Among Friends: Column 232 - A Legendary Life, Well-Lived

2002's Good Stories

2001's Good Stories

2000's Good Stories

1999's Good Stories

1998's Good Stories

No. 232
October 16 – 22 , 2002

A Legendary Life, Well-Lived

By T AD BARTIMUS

Every year about this time I turn down a gravel lane bordered by golden cottonwoods and scarlet willows with my heart in my mouth. What will I find?

So far, so good.

My friend is 95 now, "96 in February, you know," living an independent life with her rescued Border collie and her memories. She is mentally sharper than I am, able to remember details from 20 minutes ago as well as 20 years ago. Erudite and articulate, she is fluent in three languages and speaks with an elocution perfected in the drawing rooms of royalty long ago overthrown by revolution.

My friend was born into an America that no longer exists -- before motor cars, before flight, before common usage of the telephone. She has lived through two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, has buried a husband and a son, and has lived to see her surviving child become a septuagenarian grandfather.

A member of one of America's oldest and most distinguished families, her ancestor signed Meriwether Lewis' and William Clark's paychecks when they charted the greatest rivers of a then-unknown Louisiana Purchase. Another relative served the Union as a general and was honored by President Abraham Lincoln himself -- she has the letter to prove it. Still another sailed with Admiral Perry into Japan to open up that mysterious kingdom to the West.

Born into a Victorian age when women wore bustles and cinched their waists with corset stays made of real ivory, she grew up in a New York City of gaslights, horse-drawn carriages and a Social Register consisting of only 500 families, hers included. Her home took up part of the Madison Avenue block where Newsweek Magazine was once headquartered. When she had her "coming out" party at 18, her escort was a Russian named Romanov. She subsequently married a dashing Italian count famous as an aviation pioneer, and stayed with him more than 50 years, until his death in 1981.

After growing up as a wild child riding bareback with Crow Indians camped on her family's Wyoming ranch, she was "polished" at a Swiss finishing school for girls and became a lady in every now-obsolete sense of the word. After an around-the-world honeymoon, she settled down as mistress of homes in California, New York and Wyoming, devoting herself to her family and the preservation of her heritage and bedrock American values.

I met my friend when she was deemed suitable to sit next to the Queen of England at a private dinner in Wyoming in the early 1980s. I'd been sent as a journalist to cover Queen Elizabeth II's visit and was trolling for inside sources when my new friend enthusiastically agreed to be my snitch.

Twenty minutes after the carefully orchestrated royal dinner ended, my "anonymous source" was on the telephone with details of what the Queen ate ("a queen-sized filet of beef, of course") and talked about ("equestrian bloodlines, it became slightly boring").

Back then my friend was spry and rode her favorite horse, the Arabian mare Mei-ling, into the high mountains nearly every day. As the years passed and she took more falls -- "it wasn't the horse's fault," she'd insist -- her riding decreased. Now she drives a sport utility vehicle up into the vast meadows abutting the peaks on her ranch so she can exercise a new dog running beside her in devotion.

My friend has taught me what it's like to age with grace. Of her contemporaries, she is the last one standing, a "dubious honor" she accepts with humility and grace. She treats every day as a precious gift and keeps this homily by Henry Van Dyke on her refrigerator as a reminder of her good fortune:

"There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can."

Would that we all could embrace these words as well as my friend