Nancy Hulda Morris Olson Mahusay Palantios 1937-2008

My mother was born to a family of Norwegian immigrants in Boston. When she grew up she fell in love with a greek man named George Palantios. They wanted to get married but because he was greek her father refused to allow it. Instead, she was allowed to marry the son of Swedish immigrants from Brooklyn. She was studying medicine and he was studying biology but later it was revealed that he had been harboring a secret desire to be a dirt poor paster of the smallest little church in the tiniest town he could find in Vermont and live like the Amish without actually being Amish.

Much to his chagrin, she managed to achieve a masters degree from UVM where she also learned, to her surprise, that she had rights. She also learned that she really didn't like being the wife of a dirt poor paster of the smallest church in the smallest town in Vermont so they decided to see if moving the shittiest town in Florida and getting horrible government jobs working at a state mental institution and tazering their children with culture shock would help their marriage.

Surprisingly it did not. A few years after their divorce, my mother married a Phillipino psychiatrist and also discovered anti depressant drugs. For about 15 happy years they lived and worked together, starting their own practice in a less shitty Florida town. She earned her PhD in psychology and even developed a proficiency with Novell Netware. He passed away, and she retired.

But her heart had been broken now for fifty years. She never forgot, yet never spoke of George Palantios.

George never forgot her either. For fifty years George had remained unmarried, and everything he experienced, for better or for worse, he often imagined being able to experience it with Nancy. He talked about Nancy often. Fifty years after his heart had been broken, he was sharing an old story with an friend where he was now living, in Burlington, Vermont, and his friend surprised him with Nancy's phone number.

They talked on the phone for a year. Then they got married. They had a little time together.