[I cannot find one single photo of Suni, though I clearly remember at least one that showed her looking quizzically through her half glasses. How I wish I could find it! Otherwise, I have only memories from the few years between the time we met and the time she died. But, like so many things, it appears to have disappeared down the river of time.]
The notoriety I achieved by writing favorably, for a mainstream newspaper, about the Shirley MacLaine workshop, resulted in two acquaintanceships that developed into extremely important friendships. One was Bob Friedman, who will be the topic of my next post. The other, whom I met a few months earlier than Bob, was Suni Dunbar.
In the aftermath of my newspaper article, I was invited to join a group that had formed, that intended to meet regularly. (Weekly? Monthly? Can’t recall.) This would break my isolation, so I accepted gladly. I am pretty sure I was the only man in a group of – 15? 20? – women, most of them a few years older than I was. Of everyone there, the only one whose energy drew me was Suni, and as I found out later, I was the only one who interested her, though I don’t remember if we even said anything to each other. The group met only once or twice more, but by then I had become friends with Suni and her husband Jack, and I began to go over to their office in Virginia Beach occasionally for lunch (and mostly for talk).
Thinking about it today, I see similarities between Suni and Rita Warren, who at this time was still more than a decade in my future. They were more or less the same age, each old enough to be my mother, and in important ways, each performed just that function, in the process giving me something I sorely needed.
I know my mother had loved me, as she loved all her children. But loving someone doesn’t guarantee that you can give them what they need. My mother, a very traditional Catholic, an equally traditional product of middle-class small town America, had little understanding of what I was looking for, nor of the places I went looking for it, not that I made an effort to explain myself.
(One of my major regrets, in all this looking backward, is that it took so many decades for me to realize that I was so bad at communicating my inner life. But the necessity never occurred to me, stupid as that sounds.)
But unlike mom, Suni – and, later, Rita – did have a sense of what I was looking for. They did sense how this complicated my life; they did empathize, and draw me out, with the result that I began to explain myself to myself. And one day, driving over to Virginia Beach for lunch, I became fully aware of how much I needed to talk to Suni, and my first reaction was a sense of shame that I should have the need, rather than being able to proceed on my own as usual. But then I realized that even knowing that I needed the connection was an advance. When I told her, she understood immediately, which in itself helped move the process along.
Suni and Jack had me over to their house once or twice, I seem to remember, but mostly I met them at their office. For a while we met frequently, then gradually we must have tapered off. Life moved on, as it does, as i moved from the editorial office to the newsroom, then Bob and I had started Hampton Roads Publishing Company, and after a few months I moved over to work there full time. I got busier. Bob and I did Gateway, and The Monroe Institute loomed ever larger in my mind. In August, 1995, we moved the company from Norfolk to Charlottesville, with all the problems that involved.
On Tuesday, January 7, 1996, I saw I had a phone message from Jack Dunbar in Virginia Beach. Jack? In all the time I had known them, I don’t think I have ever had a call from Jack. When I called him back, I said straight off, “Nothing happened to Suni, I hope.”
He said, “Suni died!”
She had died the previous day, of lung and bone cancer. She had been sick for less than a month, but I had known nothing about it. I wondered, immediately, how could it happen that we could drift so far apart, without even the shadow of a rift between us, that I could not even know she was mortally ill?
Jack invited me to her memorial service (she had been cremated), and I was there on the following Sunday morning in Virginia Beach. And there was another friend gone. In those days, it did not occur to me that I might still talk to her. I believed in psychic abilities. I didn’t necessarily believe that I had them. They were still for special people, or so I thought. As far as I knew then, Suni and i were separated forever.
&&&
Strictly speaking, I suppose the following poem doesn’t quite belong here, but one day Jack told me about his experiences at the Battle of Midway, and I went home and turned my impressions into a poem. If it doesn’t quite belong in a post centered on Suni, still, closer here than anywhere else, a tribute to a very nice guy I liked a lot.
Jack, at the Battle of Midway
They will grow old, some of them.
They will survive to fight some more,
survive this desperate long day
to fight from island to island,
sea to sea, until six months’ disaster
is hammered into victory.
They will remember, into another time,
how long the struggle balanced. So near it was
that every man could almost justly say
it hung on him. It was as though God tested,
weighed, compared, and at the final moment
lightly touched the scales.
They will do the impossible today.
Sweating, anxious, pushed beyond fatigue,
over‑riding rules and limitations,
they will launch the planes on which
it all depends. They will bring them in,
and fill them full and send them out.
Hour on hour, they will launch many
and see few return. They will watch
failed landings crumple into flames,
smashing barriers, killing pilots,
threatening the ship itself. Against
unforgiving seconds, they will trot all day.
And victory will come, by grace and by God,
and these heroes, some of them, the lucky ones,
will live on into worlds undreamed, will live on,
somehow, through the most of their lives
that is still ahead, knowing that this day’s work
can never be surpassed, never be outlived.
2‑19‑88