Life's Hard Lessons

"Love is laughing while being stupid together."

Canal Fulton, Ohio Photo: Ileana Johnson 2017

Ray is eighty-two years young and a natural story teller, always with a twinkle in his eyes and a smile on his face. Tall and energetic, he has worked hard his entire life and is not about to quit. He could move mountains once. He has slowed down but his energy level and drive would put many younger men to shame.

Born and raised in West Virginia, he became an Ohio resident after he met his future bride with whom he fell in love head over heels. If you ask him, he does not mind telling you that she begged him to marry him and has the picture to prove it. She was eighteen when he took her to the prom and he was a handsome lad of twenty-one.

When Ray was ten years old, his beloved mother had a nervous breakdown. Back in those days, they committed patients and treated nervous breakdowns in insane asylums. Of the five children, three of the minor boys were put into foster homes. His childhood ended then as daily chores took over his diurnal existence for the next five years. Ray had a paper route when he was nine years old but he had never made a whole lot of money as a delivery boy.

But now, placed with an older farming couple, the boys had to feed the animals, “slop the hogs,” the chicken, and milk the cows before they went to school. They learned how to work hard for their keep. They ate beans and potatoes, not so much meat, but never went hungry. There was no heat in the old farm house, the boys hated to get out of bed and step on the stone cold floor. There was a pot-bellied stove for cooking, an outhouse flushing over the creek, a Sears and Roebuck catalog for toilet paper, plenty of chores, and many life-long lessons in work ethic and responsibility.

Every Sunday they went to an old Methodist country church. If there was a revival, they went to revival with their foster parents. There were pie socials, ice cream socials, and other family-oriented activities. They were part of a family but were missing their mother’s love, a mother who was too sick to treat them with kindness and affection.

Ray went to school every day smelling like cow manure because they had to do chores first thing in the morning. In his inimitable language, Ray laughs that it did not matter a hell of beans because everybody else smelled the same.

When Ray left the foster family’s West Virginia farm, he moved to Ohio to work in a steel mill. One brother went into the Navy and one into the Air Force. Ray worked in a grocery store, on the docks, in a steel mill, and pretty much any job to make a buck.

On a blind date, a blindness from which he had never recovered, he met the love of his life, Joan. His best friend asked him to go on a double date with a woman he’d never met. As Ray tells it, his buddy was looking for a “sucker” in order to appease his girlfriend whose friend was single. He could have said no, but he was smitten the moment he saw her. A very defiant young woman with bright blue eyes, Joan was in a hurry to get married so she could get away from her controlling mother Aida.

Ray and Joan got married on Saturday and Ray got fired on Monday. But the in-laws were nice enough to set them up in a trailer, rent free. Young and immature love can cause temporary blindness but true love conquers any adversity.

Ray learned how to build trailers from scratch, to weld, to wire, to do carpentry, to brick, and to cement foundations, skills that saved him a lot of money and helped him build two homes. He is in great demand to this day because he can fix anything. Additionally, in his spare time, he served in the U.S. National Guard. Out of the tragedy of his mom going into the asylum, Ray fashioned himself into a life-long Renaissance man and weekend soldier who could fix anything with string, a paper clip, dirt, and spit.

From Ray’s blind date came love, marriage, and three beautiful children. And one day, decades later, fate brought Ray’s youngest son, a captain, across my moonlit path in Mississippi and he became my husband.

After 59 years of marriage, Ray lost the love of his life to a lengthy and painful illness. Joan is buried close to a thicket of blue spruce in the cemetery where he bought a plot fifty years ago.