The Sunday Memory Drawer - Stella

A famous Times Square photo opportunity from V-E Day.  How many soldiers and how many girls were in clinches like this?  How many proposals?  How many babies born nine months to the day?

I wish I had been around for a glorious celebration like this.  I wish my own uncle, the person I was named after, had lasted another two weeks so he, too, could have rejoiced at the victory over Germany.  But, as I wrote last week, he did not.

And a scene like this between him and his fiancee Stella never happened.

As little as I knew about my uncle, I had only slightly more intelligence on his main squeeze.  She was still around.  I wrote out Grandma's Christmas card to her every year.  She apparently was settled with a husband and a couple of kids and they lived in lower Manhattan.  My family allegedly showed up at her wedding en masse and all I ever heard my grandmother say was that it was a "nice party."

And that was it for decades.

Years later, my father's prostate cancer was in its final stages and had metastized in his right leg.   He couldn't really walk so he pretty much stayed in his recliner from dawn to dawn.  Watching television and doing the word puzzle in the Reader's Digest.  He had help coming in so weekdays were covered.  I would do some of the personal maintenance on the weekend.  Of course, I checked in with a phone call twice a day.  One night, I got a voice that seemed to be the slightest bit teary.  This was monumental in itself.  My father never ever showed much emotion.

"I just got a phone call.  Did you ever hear us mention Stella?"

Duh.

From the surprising details I got that day, this lady had pretty much looked my father up in the Bronx phone booth and dialed him up.  Her husband had just died and she was feeling nostalgic.  She was flipping through a lot of pictures of my uncle and our family and simply wanted to share the moment.

Lots of pictures???  Where???  Can I see???

Stella's call seemed to stir long deep-seeded emotions in my father as well.  Perhaps it was a recognition of the passage of years.  A realization of the passage of perhaps only a few more days.  I don't know.  But I do know that my dad enjoyed that conversation with Stella more than any other he had in the recent past.

Even better?  She called again.  And again.  And again.  And again.

Nothing perked up my father in his final months as those phone calls and then letters from Stella.

The packages in the mail contained wonderful mementos.  A book of memories shared by his fellow soldiers who were with him when he was killed.  Personal letters and photos.  I'd read them as they came in.  Here was some of the history that had been missing for years.

Shortly thereafter, it was time for my father to go to one of those places which he, in better times, would have called "the last stop."  A nursing home/hospice where it all closed out quietly and quickly.

As I cleaned out his apartment, I came across Dad's address book, which he must have first purchased in 1950.  I flipped through it.  How many of these folks had gone before him?  And then I saw it.

Stella's phone number.

She might have been calling him to no avail for the past several weeks.  I realized that I was going to have to call her myself and share the news about Dad.

It hit me like a brick.  I would be calling her and saying...

"Hi, this is Len...."

Gulp.

Needless to say, it took me another week to get my nerve up to hit those digits on the dialpad.

I swallowed hard.  A lot.

Stella picked up on the other end.

"Hi, this is Len..."

She was elated to hear those first words.

And, strangely enough, they would not be the last between us.

Dinner last night:  Grilled sausage, peppers, and onions at Citi Field.