Nicki Drive, the middle years

 

I loved being a mother. I was able to volunteer at the elementary school library and junior high nurse's office. I made popcorn in the junior high cafeteria at lunch and some years I was a room mother for all three children at the same time. I always made a booth for our fund raisers and one time it was an Indiana Jones bean bag toss. I played the theme song on my boombox and made three animals out of giant cardboard boxes that I covered in fabric to match the critter. There was an alligator, a hippo and a lion (I think.). A few well placed stuffed toy lions set around the room and me wearing one of the boys' Indiana Jones cowboy hats set the scene.

I became a den mother for cub scouts for both boys at different times and both her dad and I helped Becky sell Girl Scout cookies. She took dancing in the early years, but that turned out not to be her thing. She loved soccer and so all three played soccer. On different teams. At different parks. Not always at different times. We were busy.

I began teaching all three of them basic piano skills while they were still quite young, but later they all took lessons from other teachers. Becky learned to play a quite complicated piece called, The Pines, from her second teacher and we were so proud of her. Her recital was at Weslyan's recital room and she did such a lovely job. For a child with eye hand coordination problems this was a real coup. Jim learned to play, but he really wasn't in to it and he did other things, so we let him quit a few years in. He has a natural musical ability that allows him to play almost anything. Bobby took lessons from a teacher who did a half hour of music theory with two students and then a private lesson on the piano. He played in a festival every summer where he accrued points towards a gold trophy. He really wanted that gold trophy and worked hard, but when he got it, it was plastic and he was disappointed. However he became quite good on the piano back then.

In fifth grade all students were given the chance to play another instrument. Becky wanted the flute, but the school suggested she would do better on clarinet, so that was what we picked. I've always wondered if we did the wrong thing, because she never got any better on the clarinet and she never wanted to practice. In fact when I asked the school if I should re-rent the instrument I found out she had stopped going to lessons early on and nobody bothered to tell me. The boys were more successful. Jimmy started on trumpet and moved to French Horn. Bobby played the trombone, although what he really excelled at was decorating it for special events like Christmas with lights and tinsel and greens.

Bobby had a creative gene somewhere. In junior high all kids had to take both home economics and shop. In Home Ed he got extra credit for making a Husky dog stuffed animal. It was really well done with glassy eyes and a tail that bent.

We often took the whole family to Miller Park to see plays in the summer and Jimmy was enthralled by Little Orphan Annie. When our Community Players Theater had a part for a boy I called Jane Thomley, the University school Drama teacher, and asked her what he should do. She said just have him come and tell her a story, so we went to auditions. They did auditions by having a group of people go up on stage and read a few pages. Everyone had a script except Jimmy. He looked so cute up there. He was less than half the size of everyone else and when he realized he didn't have a script he was quite indignant! In the end he read his part and got it. That  was a month before he turned seven and the beginning of our entire family becoming involved in local theater.

Jimmy often had a major part in Community Player productions while Bobby and Becky sometimes got small parts and even my husband got involved. He was Eeyore once and Santa every year. He used to joke that I had finally made an ass of him. I began helping with costumes and it turned out I was good at it. Once I custom made a tutu for a ballerina who wanted to commission me to make more, but I never wanted to make another one again. It was a bear! I did make lots of other things though, including the sailor suits and play clothes for all the children in The Sound of Music. Soon I was making costumes for Miller Park too and I made the Santa suit they still use. Those were good years for our family and good for all the children. Becky and Bobby learned to perform comfortably in front of large audiences and Jimmy became well known for his acting and singing, especially in the Christmas pageants. They did big articles about him in the newspaper and he was offered the chance to actually make some money doing television commercials with a local man on channel 3.

In April 1983 we brought my mother-in-law down to a very beautiful nursing home to be near us. I went to see her every day and often took Bobby with me, but she had smoked all her life and now had emphysema so bad she had to be on oxygen a lot and even that was not really helping her anymore. She and I agreed to both quit smoking together on April 1st. It worked for me, but it was too late for her. She loved playing Bridge and we found a fourth at the home so we could play at night when my husband was off work. She was happy, but she forgot she was supposed to call for help when she got out of bed and one night she fell, breaking her hip. It was a nightmare. Because of her emphysema they couldn't operate or give her anything for the pain. That night I had a dream that I was her. I was driving our car looking for us, but I was so tired and I couldn't find our house. Finally I drove back to the nursing home and just as I hit a tree in the dream, I woke up. The phone was ringing. She had just died. 

We drove to the funeral in Dixon, Illinois with Jimmy so sick from asthma that we had orders with us in case we had to stop at a hospital. We thought it was important for the children to experience a funeral of someone they knew, but were not particularly close to. When they looked into her coffin Jimmy remarked that it didn't look like her. I told them, "The part of her that loved you and played with you and laughed with you is gone. This is just her shell." They accepted that quite easily.

June 3 1986 was the last day of school and we were winding down for the day when we got a call. My mother was being air lifted from Springfield to St. Louis and we needed to come as soon as possible. I threw the basket of clean unfolded clothes into our van along with a loaf of bread and some lunch meat and we drove to Taylorville. My sister's friend, a nurse, offered to watch all of our children while we were in St. Louis. 

It was close to ten p.m. when we pulled into the hospital parking lot. We slowed down to get our bearings and a hand came through my window nearly scaring me to death as it clamped on my shoulder. It was my brother who had been watching out for us. Even under such dire circumstances he had a sense of humor. I only got to see my mother for two very short times that night. She was in ICU and everyone wanted to see her. My four siblings and my father were there. My grandmother, her mother, was there. My godmother and uncle, her best friend and her brother, were there. We sat in that waiting room all night long. Nobody talked, sometimes we dozed, but it was just a long night. My grandmother paid the thousand dollars the hospital required to treat my mother and they took her into surgery early the next morning. Eight heart doctors worked all day long trying to save her life and we waited. Then a woman came into the waiting room and had us all go into a tiny conference room. She said my mother had eight aneurysms in the main aorta to her heart and less than a third of a kidney left. If she had survived she would have been on dialysis for the rest of her life, but they were never able to get her off of the heart bypass machine. My mother died June 4, 1986.

