Long, strong legs and arms, tan and storkily elegant, high heels, an exotic orange, yellow and blue scarf tied as a headband across her forehead, clamping down an unruly goldenbrown mane, thickly noncompliant.  Brassy ear hoops, chunks of ethnic somethings in a necklace or two, blue Nordic eyes, coral lipstick.  Looping through the curves on Highway 1 south to Big Sur in her roadster, top down, is there any other way?  

            Her plodding, sturdy Bill, my father, met her through a friend.  They raced their cars that first night from dinner near the Mission to her house.  She won the race.  He won her.  It was 1968, the summer of love, and she would change our lives like the Beatles changed rock and roll.

            Tables laid with food from her kitchen, ice cubes rattling in cocktails at 5:00, wine in thick-stemmed Mexican glasses, Marion hoo-hooing for Billy to lift, to reach, to smooch, to carve.  Dozens of friends orbited her/them, stopping to talk and laugh, to ask for help, to get advice, and she did for them all, no favor too large or phone call too late.  She ran a public health agency but still found time to volunteer at flu clinics, drive to the homes of the wealthy to make sure the Mexican housekeepers and cooks and their babies got smallpox and polio vaccinations, then the Vietnamese boat people, the farmworkers in the valley.  Daughters of friends came to her with questions their mothers couldn’t hear.  She searched and found and gave them answers, got them help.  She held her friends’ hands through divorces and diseases and betrayals and death.  They told her secrets she didn’t repeat.

Many wild times bore her initials, MMM.  My staid Navy captain dentist dad followed her, naked, down the slippery bear grass near Nepenthe on more than one moonlit night; she dressed him in a hippie shirt she’d embroidered with flowers for a costume party.  (There wasn’t much she liked more than a costume party.)  She disappeared from a stodgy formal officers’ ball one Christmas season, only to be discovered dancing with some visiting black-booted Texas Rangers in the bar.  The guest bedroom in her tiny, pink, board-and-batten house in Carmel looked like it had been transported from Marrakesh, only lacking a hookah.  The first time I saw it, I was 18 years old and couldn’t wait for my next visit so I could sleep there again.

Two solidly middle-class incomes somehow were translated into beautiful homes and fascinating vacations.  That she worked the barter system like a pro was part of the magic; everyone seemed to owe her a favor:  the guy who made slipcovers, another who poured concrete, a couple who had a house to trade in Australia.  It helped that she had great style and an unerring eye for what looked good with what else, bright colors happily chirping together like parrots in the canopy.  Marion herself sewed -- curtains, skirts, cloth napkins (paper napkins were banned, even at breakfast) -- and cooked -- veal shanks, steamed crab, artichokes, homemade mayonnaise (things I’d never even heard of) -- while Bill buzzed Ramos fizzes and stirred killer margaritas, built things (wood furniture, new bathrooms, a big deck) and chuckled at her antics. 

An idea (or ten) of hers might have set a course for dangerous waters so he took down a few sails to keep their ship safe.  She was a mighty wind; he was the anchor.  There was a ship’s bell just inside the front door of every house these two nomads lived in that rang for no good or obvious reason and a lovely female figurehead whose bare breasts were rubbed for good luck, the pink paint worn off her nipples.  Marion  encouraged singing and spontaneous parties.  She adored dishes and bought (and gave away) countless sets:  solid red, solid yellow, painted Italian, earthenware, Aunt Helen’s Rose Canton china, anything that wasn’t boring.  Maggie, the Kerry Blue terrier, loved her best and then, to Marion’s dismay, switched her allegiance to Bill.  After the bear got Maggie, they had yellow Labradors in succession:  Jake and Jessie, Lola, then Hannah.

Nothing, not even the booze or the accompanying cigarettes, affected her tennis game.  She wore frilly pants under her tennis skirt or goofy visors with battery-operated lights to distract her opponents.  Her arms were so long she only had to stretch to hit a return, never run.  She played with effortless ease, usually winning, until she was 80, eight years ago. 

She nursed poor Bill when brain surgery left him with left-side motor impairment, unable to stand.  Life would go on, she decreed, and he would swing a golf club again.  It took three years and he walked like Frankenstein the rest of his life, but he made it through a bucket of balls at the driving range without windmilling onto the tee only because of her tenacious insistence that he could do it, he must try.  Later, when he had cancer and decided it was time, she helped him die. ("An Extraordinary Act of Love")

My mother, whom my brothers and I lived with until I escaped at 17, was an alcoholic, a bitter, remarkably cruel woman.  When I met Marion a year later, I clung to her and the female ideal of her like a barnacle to a boat.  If I couldn’t be her, I could at least be as much like her as possible, I thought.  I wanted to absorb her, to wear her skin, see with her eyes, feel with her heart.  I may have even loved her more than my dad did, and I desperately wanted a mother, so I made her mine.

Her only child, Tommy, 25, died a year before she met my father.  Marion was in Mexico, on vacation with a lover.  Tommy had been recently dumped by his girlfriend, so he drove Marion’s two-seater (with Maggie and water and dog food) south to the Bixby bridge, parked on a turnout, walked to the center of the span and jumped to the rocks below, splintering his head and Marion's life into barely recognizable shards.  After a year of aimless wandering and crushing depression, she reluctantly agreed to the blind date with the Navy guy.  She always said that my dad saved her life.

Maybe so, but she wasn’t the only lucky one.  For the next 27 years that Bill lived with her he both gave and got armloads of obvious, genuine love, and for those years and many more I had a woman to emulate, to adore, a confidante, an almost-mother, and I did everything I could think of to be the daughter she deserved if she'd had one.

I wish I could say this story ends happily.  I can’t, but that doesn’t diminish how magically wonderful that time was, what a gift she was to us then.

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