My Husband

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is "trust."

Otto J. M. Smith

On my twentieth birthday my family - Daddy, Mama, Allen and me - took a picnic supper to La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. Besides fried chicken and potato salad and fresh tomatoes, there was a birthday cake and there were gifts to open. One of my gifts, from Mama, was a bedspread for my first year sleeping away from home. For my first three years at Stanford I had been able to live at home in Palo Alto, but Daddy had recently been transferred to the Los Angeles office.

As I watched the black tar bubbles of the black lake rise slowly then burst with a lazy plop, I was miserable. I had said goodbye to Otto two days before. I wore his engagement ring on my finger, but that was scant compensation for his absence. He would be in Oklahoma at his parents’ home by now, on his way to his new position as an instructor at Tufts College in Boston. I suddenly knew that I wanted nothing more than to be with him. Forget my senior year at Stanford! It wasn’t the only place in the world to finish my degree.

Mother cried when I announced that I wanted to go back to the house to call Otto to tell him I wanted to get married in Oklahoma and go with him. Daddy said it was my life. I phoned Otto with some trepidation, but he seemed really happy and asked to speak to Daddy, whom he assured that he (Otto) would take good care of me. My family drove east, Otto’s sister planned a church wedding, and without ever regretting a minute of it, I put my trust in this good man (who was all of twenty-four years old at the time).

September 3, 1941

Now, almost sixty-eight years later, Otto is the person I most trust in the entire world. We don’t always agree. I think it would be awful if we did. One thing that we trust is that, even after noisy disagreements, our love will be no less.

I trust Otto’s word. He has never, in all those years, lied to me even once.

I trust and admire his motivations and his determination to work toward unselfish goals, whether it be to save the world from global warming or to rid it of wars.

I trust his intelligence, proved over and over as he develops social and engineering solutions to the world’s needs.

I trust his love for his family and his students.

I trust that he wants me to follow my own dreams that may not always be his, and that he will lend his help wherever he can.

Golly, I love that man!