Today is Jill’s birthday, and one cannot let the day pass without notice.
I first met the girl who would become my wife in 1953. We met in a passion play, a fact that usually produced gales of laughter in the years that followed. The priest who wrote it (with help from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) was a born impresario, who hired a professional director and staged it in downtown Boston. The play, called The Christus, had a cast of 125, which offered a part to virtually anyone who could breathe. Fresh out of the Army, I played the title role, and Jill was a member of the mob, credited as Julia in the program. Years later, Jill and I would howl as we recalled the fractured ad libs from that mob – things like “If He is the Son of God, why don’t He come down from the cross?”
There were bacchanalian scenes with Herod (with Ketelbey’s “In a Persian Market” setting the mood), a nativity scene (the infant Jesus was the winner of a widely publicized contest run by the impresario to promote the play), and a climactic ascension scene, with the Christus hoisted by cables to the sky as the curtain fell (the scene was played behind a scrim to obscure the cables).
About two months of rehearsals were needed to pull this epic together, and during that period I was careful to avoid any conduct unbecoming a Deity. In other words, no dating. But with the show behind us, we all gathered in the church hall for a mammoth cast party. I decided to ask the best-looking girl there to dance, and it was the best idea I ever had.
We were married on February 22, 1955. It was a good year, as all the Eisenhower years were, and we cheerfully began married life in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. A year later we bought our first house, a tidy Cape Cod south of Boston. We moved north of Boston a few years later, and in 1965 we (now a family of five) settled into a big, 100-year-old converted schoolhouse in the center of historic Concord. That was our home for the next 30 years. Then, with retirement, a final move to the coast of Maine, where we had summered since 1968.
The last dozen years were probably the best of all, with nothing to do but watch the tides come and go, the seasons change, and our grandchildren grow. And consider how far we traveled since that anonymous member of the cast shouted, “Why don’t He come down from the cross?”
