombian coffee and a roll. It was a sunny day in May and we sat outside for an hour or so talking of our many marriages and our educations--both formal and in the schools of hard knocks. We spoke of love and love lost and of our children, and in her case, of theirs. She told me of a granddaughter she didn’t know existed until the child was 23 years old.
Lola was born in South America to a Latina mother and a Russian father. She became a teacher and then married a less than honorable man who left her when she became so ill she could not work to support him. Being Catholic she tried and failed to be granted a divorce in three different South American countries--finally succeeding only after moving to New York with a Lebanese man she had met on a steamer to Ecuador. He was an aspiring singer and traveling salesman whom she married in New York and stayed with for over 20 years. “He was a good man,” she said, despite the fact that he often treated her like a child who did not have a head for business or the ways of the world that men do.
She had a daughter by the first husband and one by this second husband and left him only after tiring of the limitations placed on her by his continued male chauvinism. After New York and a stint in Miami she moved to Southern California where she met her last husband. They were together for 2 decades as well. She quite clearly made an effort to stand by her men. He hired her as his secretary and married her a short time later. They retired together and traveled the country in a 5th wheel RV rig.
“After 3 years on the road, he said he wanted to settle down again. We bought a mobile home where he wound up spending his days drinking and watching TV. Nothing more. I got sick of it and filed for my last divorce. I got just enough out of the settlement to make a once in a lifetime trip to Paris.
“I was 78 years old and went to Paris alone, telling my daughters that I was traveling with a tour group so as not to worry them. I knew no one in Paris and spoke no French. I had a wonderful time. I cried at the beauty of the Eiffel Tower. And believing as I do in reincarnation, I had the sense, as I walked the streets of Paris, that I had been a Madame there in a long past lifetime.”
“One of my daughters lives in Asheville, so when I returned from France I moved into the Vanderbilt. I like it here very much.”
As the City Bakery began to get crowded we walked over to Pack Square and sat on a park bench near the fountain. “This is romantic,” she said with a smile, and she asked me my age and told me hers. “You’re just a child,” she said of my six and a half decades.
I said, “You know, when I was thirty years old I had an affair with a woman twice my age.”
“You’re, …how do you say in English… Incorregible?”
“Incorrigible?” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Same aword in Espanish…. ...But I like you anyway.”
Complete Site Index
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2009,2010 by Larry L. Dill