just breathe (a love story, a lung story)

So far we've had a robbery and a death.  Who's ready for a love story?


First, the setting.  We're not in the backwoods farms of Georgia anymore, or the wide plains of Canada and  Montana.  Instead, we start with young Mary Elizabeth in Knoxville, Tennesse, from a well-heeled and respected family - the Gleasons.  Wealthy from a family beer distributorship and renowned for James A. Gleason's military success, the family lived in the lap of luxury.  But Mary's home life was hardly idyllic.  Her father was a strict taskmaster; he taught his children how to swim by throwing them into a pond and watching as they figured out how to save themselves.   Mary's mother had died when she was young and her father, before he remarried, passed the care of his children on to his mother.

Because Mary's two brothers were quite the handful for their grandmother, Mary was sent away to boarding school to make life a little easier at home.  To top it off, she'd always been a sickly child, always seeing doctors and at one point needing treatment from the Mayo Clinic.  Half-orphaned and often ill, Mary nevertheless did very well at her boarding school, graduating with honors and excelling at the piano.  She was a kind girl, soft-spoken and with the genteel southern manners expected of a young woman of her station.  Devout, obedient and with a subdued, modest beauty, Mary had become the perfect Southern belle.

Meanwhile, six hundred miles away in Philadelphia, James Larkins was growing up in a working-class family.  He, too, had lost a parent; in fact, he was an orphan, raised by a cousin's family.  His relatives worked as horse colliers and trolley operators, and Jimmie was enrolled in professional schools before he could finish high school.  He learned shorthand and mechanical drawing - skills that could make him useful at any jobsite.  But before he could make a career for himself, James Larkins was stricken with tuberculosis - the dreaded disease once called consumption.  At the time, the only recognized cure for TB was to move to an arid climate and follow a strict regimen of diet and rest.  So James rode the train out to New Mexico and tried to heal a little.

Meanwhile, back in Knoxville, Mary's brother Bernard contracted TB.  Mary herself was fine - no more sickly than usual - but since she'd graduated from the boarding school and wasn't yet married, it made sense for her to travel out west to care for her brother.  After all, caring for men is what women did.  But when the Gleasons arrived at the TB sanitorium, Mary - unsurprisingly, given her delicate constitution - caught TB and became the sickest of them all.

This is where James and Mary's paths crossed: a sanitorum in Silver Springs, New Mexico.  They spent the most thrilling years of the Roaring Twenties far from the cities that were their homes, and along the way they found each other.  Forced to stay outdoors for hours, lying down or engaging in leisurely activities, James and Mary spent day after day together in the sunshine.  In normal society, a working-class Philadelphia boy and a genteel Knoxville belle would never have spent long days having heart to hearts, but the TB sanitorium was its own little world.  The eyes of their families and the rules of East Coast society were a thousand miles away.  He was tall, ambitious and a man of few, well-chosen words; she was charming and friendly and as sweet as iced tea.  And they fell in love.

Eventually, they were both lucky enough to recover - and unlucky enough to have to head their separate ways. For four long years they stayed in touch through letters. He came through Knoxville once to see her, on his way from Philadelphia back out to the west - the dry, sun-soaked land where they'd met and fallen in love, the endless territory that had once been the wild frontier, and then the land of boundless opportunity.  Now that the Great Depression had hit, the west seemed less like a dreamland and more like a desert, but James needed a job.  And he found one, working at a desk running calculations for the men building Boulder Dam.  After long years of illness and unemployment, he had his health, a home, and a job.  There was just one thing missing, and toward the end of 1931 he sent a question back to his sweetheart in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Mary had seen him only once in the last four years.

The last day of the year, Mary wired a telegram back.  "HAPPY NEW YEAR DEAR WITH ME THAT IS YOUR ANSWER I BELIEVE IF YOU STILL FEEL STRONG ENOUGH."  Mary's well-to-do family, of course, were not about to approve of a marriage to a penniless young man from a family they'd never met, particularly a marriage that sent her across the country into wild, unknown territory.  So she didn't tell them: "FAMILY IN IGNORANCE," she informed James.  "DETAILS FOLLOW LOVE MARY"

Mary made copies of their birth certificates and contacts out in Boulder City.  She found a priest who would conduct a Catholic ceremony (although James was not a churchgoer, Mary had no intention of flagging in her faith).  She packed a trunk full of clothes and provisions, and booked her train tickets.  This time there'd be no brother - she would be a young woman crossing the country alone.   Highly unusual at the time.  Still surprises some people now, I'm qualified to say.

Boulder City, at the time Mary arrived, was not much of a city at all - more of a village of tents and makeshift roads.  It was brought into existence to house the throngs of workers building the dam, and its accomodations were - well, "primitive" would be putting it kindly.  Mary arrived in town on the night of the 22nd, and straightaway she could tell that her clothes weren't precisely suitable. She'd brought her finest shoes to wear at her wedding, but Boulder City was built on dust and dirt - no pavement to walk on.  To save the satin for the ceremony, she walked barefoot and carried her shoes in her hand.  Less than 24 hours after she arrived, James and Mary were wed in a temporary Catholic church - the first church wedding in Boulder City.  Her parents found out by telegram... after the marriage was official.

In addition to being Boulder City's first church wedding, James and Mary were another first - the first owners fo a bathtub in town.  Yep, she definitely wasn't in Knoxville anymore.  And while she was adjusting to the change in environments, she also had to learn fast: she'd been raised in a boarding school, and had never learned to cook, clean or keep house.  The first time she went to make an apple pie, she bought two apples.  She was living in a world of rough-and-tumble men and faced a job she'd never been taught how to do.  But she ordered a cookbook, asked for advice, and - just like she had at school - she proved to be a quick learner.

After the dam was finished, Mary followed James across the southwest as he found new employment - in Mexico, in the hills around Southern California, and finally in downtown L.A.  They had two children - one named James and one named Mary.  As an engineer, a hardware salesman and a contractor, James helped build the ever-expanding city of Los Angeles.  He bought land in the desert, an area he loved, where they could build their dream home.  Then Mary got asthma - bad asthma, that sent her to the hospital and sometimes kept her in her bed all day. The doctors said only thing might help: finding a climate that would be easier on her lungs.

So they tried.  They took to the car, driving up to the mountains, out to the desert and down to the coast so Mary could test the air.  James drove, Mary rode shotgun, and the kids fell asleep in the back.  The desert, which had done so well by them in their youth, made it worse; the pollen of vegetated areas caused her agony.  But the coast helped ease the painful sound of her struggling breaths, and a few specific spots, where the fog rolled in off the ocean, made her breathing almost clear.  Every night they'd drive out to the ocean by Redondo Beach and sit, breathing together, as Mary's lungs struggled on.

So James sold the plot of land in the desert, where they'd hoped to build a home, and bought one in a patch of field by the beach.  They were no longer moving to follow his jobs - they were just trying to save her health.  On the new plot of land, James designed and built a house for Mary, where they lived for the rest of their lives

Today the house is gone - torn down to free up the prime real estate, now surrounded by mansions instead of fields.  But as I stood where it once was I could taste the air - cool, clean, fresh.  I tried to imagine harsh desert winds, or the stifling heat of Tennessee.  I tried to think about finding a job in the Great Depression, or learning how to cook from a terse, unillustrated book.  I worried about the audacity of turning lives into neatly packaged stories.  But a new ocean breeze washed all those thoughts out of my mind as it brushed through the branches of the jacaranda trees.  Instead I thought of a car, perched by the sand, and these winds rushing in off the ocean, as sweet and pure then as they are today.  Don't think so much, don't worry, I told myself.  Just breathe.