No Marital Fencing About This Gift

Some guys marry better than others. The lucky ones get hitched to marvelous women who think that baseball is more fun than shopping, who believe that ditching work to play golf is perfectly acceptable--and who play to about a 16 handicap themselves--and who rejoice when one of their Christmas presents turns out to be a garage-door opener.

The less fortunate must adapt to wives who get into a snit when they chip a nail, who routinely toss out their husbands’ favorite old sweat shirts and who go into deep, silent, malevolent, impenetrable, monthlong funks if they don’t see something under the tree that has four tires and comes from Stuttgart ( not a Volkswagen).

I bleed for those guys because their intentions are probably pure. They think they’re getting their wives the most glorious present ever dreamed of when they plunk down a few thou for a pair of court-side Laker season tickets. The average guy is sure that his beloved will be thrilled with a new sprinkler system for the back yard.

But no. She’ll smile through clenched teeth and curse him for letting another year go by without sending her away for a week at La Costa. Revenge will arrive in the mail in the form of a credit card bill so high that it can’t be represented in metric numbers.

But this will not happen to Tom Noyes. Tom, who lives in Huntington Beach, is married to a cheerful, chatty, sunny, fun-loving woman who thinks her recent Christmas present is just about the greatest gift she ever received. She fairly bubbles over just talking about it. She looks at it and just grins and grins and grins.

Tom bought her a fence.

Actually, it isn’t the fence itself that makes Maria Noyes’ eyes go all liquid. It’s made of ornamental metal of a fairly straightforward design. No, it’s the seven pillars that support the fence. They are made of rough blue-gray concrete, and their design is simple and unique. And it’s a cinch that there is no place outside of Guam where you can see a set of pillars quite like them.

They are copies of latte (pronounced lat-TAY) stones, ancient structures unique to the island and are symbolic of the history of the native Chamorro people. Maria, a Guamanian by birth, grew up with them in the same way that a kid from Cairo would grow up with the pyramids.

As early as the year 500, the Chamorro people built their houses atop a supporting structure of latte stones. Spanish explorers in the 15th Century noted that most of the buildings on Guam were made of wood, supported by the triangular stones with a half-globe-shaped capstone. The supporting column was called a halig , the capstone a tasa.

The halig was carved with stone tools from coral limestone and usually had to be carried several miles from the quarry site to the spot where a structure was to be built. The tasa was made from natural hemispherical coral heads collected from the reef.

Today, the latte stones are considered priceless artifacts by the Guamanians, who see them as links to their ancestral past. There are several sites on the island where latte stones still stand. In the center of Agana, the capital, is a large park where several of the stones are on display.

Maria Noyes longed for those stones. She moved from Guam to California in 1957. She married Tom 12 years later. She has returned to Guam a couple of times with Tom, the most recent trip coming two years ago.

As always, she marveled at the ancient building stones, still standing in the island’s jungles.

Finally, a few months ago, Tom decided that she should have some of her own. He called Fred Flores, a Guamanian ornamental contractor from Anaheim, and asked whether Flores could duplicate the design of the latte stones and incorporate them into a front-yard fence.

Flores designed the halig as a steel-reinforced concrete pillar, but the bowl-shaped tasa called for a bit of improvisation. He solved the problem by using plastic laundry baskets as molds. In fact, Tom says, each tasa on the fence contains one of the plastic baskets.

One innovation was added. On Guam, the tops of the tasas are flat. For the Noyes’ fence, the tops were hollowed out slightly, forming seven miniature birdbaths. They work. Maria says she has seen neighborhood hummingbirds splashing in them almost every day.

“To me, it’s just like home,” she says. “I have very good memories of home, and I get very sentimental about it. I love this fence. Nobody in Guam makes fences like this. To me, it’s good luck.”

You have to love an outlook like that. You also have to imagine Tom and Maria Noyes at, say, a New Year’s party where women are either praising their husbands for giving them a Jaguar and unlimited credit at Cartier for the holidays or snarling at them for that gift-wrapped gift certificate good for 25 free drys at Launder-Land.

And into the middle of this matrimonial whirlwind steps Maria Noyes, who says: “My husband got me a new fence. Isn’t that great? He’s the most thoughtful man in the world! He could have bought me a lot of silly jewelry or taken me to Paris on the Concorde, but he bought me a fence. What a guy!

“Know what I’m going to get him for his birthday? Two weeks worth of green fees at Pebble Beach and the entire Clint Eastwood video collection.”

Take very good care of her, Tom.