Hey, anybody still with me. Tonight is 21st of July. I am writing while sitting in bed in Cedar City, Utah, here to visit Granny for a mini-family get together. This is the year, finally, that sister Trieste and daughter Kim and husband Tom hauled out from the closet under the stairs in the basement boxes of our Dad’s papers from his mission to Great Britain 1934 -1937, stored there, undisturbed, since September 1959, when the folks moved into this new house. The project was to arrange all those papers into categories, to make a master scrapbook, and scan the papers to a CD so every one of Dad’s descendents will have a copy. This is a mammoth undertaking, and we are all grateful to Trieste’s family for doing this.

By the time I arrived the project was well underway, I was absolutely no help, so I spent my time reading old letters and postcards - my! I could write about what is in those papers - but this is a Henry Cook site. The work was taking place in the big family room in the basement.

My mind went from Dad and his papers to the wedding dinner held in this very room in October of 1959. The folks had just moved in, the basement was not finished as it is today. I don’t remember appreciating what a miracle Granny pulled off, that huge dinner on top of the move, or being properly grateful. I do remember the banquet tables and chairs borrowed from the church. I remember Henry standing during the dinner, expressing his gratitude for this lovely event. Never in his life did Henry fail to be grateful and to say thank you - a wonderful trait I believe he has passed on to his children. I remember Henry talking a bit about how we met: our courtship, plans for the honeymoon touring up California’s Coast Highway 101 to San Francisco, our plans to live in the El Paso Motel in St. George (at that time in history St. George was a town of about 4000 people and the idea of a rental was non-existent) while he finished field mapping from the Utah line to the rim of the Grand Canyon, a stretch known as the Arizona Strip, and then move on to Roswell, New Mexico - then finishing with his pledge to take care of me. And, he did. I was about to become one of the world’s Best Kept Women - literally.

I guess here is the time to confess - a couple of days later he did have grounds to back out of the entire deal. As I remember the situation:

The Dodgers had moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958, and were playing in The Memorial Coliseum until the Stadium at Chavez Ravine was finished in 1962. In 1959 the Dodgers won the playoffs with the Milwaukee Braves the week before our wedding. Life came to a standstill during the playoffs, Henry was so very excited that there might be a possibility of the World Series being played in Los Angeles, literally down the street, well, the freeway. The freeway then did not amount to much. However, in the Corvette it was about seven or eight hours to LA. We were to be married on October 3 - not on the 2nd as I had planned - because the World Series with the Chicago White Sox was going to start that week, and Henry absolutely would not be married on a game day! So, we were married on a travel day - the first two games with the White Sox were in Chicago, then the travel day was on Saturday - the day he agreed to marry - then the next three games were to be in Los Angeles. Do you see what is coming here?

Henry was working right up to the day of the wedding - while glued to the games broadcast over the radio. I was very involved in getting things together - the folks were still moving piecemeal to Cedar City, the wedding was to be in St. George, I hardly knew what I was doing - this is very true, I was basically clueless - and in the midst of appointments and hair dos and last minute sewing for my trousseau (now there is a word we hardly use these days) when somebody - who? - approached me with the information that a couple in town had two tickets to the World Series they could not use!!!! Did I want to follow that up? I didn’t - we already had reservations up the coast for that entire week. I dismissed it and forged on ahead with wedding plans. When Henry was apprised of this news, and the tickets were long gone by then, he did seriously consider if indeed I was the girl for him. After some deliberation, he decided we would go ahead and be married despite this phenomenal lapse in my character. We watched those games in bed while in motels, day after day, as we traveled up the California coast, instead of being at the Coliseum in person, and I’ve spent the ensuing 48 years repenting and trying to make it up to him.

(For those who are too young to remember - The Dodgers won the World Series in Game Six, in Comiskey Park in Chicago. We were in San Francisco by then, and the thrill of winning The Series blunted his great disappointment that we did not see the three games in LA.)

