The stars above were shining on a crystal clear, cold February night in 1972 when an almost 14 year old me, and my mother’s first ex husband yet to be, Hadley, were out on a mission to water cows from a well on the Old Place.
Of all the men I’ve ever met on this earth, the most handsome was Hadley. If Ben Cartwrighton Bonanza (Loren Green) had a much more handsome brother then he’d have been Hadley.
Hadley had lots of money, in addition to his movie Star looks, and he was recently widowed, and was my bus driver when my Daddy had died in September 1971.
This gave Hadkey an inside edge on the race for every eligible middle aged man around to pursue my mother. Thanksgiving 1971 would have been very lonesome without Daddy, but since I invited Hadley to dinner, it was a happy time.
When Mama bent over to take the turkey from the oven, and Hadley whistled, and she smiled, I knew it was a budding romance.
By Christmas 1971 Mama announced her and Hadley were engaged.
On that long ago clear night fifty years ago, I looked up in wonderment at the heavens and exclaimed
Oh look, Hadley!
There’s the Milky Way.
There’s the Big Diipper and Little Dipper and look, there’s Orion!
Hadley looked up, and said just think, in a few hours the sun will rise in the East, and then all day those will be there, but we won’t see them until the sun goes down in the west again.
Just think how many billions of times, the sun has made that big circle.
I said not a word.
On the way back home, I warned Hadley to not discuss the heavens and earth with Mama. Campbellites have peculiar notions about those things, and Mama has a very quick temper and complete inability to consider, anything else, I said.
We both knew about her temper.
I saved Hadley from trying to tell Mama the earth was flat and the sun revolved around the earth.
But I couldn’t save him, from discovering that him and Mama, lived in two different worlds.
TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS
Blind Pig and the Acorn
Mama married Hadley that June and left him (for the last time) on New Year’s Day 1973.
By February 1973 Hadley had another gorgeous middle aged girlfriend, who’d light his cigarettes and pour his coffee and if Hadley told her the world was flat, she’d have agreed with him.
He was a wonderful, good and kind man, to me and Mama and everyone else in the world he ever met.
But he was a bit careless, in his research for the truth, you know?
cdnc.ucr.edu
en.m.wikipedia.org
