That’s my pal Walter “Mac” Davis about the death of Betsy Howie, the mother of our daughter Calpurnia. He is referring directly to “Callie’s Talley”, Betsy’s book detailing with, to the penny, the first year of Callie’s life. What it cost. Some people took offense. How dare Betsy! A mother putting a dollar, no a penny, on a life! All the stuff! Diapers, you name it. Others thought it hilarious.
Yes, that is what it COSTS!
I? I was living it.
In the house. Making the meals. I made most of them. Calpurnia learned to love salmon. Don’t think she’s had a bit since.
People seem to be dying a lot lately, or perhaps I’m just noticing. An old high school chum Bobby Goldberg, the only Jew in Notre Dame High School for Boys, brand new in Niles Illinois, right down from Ann Margret’s. Who? Bobby, a fine point guard on our fine basketball team, who became the President of the Chicago Board of Trade, no mean job. Then in his late forties he sold a company for zillions and began a decades long career coaching girls’ basketball.
So how did this Jewish boy wind up at ND? If I’m writing the story, and I am, I’ll write that his Italian Catholic mother got her way over the Jewish dad who said, Just keep putting out the mostaccioli and you can send Bobby to the Gulag for all I care. (His old man was probably kinder than that, but he did mangia Ma’s pasta.)
But returning to Mac’s “some thoughts that seem ever so empty now.” Yes. “Sorry for your loss”. Heard that a lot. And I don’t at all mean to denigrate. What do you say?
A multi-talented, much-loved woman in her prime, felled by golf ball-sized abdominal tumors, bringing tears to these already too old eyes, yes, Betsy, in so many ways we barely knew ye. Our 21 year old daughter, Calpurnia, to be born the day before the Ides, named after Julius Caesar’s wife, the lady with the dream, Don’t go to the Senate today, you vainglorious toad, he who did not listen, at least for long, our precious daughter with whom you fought all throughout high school, I trying to mediate, What’s the point, Would you please stop fighting, and eat your Coho, then reconciling and loving each other so tightly no bond could ever break them apart; Betsy, with no food too spice-less for your Martin Luther 95 Theses taste, who wrote thousands of jokes for Scholastic Magazine, some of which were even funny, Betsy, who once asked Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson to dance at some posh night club, Beatty politely turning her down, then Nicholson approaching her, after impolitely turning her down, saying You know why I turned you down? Because I get paid to make a fool of myself; Betsy, having organized the re-opening of Ellis Island, then having something with Kojak’s Telly Savalas (Who loves ya, Baby? I never asked what), Betsy who wrote speeches for luminaries, one for Ronnie Reagan, the old man not the shirt-collarless son, a “perfect gentleman”, said Bets; Betsy who called the Hunt Library’s auction to acclaim and laughter; Betsy for whom all thoughts seem ever so empty; Betsy whom we hardly knew ye and surely not enough. Who loves ya, Baby? Telly. And all the rest of us.
Lonnie Carter is a playwright, Obie winner and his signature play is “The Sovereign State of Boogedy Boogedy.”
I will write you soon with some thoughts that seem ever so empty now