I got you, babe
Dolores crosses the threshold into Medicare with her birthday on Friday wondering how deductibles play out and why a certain prescription is one-tenth the price in Canada. She has held home and hearth together the past four decades like this, diligent and fiscally aware in that St. Joe, Iowa, sort of way.
It seems worth looking up from December bookwork to mark this milestone. Her farmer father kept a daily journal of weather, corn prices and events worth noting. Something like: “Hauled a load of corn to LuVerne. Helen had a girl, Dolores.”
She was named after a nun who afterwards ditched the habit.
Dolores learned to play the organ and dreamed of horses that she could not have (Ernie had worked enough with horses). She drew pictures of horses and went off to Clarke College in Dubuque where she became a great artist. She learned to play more instruments than your elementary school band teacher, from accordion to zither — really. Music brings people together.
I caught her on the rebound. She was a recovering Catholic school teacher who took up a life as sort of a slave potter living in a barn near Alexander. She moved home to the farm looking for a career as a bicyclist and sauntered into the Algona newspaper office one afternoon. It was lust at first site. We went to the Chrome Truck Stop that night. After three dates, it was lust and love. Six months later, we were married on Thanksgiving weekend in a blizzard. It better be love.
I’ve told the story before because I like to repeat it. Living in Algona at age 28 you can envision yourself a celibate. I was living the life and resigned to it. Then God dropped Dolores in. Her mother knew I came from good people in Whittemore. It worked out.
We lived in Algona, Ames and Mason City, never far from St. Joe, until moving to 125 Irving Street as the maples shed in 1990. Joe and Clare welcomed Tom and Kieran and they each mastered an instrument of their own, Dolores being smart enough to realize it would pay their way through college. She raised the brood while we launched the newspaper. She brought in ham sandwiches on press days, as if we were shelling corn.
As the kids learned to fly Dolores picked up a camera and notebook and took over the Happy Beat. She is everywhere all at once with Peach the Newshound, and Mabel before Peach, and Jack before Mabel, and sometimes with a rabbit. She gives a voice and puts a face to people who otherwise have no voice or face. You can’t put a value on that.
She can crank out a crackerjack illustration in the time you can say, “Is that done yet?” As the clock is about to explode on deadline she is just finishing that caption. She knows how to be with the wife of the missing trucker. She knows in her bones that rural Iowa is not better today from consolidation, and that’s not how you treat a hog. Her thumbprints are all over the newspaper.
She still plays the organ as the dearly departed are sent on their way. I hope it gives me some moral standing by association. She still wants to teach kids how to draw before we drain their creative spirit by age 12. She will take a rabbit as proxy for Trigger. While I write about the issues that divide, she is finding the stories that bring us together. She gets awfully agitated when you ignore her and post those stories half-baked on Facebook, because she wants to do it up right. Doing it right is big with her. That’s how she gets the picture of the kid with lights on his head sleeping through the St. Mary’s Christmas concert while you snap sunset photos.
When we get on each other’s nerves semi-weekly Brother John is there to remind me that she is more valuable than me, so I should sit down and shut up. He is always right. Dolores is usually right. There. I said it. She is right, almost always. This column you can live without but not the photo of the two-headed calf. I love her for that.
There. I said it. We never say it enough to the ones we love. I am one lucky dude. Happy birthday. And go ahead, splurge on some gastrointestinal drugs at a criminal cost out of pocket even with Medicare. I hear you, babe, it’s a jungle out there but we got each other like Sonny and Cher used to.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
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You are a lucky man and smart enough to know it. Thank you for telling the rest of the world. You are a bright spot in a world that needs it. ( Actually, SHE is the bright spot!!!)
What a beautiful piece about an obviously remarkable woman. Thanks for starting my day right!