By Dave Wood
My beautiful wife grew up in Oak Lawn, Ill., a Chicago suburb of about 100,000 people, most of them of Italian and Polish descent. Ruth’s family attended the only Lutheran church in the entire town, a small Missouri Synod mission church surrounded by Roman Catholic parishes and Polish delicatessens (anyone for duck-blood soup?)
And the majority population had some influence on my German Polish lassie who was born in Blue Earth, Minn. Sure, she could still recite verbatim Luther’s not-so-“Small Catechism,” but somehow all the neighbors’ lawn signs and window posters that read “Fortunes Told Here!” also had an undying effect on Ruthie, who faithfully read her daily horoscope and performed feats of palmistry on fellow classmates.
And so it was on the eve of our marriage in 1970 that she purchased for 25 cents a paperback that purported to predict the outcome of her forthcoming marriage to Yours Truly. The news was not good, for she found that if a female Sagittarius married a male Pisces, there’d be nothing but trouble! That’s because I’m a Pisces (a water sign) and she’s a Sagittarian (a fire sign); consequently, my water would, shall we say, DAMPEN her fire, sniffing out any chance any chance for a successful union. Fortunately, Ruth is the sort of Blue Earth maiden who, if dealt a bushel of sour apples, she’ll make applesauce.
Undaunted, Ruth kept on reading the supermarket Zodiac book and found a footnote referring to our wedding prediction, to wit: “An exception is possible if the S-P couple make travel plans to far-off places with strange sounding names a priority in their lives.”
So once wedding bells had taken their last toll and we were settled in our love nest in the Minneapolis suburb of New Hope (forebodingly called “NO Hope” by most residents), my bride turned to me and said, ”When are we going on that honeymoon trip to Europe that you promised me?”
So that darned old Zodiac book has cost us a good deal of pelf for my “Travels with Ruthie.” The other night as we sat on our River Falls porch and discussed plans for our junket to the Deep South, we recalled the Zodiac story and opined that we have been very lucky in our travels and have gotten along more famously than when we’re at home.
“How so, my Precious Pet?” asked I.
“Because travelling is in itself a challenge, Stupid, and dulls our attention to petty quarrels we might have at home.”
“You mean like when you insisted on jumping on a moving train car because you thought it was bound for Ciudad Real, and the trainmaster at the Atocha Station in Madrid was forced to dispatch a special locomotive to tow us is back to the station from a siding where we sat alone as Madrilenos on the platform guffawed in a most unseemly manner?”
“Or when you recovered from dysentery in Paris, then went out with me for dinner and ordered off the French Menu and ended up with lamb kidneys cooked medium rare?”
“Or in Paris, when you ordered the pickled pig’s feet that were huge trotters packed with glistening fat and erved piping hot, rather than the meaty chilled variety you were familiar with back in Blue Earth MN?”
“Enough, enough,” replied my Sagittarian Sweetie. “You’re accentuating the negative and forgetting that our travels have indeed been blessed with wonderful experiences and loads of fun. We’ve had far fewer travel troubles than most people who’ve traveled as much as we have!”
“OK, my precious. Let us return our badinage to our upcoming trip to the Deep South. I just read in the Star Tribune that North Carolina got 20 inches of rain and is under water. Dare we risk the trip to Raleigh?”
“Trust me, my pet,” was her reply, “It’ll be dry and sunny when we arrive and we’ll have a marvelous time!”