It's hard to say who was in more shock at the moment. Her mother, my dad, or me.  Mom was 58 years old and had been out in her yard planting roses a few days before. My dad hugged me as we left the hospital and said vaguely. "Your mother died." He was never quite the same after that. The bills completely wiped him out. He was penniless and lost. The love of his life since he was 21 was gone. Grandma suddenly became strange and even though he had lived next door to her and cared for her and cooked dinner for her for years, she accused him of things he never did, like peeking in her windows from his house next door, or causing my mother's death. Grandma's way of grieving was anger. At my dad, at my mother's father, at an unjust world, I guess.

I grieved deeply for over five years. It was almost impossible for me to comprehend how this person who had always been there was suddenly gone. I remember writing thank you notes for all the flowers and food with my sister while my dad made a Tombstone pizza. I'd never heard of Tombstone pizza and it seemed hysterically funny to be eating it at that particular time. We kept laughing at almost nothing and it seemed odd. Now I know it was to release the tension. I didn't really understand what was happening, but every time we went home to visit my father, I had the flu and spent the whole trip lying down or throwing up for the whole next year. I dreamed about finding my mother living in some house near by, or thought I saw her driving a car on the road when I was driving. One day, while sitting on my screened in back porch I was suddenly surrounded by the smell of roses, my mother's favorite flower. I had the strangest sense that she was right there. Then one day after church we were all in our van going to visit a parishioner from our church, to see his train layouts, and our van was filled with the smell of roses. We all smelled them! Who knows what caused this, but it felt good to me and brought me some peace.

We had a pre-scheduled family portrait done shortly after this. In it I am wearing my mother's clothes. Bobby is sporting a haircut that was trying to hide the big chunk he cut off his bangs while at the babysitters when we were in St. Louis. Nobody but my husband looked quite right.

These were the years of soccer and baseball, long summers reading for prizes at the library and family vacations where I thought camping would allow us to see places without costing an arm and a leg. It started by tent camping with the teachers. Then we bought a pop up camper and finally a used motor home. I remember that motor home seemed so familiar, like it was meant to be. My sister explained that on our first camp out in it. She walked in and said, "This looks like the outside of a Kleenex box!" And it did. That brown coppery one with swirls that was my constant companion during allergy season.

Camping out was always an experience no matter what we camped in. I would spend all year planning it and my husband would just show up to drive. We broke down everywhere. We had to replace vehicle parts and once even got bad gas, because he had no real interest in any of it. 

Still we did many things. We went to the Hiawatha festival in Pipestone, Minnesota and watched Native Americans mining the sacred rock and carving it into peace pipes and turtles. We drove through the Badlands. Bobby wanted to see Mt. Rushmore so we went there and then we went to see the very beginning of the Crazy Horse Memorial. We spent the night in the parking lot of Wall Drugs the world's largest drug store that sold Jackalopes and squashed pennies that said Wall Drugs. We went to Yellowstone the year of the great fire and saw lots of animals up close and flames shooting off the distant mountains. Ashes floated down over our campsite and when we left it was through smoking, fire destroyed land. We even hiked in-country with a park trooper who taught us to identify scat from different animals and showed us a fresh grizzly bear kill. 

I played John Denver music, or folk stories on tape while the kids played a card game called Predator where my rat takes your bacteria, or my lion eats your fox. I kept the van full of children's books about the states we would drive through, gave them all diaries to write in and no one was allowed to bring radios or tape players. It was family bonding as I saw it, but I could tell when it was wearing thin the year I heard one of them say, "If I see one more tree I'm gonna puke." 

We had a yard full of toys. The swing set was set in concrete so it couldn't tip over and I could put the wading pool under the slide with a hose on top to make it a water slide. Our neighbor, the head of ISU's Industrial arts department helped my husband build a club house over the sandbox and there was a big picnic table we built for lunch outside. When my husband's mother died she left us some money and some stocks. He refused to share the stocks with even the children, but he did use the money to finish our basement into a bedroom for Becky, another bathroom, a pool room and a family room. He also allowed us to build a beautiful screened in porch off the back of the house. All the neighborhood kids gathered at our house.

My husband and I only played in one Bridge group now, with some friends. We were all very active in church. He was still thurifer and in charge of the acolytes. All three children were acolytes and I taught Sunday School. Our best friends there were the Rehagens. We often let the children spend Sunday afternoons at one house or the other together and Marirose and I took oil painting lessons together. 

These were the years of big birthday parties and Halloween costumes that were homemade and extravagant. We made yearly trips to Chicago to see the zoo, the aquarium, or the museums. At home I took lots of pictures and organized them into albums, made teacher's gifts in the shape of Kleenex houses with tissue smoke, or Victorian scissor holders and sometimes made matching outfits for all three kids to wear.  Life was very busy, but good.

But there was always an undercurrent of something feeling wrong. My husband moved out for a month and during that time our yard was infested with grub worms. While I was trying to spray that I discovered a pipe had broken in the basement, so the whole time I sprayed the sod, the basement was filling up with water! Luckily this was before we refinished it, because everything down there had mold growing on it or in it. We lost all our old yearbooks and most of our winter coats.

He did move back in after that month, but my trust in him floundered. Especially after I discovered the reason he wanted Becky to take piano lessons was that his girl friend taught them.  She came to our house every week for months before I realized who she was. Between his infidelity and refusal to put any of his mother's stock in his and the children's names (Which she had always done with her children.) our marriage was beginning to suffer.

This might have been the beginning of the real end. Becky graduated from high school in this house. Jim started high school here and Bobby, who was almost fifteen was finishing his last year of junior high when we moved. We did what so many couples in trouble do. We bought a bigger house thinking it would make things better.

Nicki Drive, the early years

Our move to Nicki Drive was chaotic. All of our old neighbors and my family packed up everything as quickly as they could and moved us. Anything not necessary right away was stacked in the basement while we shuffled kids in an attempt to let everyone sleep as much as they could with a newborn baby who pretty much cried nonstop.

We had to take out a bridge loan because our house on Bradford lane had not sold and that added a lot of pressure. My husband's escape was to work as much overtime as possible even though he didn't get overtime pay. It was still a relief for him to get away from the chaos. I tried to juggle two babies under two and a child who needed lots of extra attention in order to thrive as well as unpack. Eventually we just got rid of anything left in packing crates after two years.

The old house flooded for the first time ever after we moved out and there was that to deal with, as well as a yard to maintain at both houses. Our routine became struggle through the week then go to my parent's house for the weekend for some help. We didn't have any pets which was a blessing, but then Becky's class visited the pet store and everyone got a token for a free goldfish. Of course a free goldfish means you need to buy a goldfish bowl and gravel and food and cute little things for the fishy to play with. The goldfish died a week later and Becky was devastated.

