Featuring Four: VIV

RICHVILLE REDUX: A Love Story 

Vivian Okey and…(read on) 

Vivian Okey was a close friend my last two years of high school, She threw me the only real birthday party I have ever had, and she wrote in my yearbook, “Dear Diane, no farewell eulogies for you from me! You’re too dear to leave….Here’s to a friendship that will grow more as we grow older...” And then, in the way of yearbook predictions, we went off to college and rarely if ever saw each other again until she found me on Facebook recently and wrote, “Diane, I have married the nicest person who went to Perry with us. I want to tell you about it sometime.”



1968 Clock
 

So one fine morning, about 40 years since we last met, we got together for lunch at Samantha’s. Arriving in the parking lot at the same moment as she did, I was struck at how little she had changed. The long hair she wore in our senior picture is short now, but it’s still dark brown, her eyes still soulful, her speech still careful and emotional. Over salads, we caught up on a lot, and she told me the story about her new husband.

 It’s a great PHS ’68 love story:

Vivian and her grandson, reading

The first part, I knew. After high school, Vivian, one of the “Top Ten Academically” went off to Heidelberg College, where she majored in math education, graduating in 1972. She married shortly after that, and stayed in Northeast Ohio, close to home but not Perry Township, and she taught for many years in various school districts. I figured she had had children, and in fact, she had two daughters, Tina and Carrie. I didn’t know she had divorced and had by now become a grandmother and grandchild sitter extraordinaire. But the love story, that’s what she wanted to talk about.

Vivian had been long divorced. One evening at the end of visiting hours at a senior residency, she and her sister bumped into an old neighbor, Art Snyder, a guy who had been a classmate at Richville Grade School and too at PHS. There in the lobby, Vivian’s sister got engaged in conversation with him, as Vivian stood there, distracted (I had forgotten till recently her tendency to distraction!) really barely remembering him at all on the ride home, when her sister commented on how nice he was.

She had remembered that he had invited her to have coffee at his church’s coffeehouse one particular upcoming night, though, and being very interested in church interests, she showed up. Within moments after sitting down at the table in the church, Vivian notes, “We were just very deep in conversation.” They talked about their previous marriages, the divorces, their kids, their jobs, all the intervening stuff of their lives since 1968. Each emphasized the importance of church in their lives. And the next thing she knew, “I looked up, and it had grown dark out, and everyone had left, and they were shutting the coffeehouse down.” Vivian and Art stood in the parking lot in the dark, saying good-bye, and she felt as though for the first time in her life, at age 58, she had found her soul mate. And then she remembered the last time she had sat in the dark with him.



1967 Clock

One summer in seventh grade, a Richville boy she barely knew showed up on her front porch. Now he tells us that his friend had had a crush on one Vivian Okey, and he was there to check up on her, to see what exactly she was like, whether worthy of his friend. He sat down beside her on the porch, and they talked for hours. “And then, I remember my father coming to the door and saying, ‘It’s really late. You have to come in now,’” Vivian says today. And that was the only time in her twelve years of school that she spoke to Art Snyder.

And yet, here he was again, and there they were again, in conversation, and in love, just like that. Within months, they were married, and now, as the fairy tale goes, “are living happily ever after” in a new house they have bought together in North Canton.

 

And Vivian and me? Well, I can say that now, forty years later, we are finally getting back to that friendship that grows more as we grow…wiser.