A Basket of Chips: An Autobiography

Basket of Chips, page 148

A Basket of Chips "It used to be that Carl and I in passing the littlest bit of a hovel would say we could be perfectly happy in a place like that, couldn't we? Nothing makes any difference if we are together." "The blessedness of babies is beyond words, but the blessed- ness of a wife is such that one can't start in on it." Carl Parker. "He wrote once, `We (the two of us) love each other, like to do things together (absolutely anything), don't need or want anybody else and the world is ours.' " "Bring the future what it may, we have the ten years that no power on earth can rob us of." "That future and the plans we had! Anything I can ever do now would still leave life so utterly dull by comparison." One day Carl Parker said to his wife: "I want you to promise me faithfully you will make me stop teaching when I am sixty. I have seen too much of the tragedy of men hanging on and on and students and education being sacrificed because the teacher has lost his fire - has fallen be- hind in the parade. I feel now as if I'd never grow old - that doesn't mean that I won't, so, no matter how strong I may be going at sixty, make me stop, promise." "Old age together always seemed so good to think about." Strange that neither of us ever dreamed one would grow old without the other." Sometimes it seemed almost as if we must have guessed it was to end so soon, and lived so as to crowd in all the joy we could while our time together was given us." "And yet to hear a snatch of tune and know that the last time you heard it you were together." "To come across a necktie in a trunk, to read a book he has marked." many friends have sent word to me . . . . And, lastly, reason of all. I want our chil dren to know about their there is the most intimate father -not just his aca- demic worth, his public career, but the life he led from day to day. . in the last instance, this is a document for them." Cornelia Stratton . . And Parker, 2 Americnn Idyll - The Life of Curleton H. Pucker (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 19 19). 148