My sister suggested that the water we used to clean the bowl had not set long enough. She said the solution was simple. Just buy another bowl and have it waiting, so we did, along with another goldfish. That goldfish died overnight for reasons no one will ever know, so it was back to the pet store again. This time we bought two goldfish so they would have "someone to play" with and all seemed well. 

One Sunday afternoon, while we were at my parent's house the realtor called. She had a buyer! It was a few days before our bridge loan became due along with a huge interest payment so we were ecstatic. She asked us to come back right away so we could get all the paperwork done. We threw everyone and everything into the car and drove back home. By the time we arrived the baby was wailing for a bottle. I had stopped breast feeding and we did not have any bottles made up in the car.  We opened the door to our home and were instantly assaulted by a horrible smell. Apparently the goldfish must have died moments after we left. They were floating belly up and turning white. 

We had a new thing called a microwave we had never really used and I thought, "No problem, I'll just the pop the baby bottle in there and warm it up." I didn't know to leave the top unscrewed. It exploded in the microwave. The baby did not understand any of this. He was hungry and crying inconsolably as I quickly peeled nipple parts off the walls of the microwave, made up another Playtex nurser and put it in. The microwave dinged. The realtor waltzed into my kitchen wearing a lovely navy blue suit and as I turned toward her I burped the bottom of the bottle bag like I always did just before giving it to the baby. Only this time the lid was still loose and the Enfamil with iron shot all over the realtor.

In the end she was amazing. She sat there, covered in smelly baby formula, beside the rotting fish, and fed the baby while we filled out all the papers. Our house was sold! 

The next two years were hard. I exhausted every person who had been willing to babysit. Even the church nursery refused to take the baby because when separated from his siblings and me he screamed with the gusto of any young animal separated from its mother and waiting to be found.  Becky finished a second year of kindergarten and in first grade her teacher recognized her need for extra help. She was tested and began to settle into a learning disability class. We had teachers in school all year and tutors in the summer, plus everyone in our family worked with her for much of every evening after school. Her first and second grade teachers became so close we vacationed with them after that. We would camp with them and some of the other teachers and all their children for a week or so in the summer. We even all signed our children up for swimming lessons at Ash Park at the same time so we could have a picnic lunch together and swim all afternoon. We took turns making different parts of the lunch every day.

Bobby was very sick when he was about nine months old. He ended up in a tent in the hospital and it was scary. I stayed with him all day and his father stayed with him at night. Judy would watch Jimmy while I was at the hospital. She was potty training her daughter, Linda, and every time Linda used the potty she gave her a chocolate chip. Jimmy, although younger loved the chocolate chips and was well on his way to potty training right away. Except if he was busy and couldn't be bothered.

When Bobby was two his father read a book, Potty Training in a Day, and decided he would stay home and do this if I would take the other children and leave. I did. It worked, but it left Bobby slightly crazed for a couple of years.  He was always dry, but he would suddenly leap up screaming, "Potty, potty, potty, potty!" And we would have to grab him and run for the nearest potty.

Jimmy went to Tiny Tots at the YWCA for a year when he was about two. Their only prerequisite was that he be potty trained and he was. He was also so cute. He had a tiny pair of jeans and a polo shirt, but he was so little he couldn't even reach the doorknob! He started nursery school at Noah's Ark Preschool just before he turned three. It was at the Lutheran church, but was non-denominational and my neighbor, and best friend at the time, was one of the teachers. 

During that time period I still tried to put the boys down for a nap in the afternoon. One day I had jumped in for a quick shower when I had a funny feeling. Maybe I heard something, I don't know, but when I got out of the shower the boys were not in their beds! I found them in the garage. In the car! Jimmy was turning the key and telling Bobby to push the peddle. We no longer relied on baby proof doorknobs after that. We installed hook and eye latches at the top of every door leading out or to the basement.  Another time shortly after Easter I found the boys playing on top of their bunkbeds. They were chattering away and playing quite nicely when I noticed a raw egg on their red carpet. On closer inspection they had a Fisher Price barn silo full of water with all the leftover egg dye pills in it. They also had a carton of raw eggs. That day I tied the legs of their little table and chairs to the register so they couldn't use them to climb. Eventually they just learned to climb the drawer handles, but every step they had to make gave me a few extra seconds to keep up with them.

Becky rode a bus to school and I bought a twin stroller called the limousine so we could walk her down to the stop. It had two seats facing each other, so it wasn't wide like other twin strollers and both seats could recline. Plus the sun shades could be adjusted however I needed them. The babies, as we called them, were a couple of characters who quickly learned to work together. I ended up buying harnesses that zipped up the back. I used these both in the stroller and in grocery carts at the store. I never really used them like leashes at the mall because I had the stroller, but one time I made the mistake of letting them out of the stroller while Christmas shopping for my dad. 

I turned around and they were gone! Panicked, I ran all over Bergners looking for them before going out into the mall. There, in the far off distance I saw a woman holding Bobby's hand and walking towards me, but I still couldn't find Jimmy. I ran into our priest and he began helping me look. We checked everywhere we could think of. I didn't want to announce it over the mall speaker system because that was like telling child molesters there was a child available, but we were almost ready to do that when I saw him coming out of Sears with an older woman. They were chatting away and heading towards Roland's department store. When I caught up with them she told me she had asked him his name. (Now he knew his name, address and phone number well before he turned three,) but he thought it would be funny to fool her so he gave her all fake information. When she asked if his mommy worked here he pointed at the nearest store, Rolands and when she asked if he was Jimmy Williams he said yes!  My life with a very bright and creative child was just starting. 

After that I tried to do all my shopping without them along, but that was not always possible at the grocery store. By using the harnesses I could keep them in the basket, one in the baby seat and one in the cart below and that worked pretty well except for the day I reached in to unload the groceries at the check out only to discover Jimmy had greased everything with oleo!

