Thank You!
Ron and Marion, March 2025
My former husband, the Reverend Ronald Bauer, died last week. Ron and I were married for twenty-eight years, but I left the marriage so long ago—almost forty years—that our life together seems like something that happened in another universe. Nonetheless, his leaving changes the shape of my world.
We met at the Episcopal Student Center at the University of Missouri. Ron had been in post-war Korea with the Army, and he was working on a B.A., preparing for seminary. I had arrived for my junior year, drawn by Mizzou’s highly regarded journalism school. On our second date, Ron asked me to marry him. I thought he was nuts and told him so. I didn’t send him packing, though. After all, no one had ever proposed to me before, and this was the 1950’s when we women knew, without question, that acquiring a husband was both destiny and necessity.
Not long after I turned him down, however, I made a discovery. I, who hungered for an education in the humanities, had enrolled in a trade school! An excellent one, but a trade school. I had chosen journalism because it involved writing and because I understood I couldn’t expect to support myself with the kind of writing I really wanted to do. But when one of my professors spent an entire class talking about advertising as the ultimate good, the force that holds our society together, I knew I was in the wrong place.
The same day I dropped my journalism classes, I returned to Ron to say “Yes.” And suddenly, I was free to study what I wanted to study, to write what I wanted to write. After all, as a married woman, I’d never have to earn a living! That I spent the next five years while Ron completed his degrees, first typing travel claims in quadruplicate, then teaching English was the smallest possible sacrifice. The future lay before me.
We completed our degrees at the University of Oklahoma; moved to Wisconsin for Ron’s seminary; back to Oklahoma where he was in charge of three small churches across the length of the panhandle (the bishop said, “Son, make it your own diocese, just don’t let me hear anything about it.”); to Fort Worth, Texas; to Manhattan, Kansas; to Hannibal, Missouri; to Minneapolis/St. Paul. I have stayed on in Minnesota, but not long after our divorce, Ron moved to a parish in San Juan Capistrano.
Inevitably, those 28 years of marriage formed me. Formed us both. And curiously enough, today it’s the smallest memories, the smallest and the earliest that rise up to capture me.
The bicycle-built-for-two we rode to and from classes at the University of Oklahoma. It was uniquely engineered so that both riders could steer. If one of us meant to turn right and the other left and we didn’t communicate before arriving at an intersection we’d barrel straight on through. (A perfect teaching tool for a new marriage, though I’m sure we didn’t learn all we could have.)
The two young women who lived on the first level of the old frame house where we lived upstairs. They each paid 50 cents a plate to eat dinner with us every evening. Ron was the cook. He was a man of many competencies, his ability with food drawn from growing up in a family restaurant and training as a baker in the Army. The dollar a day we took in enabled us to serve meat and enjoy it ourselves, something we otherwise couldn’t often afford on Ron’s G-I Bill allotment of $180 a month. (One of the women, a psych major, had a dog named Anna Freud. Once, when the four of us planned to share a small steak, the rarest of treats, Anna got hold of the thawing steak while we were in class. I found the remains on the floor of the girls’ apartment and Anna on the bed, blissfully comatose. I’ve forgotten what we ate that evening, but Ron rustled up something.)
The dude ranch in the mountains of southern Colorado we ran one summer. Ron, St. Louis born, had learned to ride and shoe horses at scout camp, so he was in charge of the trail rides. My responsibilities were a stocked trout pond where people paid by the inch for the fish they caught and a golf driving range. The un-mowed meadow where the horses grazed at night served as the driving range during the day, and despite my plodding searches, at least half of the balls disappeared in the tall grass and scrub oak. I used to wonder whether we should hang baskets under the horses’ tails to capture the lost balls.
Three years in a tiny studio apartment at seminary. Ron made dandelion wine there once, the concoction bubbling in an open crock in the corner of our bathroom. I came home from teaching one day and found the crock and its contents gone. His explanation: “I tasted it, and it tasted like panther piss.”
Then there were the bigger moments … our son, Peter, arrived to spend his first year with us in that one-room apartment. When we moved to Guymon to a modest, two-bedroom vicarage, we thought we’d won the lottery. And Beth-Alison was born there.
Once the children were both in school, I began writing in earnest. I’d always written, but now I was aiming toward publication. At the same time, I opened our home to foster children and exchange students. Ron wasn’t much involved with either, but he made room for it all. Mostly without complaint. It used to annoy him, though, when he’d arrive home at a time I had no way of predicting to find me still at the typewriter. “What are we having for dinner?” he’d ask, and if the answer was, “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he would huff a bit, but he’d go into the kitchen and rustle something up.
The years as a clergy-wife were isolating (it was an oddly public role, yet disconnected, too), but Ron continued to provide a foundation, financial and physical, for the constant flow of children and for my writing. I may have married for the wrong reasons—probably we both did—but I, at least, was getting exactly what I had bargained for.
We parted ways when I finally came to terms with my sexuality. It took many years after we divorced for me to wonder how different we both might have been if I had been as capable of loving the man I said “yes” to as I am of loving a woman.
Our son, Peter, died at age 42 of atypical Lewy Body Dementia. Sharing the grief, first of our son’s long, debilitating illness, then of his passing, brought us into orbit with one another again. Then, at the beginning of Covid, Beth-Alison flew with her husband to California to take Ron out of an assisted-living facility, rent a car, and drive him back to Minnesota. This amazing woman, our daughter, took care of her father, either in her home or in a nearby senior facility, for the next five years until his death.
When I was a young girl, I gave up on the idea of heaven after being told my beloved cat wouldn’t be going there. I decided, then and there, that people made up heaven in their minds and that they kept cats out with their minds because they didn’t want them there. So it’s not anybody’s idea of heaven I’ve been holding in my heart since Ron’s passing. Instead, I’ve been carrying an image of the energy that makes up the universe, that makes up us. Because energy never dies; it merely changes form. And knowing that, it’s easy to imagine the energy that is Peter welcoming the energy that is his father to the other side. The thought comforts me. I can only hope the comfort encompasses both of them, too.
The last thing I said to Ron was simply, “Thank you! Thank you for supporting me through the early years of my work. Without you, I could never have had this good life.”
A final stroke had robbed him even of speech by then, but I’m certain he heard me.
