Karen Cottingham, STTL
I don’t seem to have a picture of her, unfortunately. She took her long leave of us a few days ago.
Karen and I had known each other since we were fifteen years old, and we even “dated” for a year or so, in my little home town, Henderson, Kentucky, before the great cultural convulsions of the later Sixties. So I hasten to add that “dating” meant something different in those days. Let me tell you about it.
Dating meant (for the guy) that he took a bath, and shaved, and put on some cheap reeky aftershave, and slightly nicer clothes than usual, and drove the family car over to the girl’s house, and waited waited waited while she did her hair and makeup. She would finally appear, looking quite splendid, and we would show up halfway through a movie, which as I recall was always either The Sound Of Music, or Dr Zhivago. Something really romantic. (The halfway-through part didn’t matter; we both had the script by heart.) And then the guy drove her home. In the family car. It was all very chaste, apart from a bit of making-out in the aforementioned car.
I once persuaded her to go see a boy movie with me; I think it was called The Endless Summer, a sort of documentary about a group of surf bums who spent a year surfing around the world. I quite liked it, but Karen was not pleased. Back to Dr Zhivago.
This phase of our friendship didn’t last long, but an enduring affection remained. I went to college in one place and she in another; she married early and I married late; she stayed in Kentucky and I went to New York. Our connection had some gaps, but once we each had children we got back in touch and remained so right through. Parenthood is a great opportunity to compare notes. We didn’t see a lot of each other in the 3D world, but I think we talked on the phone every other day, or so, and knew a good deal about each others’ lives – at least, as we experienced our lives; other participants would surely have different stories to tell. The kids, for example. Or my various ex-wives.
I recall one occasion when the Cottinghams came to New York. They drove the car, of course, being Americans, and my advice was to park the car in a garage somewhere outside of town, because parking a car in New York is a terrible, soul-destroying, un-American experience, and its curious folkways are understood only by seasoned New Yorkers. I suggested parking the car in a garage in Brewster, let’s say, and taking the train into town.
I met the Cottinghams, when they arrived, having ridden my bicycle I think, to Brewster, or wherever, and we disposed of the car, and got them onto the train. I thought the kids might like looking out the front of the train. (I thought this because I like looking out the front of the train, and you could still do that in those days, and I figured all kids like trains.) So we got into the first seat in the first car, and after five minutes or so, the kids looked at me with a shared expression of perfect horror, and asked, incredulously, “You do this every day?!” So that experiment was not a success.
We talked each other through my failed marriages and some of the twists and turns of her successful one – though no marriage, I think, is perfect; success doesn’t imply perfection. And we talked a lot about the curious sibling dynamics of our kids.
And we talked a good deal about God. I myself over-intellectualize, and twist and turn, and quote Augustine, with some dubeity, and look for a subtle nuance in John’s Greek, and I’ve even tried being an atheist, though I wasn’t good at it, and had to give it up. Karen just pooh-pooh’ed all that. In her last year or so, she liked to say that she was going to go see Jesus and her late husband Jerry. I get tangled up in Pauline metaphysics – what exactly is a “spiritual body”? -- but there was simply no doubt in her mind about the blunt truth of this promise, and I found it encouraging. There are a lot of people I would very much like to see again, and she’s high on the list.