That was the same year I was home alone when the boys were taking a bath. I could always see them and the bathroom was right off the kitchen, so I didn't think anything about it when I had to take Bobby out of the tub and into the kitchen to give him some medicine. I let Jimmy play a little longer. They loved baths so much. I was just rinsing off the medicine spoon when Jimmy stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his neck. "You better look at this Mommy." That was all he said and he said it so calmly I was not prepared for what I saw. There was a two inch gaping smiling hole under his chin! It looked like someone had slit his throat. I could have laid my finger in that hole and I could see stringy white cords in it. I sat him on the kitchen counter and poured hydrogen peroxide in it, then I made butterflies out of tape and taped it shut. I didn't have a car and my husband did not answer his phone at the office that night. The next day I took him to see our pediatrician who patted me on the shoulder and said, "Good job mama." It was months later before he revealed to my mother that he had been trying to slide down the back of the tub and fell out onto the plastic toy crate on the bathroom floor.

When it was Jimmy's turn to go to kindergarten evaluation he refused to let them put a name tag on him, stating boldly that if they wanted to know his name, he would tell them. They were no fools. They patted him on the back and said fine as they placed his name tag on the back of his shirt. Kindergarten started and he was easily the youngest child in the class because he had a late September birthday. Some of the children were nearly a year older than he was and a few were already reading quite well, including his new best friend Jason, But when reading finally clicked for him he was reading Hop On Pop, by Dr. Seuss and he read it on the couch and on the hamper. He read it in his bed and even in the bathroom under the vanity. He read it in in the backyard and on the screened in porch. He was truly hooked on reading.

Becky meanwhile was starting to read more too. She enjoyed our summers where we all went to the library in Normal and read books to gain prizes like free bowling, or free mini golf, free ice cream, or whatever. Sometimes she would read to the boys and one day I heard her reading a Little House on the Prairie book to them. She said, with great excitement, "They hopped in the boogie and drove away!" Later I asked her what she thought a boogie was and she just shrugged. Obviously whatever it was, she was content that people could hop into it and drive away! And so were the boys.

Bobby did not go to Tiny Tots and he did not take infant swimming lessons like Jimmy did. Jimmy was a fish, but Bobby had ear infections like I did as a child. Still, by four he was taking lessons at the pool all summer with the other kids. His philosophy as a young child seemed to be anything was okay as long as I was there and so were his siblings. I began teaching three and four year old Sunday School and he was right there with everyone else long before he was two. He simply followed along. He did the same when they were playing in the neighborhood too. He learned to roller skate on plastic skates while neighborhood girls held him up and he learned to ride a two wheeler mostly on his own using the tiny bike Jimmy and Becky had both used. This only backfired once. They were all playing baseball in the front yard and Bobby ran up behind them just as someone swung a metal bat right into his head! He had a black eye and later we discovered he had knocked a front tooth loose, but he seemed perfectly fine He played the rest of the afternoon. Then a few days later he fell off the bicycle and skinned the whole side of his face. We were right in front of the Weight Watcher Lady's house and she ran out with a washrag. He really looked terrible  -- like a battered child with a bruised and bloody face and swollen eye. 

One of my friends at the pool, who had kids the same ages as mine, was the wife of a neurosurgeon. I know she suspected child abuse, but she invited the boys to spend the night with her boys and they told me how her husband held up two fingers and asked Bobby what he saw. They thought that was funny. They said he asked lots of silly questions and I guess he was satisfied because they didn't say a word when I picked the boys up the next day. Almost a year later he woke up with a big purple swelling on the top of his front gums. Evidently that tooth that was hit had abscessed, so we took him to a pediatric dental surgeon who put him in a tiny koala hospital robe and instantly put him out with gas the moment we handed him over. It was taken care of without any real trauma at all. He went to work with his daddy afterwards and ate a hog dog!

Once Bobby was in first grade I was asked to come work at Noah's Ark as a watcher for a child who was very violent. Eventually he left, but then they asked me to stay on and work with three children from one babysitter who were pretty nonverbal. Eventually this worked into me becoming an assistant preschool teacher. It was usually about six hours a week the first couple of years and as much as twenty-one later on, but it gave me time to volunteer at my children's schools in the library or nurse's office and to be room mother's for all three. It also let me take off if I went on a field trip with the school. 

These early years were rich and fulfilling. Their dad joined Indian Guides with them and they began their first forays out into the world of men.

Bradford Lane

 

Bradford Lane was on the corner of Bradford Lane and Plymouth Court in Normal, Illinois. We moved in and before we even unpacked that first night we went to play Bridge. The next morning we were sitting in our dining room when a large woman walked across her backyard into ours and right up to our patio doors at 6:30 in the morning! She had seen our lights on and was bringing us a still warm homemade coffee cake to welcome us to the neighborhood. That was Judy, probably the best friend I am still in contact with.

Judy was to play a large part in our life from that day forward. She had two children, Andy 5 and Linda under a year. I got to babysit for Linda sometimes and I cannot tell you how many mornings I spent sitting in Judy's kitchen drinking instant coffee while she drank tea and both of us just gabbing away. She taught me what I know about making neck ties and the finer points in sewing. She gave me the recipe for my favorite brownie recipe and she was just always there if I needed her. When they built a family room onto the back of their house we helped stir the cement and I would ride in the back of an old El Camino. As the youngest and smallest of the friends, I fit back there so I could hold onto the plywood we bought and it wouldn't blow up and out of the car on the way home.

This was our first house house and it was a piece of work. It was a tri-level that the builders must have cobbled together out of all sorts of leftovers. After we moved in we discovered the woodwork was actually metal with a wood grain painted on. The kitchen window was so wide that every time the neighbor's dog put his nose against it, a long crack appeared across the bottom pane. And when the toilet seat in the upstairs bathroom broke, the only way we could replace it was by buying a case of toilet seats from the Holiday Inn!

 It had long gold shag carpeting in the dining/living room and heavy gold velvet drapes on the windows to match. There was a unique wooden chandelier over the dining room table that had what looked like real  used candles on it, but they were really lights. I loved it and had refused to give it to the people who sold us the house. The wall paper was awful burlap, put on in uneven strips and painted either ecru or yellow, except for the strip of wall between the hall closet and the staircase. That was whore house red brocade for some reason.

I thought the front bay window would be a perfect place for my collection of African Violets and spider plants, but it totally boiled them in the sun! However the patio door turned out to be the real perfect place. My violets bloomed like there was no tomorrow there and I planted Grandma's red Canna Bulbs right outside that door by our patio. I saw my first luminescent humming bird flying over them. There was a gorgeous blooming plum tree hanging over the patio the first year we lived there, but the next winter it got warm and bloomed. Then it froze and died. Judy's father helped me plant tulip bulbs and hyacinths in the garden out front and showed me how to trim the bush in the back yard. After it was trimmed that bush turned out to be a wonderful flowering lilac bush.

