A Love Letter

In January 1958 my father, Chris E. Grimsley, was a freshman at East Carolina College in Greenville, North Carolina, about fifty miles north of New Bern, his hometown. He was a Navy veteran a few months past his 23rd birthday. The G.I. Bill was paying for his education.

Early that month he met my mother, Margaret Griffin Harvin, commonly known as Peggy. Peggy had just turned 22. She was from the small town of Woodland in the northeastern part of the state and had transferred to East Carolina after studying first at Duke University and then, briefly, at Guilford College in Greensboro. She was a senior majoring in Home Economics.

Throughout my life I’ve been told that I look just like my father, which is more or less the case, with two caveats. First, my father was six feet tall; I’m only five foot eight. Second, my father was considered quite good-looking; my looks are passable but not in the same league. It may have been the gap between his front incisors. When he grinned it gave him a boyish charm. I myself have never been accused of having charm, boyish or otherwise. Nor have my looks been compared to my mother’s. She was considered drop dead gorgeous; at age 18 had, in fact, been selected as the beauty queen of WTAR-TV in Norfolk, Virginia, which won her an all-expenses paid trip to New York City.

I don’t know exactly how my parents met, but they very definitely hit it off, and at 9 p.m. on Saturday, January 18, 1958, my father abandoned his textbooks and in his firm, masculine hand-writing penned my mother a three-page letter:

“In the cold light of day—this note—letter—what have you; may seem ridiculous, however, though I realize this. . . . there is, at least for the moment, the need to talk to you and since our sixth sense has not paralleled our development of writing—perhaps this page will suffice to capture this moment as it is—I know I could never tell you about it later.

“A few moments ago I was trying to study. Odd though it may seem, a little background music usually helps, but tonight all it does is bring visions of you to me—So you see it seems I can neither study when I’m with you nor when I’m without you. That probably sounds like a bad state of affairs—yet, I would not trade that ‘need for you to be near’ feeling for all the World.

“This is a crazy world Peg—two weeks ago I had not even heard of you—and tonight you possess my every thought—How do you explain this to anyone? How do you explain it to yourself? I do not know, and yet it is fact so I cannot deny it—even if I wanted to.”

For the next two pages, my father wrestled with a problem that most of us have faced at least once in our lives. There are people for whom every new infatuation feels like the discovery of a soulmate; people who are perpetually seventeen. My father was not like that. He had been popular in high school, had no trouble going out with girls, and during his years in the Navy had dated a woman in California for a number of months, gotten to know her family, and considered asking her to marry him before sizing matters up squarely and deciding that, no, she was not the right one for him.

With my mother, however, as he was at pains to state, things were different. “You told me a few days ago that when your parents saw us together—‘they’d know’—At the time this did not seem to be too significant—Tonight though, I know what you meant…. my parents, when I told them about you—read my thoughts like an open book. They were quite pleased at the girl who I described and they are looking forward to meeting you next week-end.”

My father understood perfectly well that saying “I love you” after just two weeks was, ordinarily at least, premature. At one point in the letter he asked my mother to recall a conversation when they first met when “we were discussing the various shades and meanings of love—At that time I told you it was unfortunate that our language did not have a word that meant—‘almost love.’” Now, however, he was disappointed that the language did not contain a word sufficient to convey what he was feeling at that moment. So for lack of anything better he was going to use the word “love,” and by way of staking a claim to the word he copied out an entire sonnet:

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Four months later—May 20, 1958—my parents were married in a civil ceremony in Bennettsville, South Carolina.

They would go on to have what might charitably be described as a tempestuous marriage. My sister and I, who continue to process that marriage after all these years, often refer to it as “The Chris and Peggy Show.” I myself have been cruel enough at times to say that my parents had no business sharing a taxi, much less a marriage. And the marriage would indeed end in divorce, on October 25, 1982, in a courtroom in Franklin County, Ohio.

My mother died just three months later. She was barely 47 years old. My father would follow her in death just six years after that, two months shy of his 55th birthday.

As I write this I am 60 years old. I buried them both, first one and then the other, more than half a lifetime ago. Thinking back upon the years I spent with them and everything I know about their relationship, I suppose I could say that they did not love each other deeply. I do not think I would.