Our wedding bands: were bought in St. George at Milne’s Jewelry. Henry was careful to ask if I minded not having a diamond. We were the generation of Don Cherry’s popular 1955 hit song “Band of Gold”:

I’ve never wanted wealth untold, my life has one design
A simple little band of gold, to prove that you are mine.
Don’t want the world to have and hold for fame is not my line,
Just want a little band of gold to prove that you are mine.

The next verse proved prophetic in our case:

Some sail away to Araby and other lands of mystery
But all the wonders that they see will never tempt me
Their memories will soon grow cold, but til the end of time,
There’ll be a little band of gold to prove that you are mine.

So - simple little bands of gold it was - it is. Henry stopped wearing his ring within just a few years, it is very wide, very heavy, and he very nearly lost his finger in a rig accident when his ring caught on a piece of moving machinery. After that near disaster, into the safe went his ring, never to see the light of day again. For some years I would ask him to please wear it, when he was working in the office. By then it was too tight, he is not a jewelry person, and he would assure me he didn’t need to wear a ring to know he was married.

However! This thinking did not apply to me, I never took my ring off. The light in his eyes and the look on his face when he put that ring on my finger is a treasured memory forever, and there on my finger that ring has stayed. Except - at one time I had a piano teacher who diagnosed my sloppy left hand technique as perhaps due to that heavy ring, so I was instructed to take it off when practicing. I did some, and once left it on the piano at the school in Dhahran - when rehearsing with Anne’s fourth grade for a school program. I got home, realized what I had forgotten, and Henry moved Heaven and Earth until we finally found it. I never took it off again; to heck with technique.

Three weeks ago I played the organ for a funeral, and while there was not exactly blood on the keys, to my surprise, I was bleeding profusely - my ring was so tight had quite a wound. This tightness has been coming on for some time, I have ignored it (could I be gaining weight?) and then it took some doing to get the ring off by using liquid soap. The jeweler kept it just a couple of days, enlarged it by an entire size - and he also polished it to it’s 1959 shine, quite a difference. I still could not wear my wedding band for another week, my bloody wound took so long to heal.

While riding the airport shuttle, Vegas to St. George, I was thinking about the day we bought our rings. Here is another example of how the human family is connected : the lady sitting by me, originally from Las Vegas - her maiden name was Milne - and yes, she is a cousin to Wes Milne, of Milne’s Jewelry where we bought our rings.

Actually - now it is the middle of the night - August 2nd. I never was on the internet while in Utah, and since being back in Fort Smith have had internet problems. Just yesterday paid a nice Buddhist man from Malaysia who got his degree at U. of Arkansas (he did not go to school in Australia, his other option, because he could not understand the accent there - he told his mother, while making six shooter pistol motions at me, “I need John Wayne English!” this guy is wonderful, knows his computer stuff - and is very expensive. And, have lost internet three times since he was here - but now I know what to do.)

So, tonight, I can post this article. I’ve missed writing, and missed those who comment on the guestbook. You are my lifeline, in a way. We are approaching the six month mark here, and I can see myself going into the next phase - as a friend told me last February: there will come a time when it will finally hit you: “he really is not coming back. You have to prepare for that.“ Yes. I am beginning to see. It is more difficult now than then, if that can be. Today I turned on the TV for just a minute, and there was Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox - wearing a Dodger uniform! First the Yankee icon Joe Torres is the manager this year, and now Manny Ramirez is a Dodger? What is the world coming to? What would Henry think?

And, August 2, while also the day after Allison’s birthday - all the kids were born in August - when I think about this I remember Linda Simms, in the teacher’s lounge in Abqaiq, giggling at me one day with the comment: “You and Henry really did enjoy your Novembers, didn’t you?”

As I was saying, August 2 was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Like 9/11 and the day JFK was shot, we all remember where we were on those singular days in history. More on this next time. And, Yemen is not finished! My mind is churning about some more issues of the trip.

But, this is bye for now. Thank you to those who will come back after almost a month of no writing. Much love from Bonnie and the Cook Family.