When we moved in the house was very plain, but I conquered my fear of tall extension ladders and painted it Jamestown Red with black shutters all by myself. I scraped and washed and caulked all summer long and it ended up looking exactly the way I dreamed it would. My husband would come home and say, "Poor baby, I was going to help paint, but you look exhausted. Let's go out to eat." Then after we ate he'd suggest playing tennis and after that it was too late for him to paint, but I'm a sucker for eating out and playing tennis.

The bottom level had a utility room with a workbench, washer, dryer and a toilet! Now we were a two toilet family! We bought a professional pool table for the other room down there, because had grown up playing pool and was very good. I painted the built in credenza bright red enamel, the same color as our kitchen cabinets. 

I discovered I could do so many things. One day my husband called home and asked what I was doing. I told him I was working in the kitchen. Imagine his surprise when he got home to discover I had sawed off part of the counter top, unscrewed and removed the kitchen drawers and put them in the dining room, then put our dishwasher in their place.

We had three bedrooms upstairs and one bathroom, but it felt like an ensuite because there were two doors, one to our bedroom. and one to the hall. I painted a four foot Mickey Mouse on the back of one Bedroom's door with a measuring tape for our first child. She was a foster child who came to live with us October 1, 1976 and turned four on October 12th. 

Becky was a tiny three feet tall and twenty nine pounds at four. She spoke a handful of words and wore a size two. but I made games to teach her her address and how to spell her name. We had tea party after tea party to encourage her to speak and a year later on October 1, 1977 she was in kindergarten when we adopted our first baby. No two people could have been happier. 

Jimmy was a beautiful three day old baby boy. He had blonde hair and the bluest eyes anyone could ever imagine. People used to stop me on the street to tell me what a pretty baby girl he was no matter how I dressed him. I dressed him like a little boy, but I made most of his clothes along with matching ones for Becky. Judy loaned us her baby crib. I made a stuffed rabbit diaper holder and painted a chest of drawers bright red enamel to match the kitchen and basement, because that was the paint I had. Our pediatrician gave us a booklet on newborns and I treated it like an owner's manual! It said keep the room at a constant seventy degrees, so we bought a heater that kept it at exactly that and I knew it was right because I also hung a fish tank thermometer on the end of his crib to make sure. When he left home for college he took that heater with him! 

I worried about everything. I weighed him before and after every feeding and told the doctor I was afraid he wasn't getting enough to eat, so he suggested I concentrate his formula. I did. Since he never told me to stop I kept this up for a year! By this time he ate anything and everything he could put in his mouth. I made all his baby food and froze it in ice cube trays and I have a movie somewhere of me saying, "You've gotta smile when I say peaches!" When I said that he would burst out giggling and grin and I would shove the spoon in his mouth. But he also rolled his walker up to the Christmas tree, which we had placed up on a high table, and tried to eat the bread ornament Becky made at school and the rocks in the front garden and one day; when he was in Becky's room I didn't see her Mickey Mouse weeble when I walked in the room. Jimmy grinned and a Weeble popped out of his closed mouth.

That year I made Becky a big angora cat costume for Halloween, but as luck would have it was so hot, she could barely wear it. It was fluffy and soft and left hairs in my sewing machine for months! Jimmy wore a clown outfit Judy had made for her children.

Becky made friends with Judy's daughter, Linda, and the little girl across the street, Andrea. We found out the state was trying to terminate her biological parents' rights and we would be able to adopt her, so she got to use our last name at school to keep things simple. But state courts are slow and inefficient. We took her out of school and sat waiting outside the courtroom many times only to have to wait until another day. We finally used the attorney we were using for Jimmy's adoption to speed things along, but in the end his adoption went through years before hers.

I discovered I was pregnant when Jimmy was six months old and I was so happy. The idea of three children didn't bother me at all, but my husband wasn't so sure. He was kind of evasive about the whole thing until one afternoon after we all went sledding and I miscarried. I was devastated. I remember looking at the big butter carton I put that tiny unformed fetus in all night before we went to the hospital for a D and C. He was just relieved. 

His mother thought she would like to live with us. I  had imagined the joy of three generations in one house, but  she smoked like a chimney, didn't really want to spend time with two small children and was very picky about getting tiny portions of food in tiny bowls. She would go on and on about how the hospital gave her little bitty bowls of food and how perfect that was. One day we all went to the Dairy Queen and she ordered a small hot fudge sundae. When it came she said it was too large and gave it back. They quietly threw that one out and made her another. She wanted to send that one back too, because it was also too large. We told her she could just eat what she wanted and throw the rest away. She was furious.

Jimmy was scheduled to be Christened on Easter Eve, but that day my husband drove his mother back to her house and a big snowstorm kept him from coming right back. We were all through with our attempts to live together. Later, when we did the actual baptism his brother's family came to visit from Munster, Indiana. We told his brother that we named him James after his uncle and his grandfather, thinking he might be proud to hear that, but he said, "Nobody every called me Jimmy." They gave him a teddy bear, but never visited our home again.

His brother came down to Bloomington to play Duplicate Bridge every month, but we never saw him. He did invite us to his daughters' weddings and invited us to visit again on my husband's fiftieth birthday twenty four years later, but their family just wasn't close.

One day I was standing in my kitchen working when I heard something crash. I saw a stuffed toy come rolling down the stairs past the kitchen door and, with horror, realized what I would see next and was right! It was my baby tumbling down just like that bunny had. Somehow he had dislodged the baby gate. Fortunately the steps were very well padded and he seemed totally unhurt. Another day he was sitting in his high chair while I washed dishes. He loved pickles, had some teeth, and I thought by cutting them up it was okay for him to eat them. He'd eaten them before without a problem. Then he began to choke. I couldn't get the tray off the high chair and I couldn't get him out of it. Finally I picked up the chair with him in it and in some unbelievable move must have done a heimlich maneuver. The pickle piece popped right out.

When I went back for my six weeks check up after the miscarriage my doctor's words were, "Well, fertile Myrtle, you are pregnant again!" I was ecstatic. This time it was a normal pregnancy. I heard the heartbeat at ten weeks and felt the first little flutters almost exactly three months later. 

