On Quests, Part 1
Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, among others, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written by an unknown 14th-century poet of the West Midlands of England. .
As I recently watched The Green Knight, based on the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, one scene resonated for me as I sensed the extent to which it mirrored my recent experiences with my friend Bobbie. The movie is a faithful retelling of the fourteenth-century chivalric romance, with chapter titles in Old English blackletter and a soundtrack that is positively eerie, sometimes sounding like a chorus of Tuvan throat singers. King Arthur is old and doddering; Queen Guinevere is decidedly unlovely; Sir Gawain is a youthful goof-off.
The story centers around Gawain’s quest to fulfill a Christmas Day promise to seek out the Green Knight one year hence, whereupon Gawain would receive the same blow he chose to deliver to the Green Knight. (Gawain had cut off his head, likely not expecting the Green Knight to pick it up as he laughed and rode away.) Gawain’s journey is infused with magic – a woman who asks him to retrieve her head from the bottom of a lake, a talking fox that befriends him, the Green Knight himself, more vegetation than human.
Last October, I was working on a memoir piece about falling in love with Bobbie the summer after high school.[1] Those recollections of first love inspired me to reach out, if only to thank her for all she gave me. I sent a letter, a shot in the dark, to the Long Island address I had for her when our correspondence was sidetracked over forty years ago by growing families commanding our full time and attention. My letter did reach her, and a week later I received one in return, eight pages on yellow legal pad paper. All that catching up!
Although we exchanged emails and cell phone numbers, we decided to continue to correspond via handwritten letters. Over this past year, one of us has received a letter from the other every ten days or so, the U.S. Post Office’s lack of delivery speed giving us time to think of something new to write about, although that was never really a problem. We had a lot to share about our lives and families, about the dismal state of the “American experiment,” about our experiences as high school teachers. We had both left secure jobs in our late forties, returned to school to earn education degrees, and then helped students learn about World History (Bobbie) and Language Arts (me). We would have been great colleagues, our teaching philosophies matched so well.
In May, while I was visiting old hometown friends in Akron, Bobbie sent me a text: “Cheryl told me you are there today and tomorrow. Hope your visit is wonderful. If you get sleepy as you drive back to Iowa, give me a call. I’d be happy to help some of the miles pass.” I had other stops before returning, but ten days later, I texted Bobbie from the first rest stop in Illinois to see if she was available to talk. Back on the road, ten minutes later, I got a call from her: “Where are you?” “Just east of Champaign.” “Well, turn around! I’m in the middle of Pennsylvania on my way to Ohio.”
I was momentarily tempted to do so but decided to continue homeward. Instead, we talked – for the first time in all those years, for over two hours as we both drove west. The miles flew by. We agreed that since we’d missed this chance to meet up, we must do so soon, and I told her I’d be coming back east in August to camp with my daughter and grandsons in Virginia. When we finally said goodbye, as Bobbie was pulling into a rest stop and I was crossing the Mississippi River, she said, “I love you.” Without a moment’s hesitation I responded, “I love you too, Bobbie.”
We made plans: I’d visit her on Long Island at the beginning of August before heading down the coast to meet Emma, Oscar, and Linus at a state park near Virginia Beach.[2] I stopped in Akron for a few days, then drove to the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch country, in the foothills of the Alleghenies, where I camped for the night at the all-but-deserted Holiday Pines Campground – for free since the office was closed. The next morning, as I fueled up on the Twilight Diner special, I watched two horse-drawn buggies make their way along the Interstate 80 overpass. I reached New York City at noon, avoiding rush hour traffic, crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and the Bronx, then across Throgs Neck Bridge to Long Island, pulling up in front of Bobbie’s house an hour later.
It had been 45 years since we’d last seen each other, but we reconnected as if it were yesterday. Of course, all the letters had smoothed out much of the potential awkwardness of the meeting, but we both still felt a twinge of apprehension. After all, we had professed, not in so many words, our love in those letters, letters that I wasn’t sure her husband, Jeff,[3] was fully aware of. When he arrived home that evening from work, he welcomed me without reservation, taking me on a tour of the dovecote that housed his flight of homing pigeons and the chicken coop he’d built for their laying hens. I was given their boys’ old bedroom, a beautiful space with three ribbon windows looking down on Northport Bay and, beyond a narrow neck of land, the Long Island Sound and the far Connecticut shore. Two skylights in the roof let in sunshine filtered through the tall oaks towering over the house. I called it the Treehouse, and there I slept for five nights as Bobbie and Jeff graciously wove me into the fabric of their life.
Footnotes:
[1] For the full story, I invite you to turn to Falling in Love for the First Time (Parts 1-3) in this blog series.
[2] First Landing State Park, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where English colonists first arrived in 1607.
[3] Jeff was the boyfriend after me. When I visited Bobbie in Denver near the end of her first year of college (still thinking I was her boyfriend), he helped replace my car’s fuel filter so I could drive back home.