We began house hunting again because we needed more bedroom space and after looking at hundreds of homes found one we liked, but my husband would not buy it without a refrigerator and they would not include theirs. After all that work our realtor was afraid of losing the sale, so she bought us a refrigerator herself and had us sign all the papers ahead of time in case I went into labor on the final date.

My husband was not a fun man. He made cracks about how big I was getting and how embarrassed he was to have two children in tow while I was pregnant. It was more than the socially acceptable 2.5 children he wanted to have! I bought two maternity outfits and a necklace that had the word Baby and an arrow pointing down. A neighbor gave me her old maternity pants and I was happy.  I only had morning sickness for about five minutes of the whole pregnancy. We took Lamaze classes, but he worked over time all he could and never practiced with me. I had a student nurse who followed my pregnancy and she was as excited as I was. 

The night before the baby was born he was so active he kicked a magazine off my stomach and early the next morning I woke up feeling funny. He wasn't due for another four weeks, but when I went to the bathroom at six my water broke! I called the doctor who said wait until the contractions were five minutes apart and then come to the hospital. Nothing was happening so I took a quick bath and ate a piece of toast and finally about ten after eight I had the first contraction. I had the next one five minutes later so we called Judy to stay with Becky and Jimmy and drove to the hospital. By the time we got there my contractions were every four minutes and hard. It was quite a day. So many women were in labor that all the brand new birthing rooms were full and I had to share a room with another woman who was also in labor. 

My husband was angry because State Farm was doing a big conversion that day and he spent most of his time on the telephone and eating chicken soup. My student nurse came in and was there with me all the way through. I was fully dilated by eleven, but the baby's head was too large, so they had to stretch the cervix around it and kept telling me not to push. By four o'clock they took me down for x-rays and I remember watching the lights slide by on the ceiling overhead as we rolled down the halls. Then it was back to a delivery room. 

My doctor had two of us delivering at once and he was yelling instructions into the other labor room as a nurse positioned the mirror n mine, so I could see my baby being born. In the end he had to do an episiotomy because I ripped and at 4:20 p.m. Bobby was born, face down with the first flat forceps my doctor had ever used. There was a hematoma under a big shock of black hair, but he was healthy and fine. His Apgar tests were perfect and even his father was in awe of him. He was the only boy in the nursery and the only baby with so much hair. The nurses had fun combing his hair into different styles and my student nurse showed me how his ears folded because he was premature. Premature? He was eight pounds, two ounces and twenty two inches long.

I was sad those first few days because he couldn't stay in my room because I smoked and my parents had to stay at home with my other children. They didn't include me in any of the new mother classes like bathing because it said I already had two children. My husband really didn't visit much either. He bought me a pair of really ugly slippers in the hospital gift shop, but my family sent flowers in a musical cradle.

When I went home, Judy had made a big sign she hung across the front of the house. It said, Welcome Home Robert!  My mom and dad were there to help, but my mother was uncomfortable. She didn't like me breast feeding and she just wasn't into the whole mothering thing. I was sore and recovering from a ton of stitches so I had to spend most of my time upstairs. Steps were difficult. My dad cooked wonderful meals and all was well. For three days. Then they left. I was still recovering. My breasts were so sore I could barely tolerate them. It turns out I have fibrocystic breasts. I was left with two babies and a special needs seven year old to take care of. Bobby was a colicky baby. He cried all the time and barely slept at all. Not in his crib, or cradle, or even my arms. Then he began projectile vomiting. He would eat and a few minutes later it would all spew out of him and hit the wall three feet away. 

I didn't want to give him any kind of drugs, but our pediatrician finally convinced me to give him some baby Benedryl. He said it would make him sleep for hours, but it might calm him down enough to stop the projectile vomiting. I reluctantly gave him one dose. He never even dozed off, but he never vomited like that again and I never gave him a second dose.

It was almost impossible to deal with all of this and keep the house ready to show on a moment's notice, so Bill suggested we go ahead and make the move. Our neighbors all helped. There was no privacy. Everything I had became public, but we needed the help. 

We moved to Nicki Drive when Bobby was three weeks old.

Hilltop

 

We bought a 1965 Shultz mobile home, a classic that was no longer made by that company, and moved it onto a brand new lot in Hilltop Mobile Home Court. His mother loaned us the money figured at 7.5 percent interest by her bank and we paid it back every month in regular payments. I was promoted to secretary in Personnel and life was good! 

We joined a gourmet group that met monthly at different people's homes and it never bothered me that they all lived in fancy big houses while we lived in a trailer. Our trailer was really nice. However we didn't have a dining room and our table was not large enough for a formal dinner with so many people, so we took our closet door off in the tiny second bedroom, put it on two card tables then covered it in a nice table cloth. It looked elegant with our good china, but I have to say the sauerbraten I made did not impress me. Of course the paella someone else had once made did not impress me either. The eight dollar a pound squid and the oysters were rubbery and I think I swallowed one oyster three times before it stayed down. I couldn't even eat tuna fish for a year after that!  But we enjoyed that group in spite of the food.

Many of our friends already had children by this time and we decided to start trying ourselves, but nothing happened. After several months we decided I would stop working and stay home. The idea was that it might make life calmer and I might get pregnant. That was the beginning of years of hope, disappointment and despair.

I began sewing more. I embroidered pillow cases for our dog's bed, made Valentines out of felt and lace with Shakespearean sonnets embroidered on them, and kept on making some of my own clothes. I even made an outfit to wear to our Newcomer Luau. That night I wore a flower from my own garden pinned in my hair. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered the tiny red mites crawling in it! He built a shed. I planted a vegetable garden. He built a porch. I planted a beautiful line of flowers across the end of our driveway. I loved the song, The Happiest Girl in the USA. Those lyrics felt like they were written about me.

I finally joined the Episcopal church and we became very active. We joined the young couples group and he was the Thurifer for special Sundays while we both took over the youth ministry for Father Lyons. It was a group of kids ages 12 to 21 and I was 22. We were tuned in! Father Lyons had an ancient Cadillac and he would take Ninna, our dog, with him and follow us on our long bike rides across town to the park. He even allowed us to take her to the church when we had lock-ins. In between chasing would-be lovers out of the choir loft we had deep discussions and some games. I played my first trust game with this group. I crossed my arms over my chest, closed my eyes and allowed myself to fall straight back! Of course they caught me (but I have to admit I was much smaller back then, probably 110 pounds.) The weekend we went to Lake Bloomington was one I will never forget. Two of the kids lost their oars while canoeing. None of them brought any warm clothes and I ended up handing all of mine out while I froze in the relentless rain. I slept with the girls. He slept with the boys. And the kicker for the whole thing was the giant mud slide most of the kids participated in just before their parents arrived to pick them up.

I began playing tennis during the day. I'd be on the tennis courts right after I took him to work and play with a friend of mine until it was time to pick him up, often six hours a day with a small break for lunch. My tennis partner was a woman I met in Bloomington, but she had actually grown up about a block from my house as a child. She was a few years older than me and we were well matched. Then she got pregnant and began having problems. We had to stop. I still played with my husband at night, but I missed Marian.

We decided to become foster parents and began the necessary classes. Every week we would go to a house over by Miller Park to join several other couples waiting to be licensed. Our first foster child was Roma a nine month old baby girl whose mother was in the hospital. We had no notice and borrowed a bassinet from some friends. It turned out a bassinet is not really appropriate for a nine month old, so we found a net porta-crib. Roma was a learning experience. She got into everything! She was adorable, but tore the books off my bookshelves, messed with the television knobs, opened doors . . . she taught me a lot and kept me running. One day I made the mistake of giving her a teething biscuit while she was in that crib. She went home that night when the case worker showed up to get her and it's probably a good thing, because it took me days to get all the teething biscuit goo out of that netting in the crib. We were supposed to get a sixteen year old girl, but she kept running away and we never actually met her even after thinking we would three different times. Eventually we became emergency care foster parents. Those are sad. A social worker calls and shows up at your house all hours of the night with a child or children who have been dumped at a local grocery store or something similar and they've waited hours for a parent who never returned. These children never stay more than a few days or until they can be placed in permanent foster care.

Now we played in three Bridge groups. Couples, Twin City and Duplicate. He was such a hard core partner I used to drink Mylanta before the games, but sometimes it was fun. I also played in a ladies bridge group that was much more relaxed.

I even went back to school and took a class at ISU. It was Fantasy literature and I really enjoyed it. I was only a year older than most of the kids in the class and we were reading books I found fascinating. One of the books on the syllabus was The Hobbit, but we got into such spirited discussions that she ended up adding Tolkien's whole trilogy! It was a lot of reading, but it made me a life long Tolkien fan.

Cooking became another one of my passions. I made homemade yeast doughnuts and hung them on rods between my kitchen chairs when I glazed them I put newspapers underneath to catch the extra glaze. I made popovers and Yorkshire pudding, red velvet cake from scratch and Boston creme pies. I tried everything. One of our wedding gifts had been a splatter screen to put on top of frying pans to keep the oil from splattering on everything. One day I had it sitting on the stove and when I grabbed it, it was so hot and soft It forever left my fingerprints on the handle! It's amazing I wasn't burned badly, but I wasn't.

I remember telling my dad one day, "You know how people are always trying to keep up with the Joneses? We are the Joneses in Hilltop right now."

The mobile home was paid off and we began house hunting. Thus began a tradition I call the Goldilocks game that would follow me the rest of my life. Everything I saw was not quite right. It was too big, or too small. Too old, or too lacking in character. We looked at so many houses our realtor finally gave us a copy of all her listings so we could peruse them, by then everyone knew we were on the look out. 

We were playing bridge with an older couple whose house was beautifully decorated except that, in the fashion of some people back then, they covered all their furniture in clear plastic to protect it! It was cheesy and uncomfortable, but we would have never stopped playing Bridge over something like that. However, one night while we were playing they got into a disagreement over a play they'd made. First they argued. Then they shouted at each other and finally she threw up her cards and shoved the table towards him so hard she knocked his chair over and he fell on the floor! We were in total shock and it wasn't over yet. She got up and stood over him, arms on her hips, screaming at him while he lay there blinking. Imagine watching two well dressed people in their sixties doing this!

We decided not to play Bridge with them anymore, but she kept calling. I kept putting her off and then one day she said there was a young couple in their synagogue who was selling their house and she thought it would be perfect for us. We were very reluctant to look at it, but in the end we decided to go check it out. That was the first time we saw the house on Bradford Lane.

Bunn Street

 

We rented a two bedroom ranch house on Bunn street right under what is now Veteran's Parkway in Bloomington, Illinois. There was a viaduct directly south of us that traffic ran over and a day old bakery store across the street. We didn't know it at first, but we shared a long driveway with a family that lived way way back behind us. Soon we discovered they had a yard full of tires and car parts and Sunday afternoons were their special time to ride little motor bikes up and down our shared driveway. It was like living next to a nest of giant bees. The buzzing was so loud you could barely hear yourself speak when they were riding. And they rode all Sunday afternoon.

The very first day we moved down there, we had to buy a bed. We went to several stores downtown and bought a queen size mattress from the first one who would deliver it, along with a simple metal bed frame, that afternoon. Now we owned a bed and a small Danish table! The angora goat rug was a casualty of having a dog who thought it smelled heavenly and peed on it the moment we laid it on the floor. No amount of dry cleaning could stop that smell and the cost of cleaning the leather backing was horrendous. We also bought an old refrigerator from a second hand store on Empire and Grandma gave us the old library couch that we refinished and recovered for our living room. 

Money was running out, but there was a sliced ham at the Eisner store that someone had not taken. We bought it and froze each slice separately. We also bought some hamburger and figured we could make it to our first payday without starving. I applied for a job at State Farm and he was working a lot of overtime. One night he came home, gobbled down his dinner and I walked him back out to his car when he went back to work. When I went back in Ninna, our dog, was sitting on my chair at the table. She had eaten my dinner! I remember I cried and she seemed very remorseful.

One of those early weekends when we went home to visit my parents they cooked a ham because they knew we had been scrimping on money and they wanted to do something special! The homemade macaroni and cheese my dad made was extraordinary, but more ham? Ugh! We never said a word though.

I was offered a job in Personnel Records at the downtown Home Office. He would drop me off when he went to work and pick me up on the way home. One time our car was in the shop and we had to call a cab. Imagine our surprise when it showed up with two other people already in it and dropped us all off one at a time like some sort of bus. He was still working overtime nearly every night, so after picking me up from work we would often go to Steak N Shake and split a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake before I dropped him back at the Grossman building and went home. This was a true luxury back then.

Working at State Farm was okay. I shared an office with three other women. Two of them were the group insurance people. Two of us were Personnel Records Clerks.  It was the second to the lowest pay grade in the company, but because I was the wife of new career level underwriter I was invited to a tea by the wife of the company president. I didn't go. First of all I wasn't sure what to wear. Also driving out there was going to require a lot of car shuffling and finally there was the fact that I had just started a new job and I felt funny asking for time off right away.

These were the last days in the old Home Office before State Farm moved us out to the new Corporate building. There were sill huge mirrors on every corner, because couriers used to roller skate through the building delivering the in office mail and their first computing machine was up on eighth floor for display. It was enormous. My job took me all over the building from the ground floor to the executive floor, but I was walking, not roller skating. We kept the personnel files up to date by typing new admissions and filing salary sheets, employee evaluations and conflict of interest statements. I learned to recognize the scrawls that were the signatures of all the important people in the company and I had to take care of OSHA demands by being sure contract employee's seniority dates were correct and all the up to date information was posted at all the right times.  It was a varied and interesting job. And because we were just across the alley from the back of Kresge's we could sneak down there once in a while and buy a grilled caramel danish from their counter.

Now that I was also working we could afford to give Grandma back the library couch to put in the attic and we bought a two piece tuxedo sectional from Goodwill. It was ivory satin and ninety inches long if you put the two pieces together. It was not new, but it was a real couch and we were even taking tennis lessons at Sate Farm Park. We were beginning to feel like we were moving up a bit.

One of the women I worked with lived in a lovely mobile home and that led to us finding a very nice used one in a beautiful mobile home court. We were ready to stop renting and buy something.

Dixon

 

The army sent a moving van owned by a man and his wife to pack up and move us back to Illinois. I remember she wore flowered coveralls and he wore standard ones. I liked the idea they could always work together and they seemed like a good team. All we packed was a bag to get us through a few weeks at his mother's house in Dixon, Illinois while he job hunted.

My husband's parents were much older than mine. In fact, his mother was close to my grandmother's age and his brother was the same age as my mother. His brother's daughters were almost the same age I was. 

Ronald Reagan grew up just a few blocks from his mother's house, the one my husband grew up in. The Reagan house was a very simple one with a secret tile in front of the fireplace where he used to hide things as a child. Of course we visited and his mother just raved about how cute Ronnie was and how all the girls had a crush on him when he was a lifeguard.

His mother was glad to have us there. We helped her do many of the things Jimmy, my husband's dad, had done before he died. She had raised two sons and I think I was her chance to have a daughter. She took me with her when she subbed at schools and she arranged for me to attend quite a few coffees and teas, so I could meet her friends. These were informal affairs with a formal twist. The silver coffee and tea sets I had grown up seeing just sitting on sideboards and inside china closets were actually used by all these ladies and everyone seemed to take it for granted that they used the best bone china to go along with it. I felt like I had stepped back in time.

She also took me to Virginia's, a private little boudoir where Virginia herself unlocked the door and invited us in to look at clothing. I got to pick out an beautiful tailored blouse and a skirt with a fitted suede belt that had a silver buckle. I was a bit in awe. 

One of her best friends was Bernice,  an elegant diabetic woman in her eighties who wore her shiny gray white hair up in a chignon. Bernice and her brother lived together in their old family mansion. It still had a port cochere from the old days when there were carriages and people needed that high porch to step onto. Bernice always made regular cookies when I came, even if she couldn't eat them and she told the most delightful tales. I remember how she impressed me when she hopped up on or off  of that port chochere porch because there were no steps. Then I found out she had reroofed her own house and repainted it herself -- just a couple of years earlier. Her brother was an invalid and couldn't really do anything except read. They did a lot of reading because they didn't have a television and she liked to walk to the library summer, winter, spring and fall. I knew right then she was the kind of woman I'd like to be.

All my life I had done certain things to kill time when I was anxiously awaiting something. As a child I made clothespin dolls, embroidered or knitted. Later I made a "Baby Sergeant" doll out of a sock and my husband's old fatigue shirt. I even used one of his sergeant pins on the hat to make it look more official. I paper mached a ketchup bottle and painted it to look like my husband wearing a suit., I read voraciously. I sewed and made dresses or long nightgowns, I painted with my great grandfather's old art box, or I played the piano. Here and now I could only walk my dog, hang out with his mother, or play Bridge with my husband, his mother and his aunt.

He interviewed with the State Farm Home Office Life Company for a position as a Health Underwriter at what used to be called the Grossman Building. It was out near where K-mart was back then and across the street from what would become Eastland Mall, but all I remember being built at that time was Sears. Around noon he came out to the car where I was waiting with our dog. A  tall, distinguished, gray haired man he introduced as Jack wanted to take us to lunch. Jack agreed to ride in our car because I had the dog and he insisted on sitting in the back seat. In my nervous rush to clear the floor of Ninna's paraphernalia, I accidentally dumped a gallon of water right on his shoes! I was horrified. I just knew I had ruined everything, but he was such a gentleman. He refused to make a big deal out of it. We went to a place where we could get a nice lunch relatively fast so we could leave Ninna in the car and he could get back to work.

A few days later we got a letter in the mail offering us the job. Now we were house hunting in Bloomington, Illinois.

The Airstream

 

We rented a beautiful little Airstream trailer in Fairmont Trailer Court right outside of Manhattan, Kansas, the home of Kansas State University. Most of the people there were also in the army, but a few, including some army wives were going to school.

Money was a concern now. My husband brought home $450 in cash from the army every month. We bought a little lock box and put our money in there. We divided our money into envelopes with $60 for groceries, $92.50 for rent, $33.61 for our car payment, $40 for recreation and entertainment, and money for things like gas and doing laundry, etc. in other envelopes, we were careful to always put $20 into a joint savings account. I still remember these things because it was really the first time I had ever thought about paying my own bills and what things cost.

I had lots of time on my hands here and this is where I began to do a lot of the things I still do. We bought a second hand Dressmaker sewing machine and a friend taught me to sew. After that I made most of my dresses for a long time. It was easy in the early seventies. A yard of material made a darling little mini-dress. I used leftover fancy jars that syrup, or other food came in to make paper mache art projects. Our landlords let us bring our little dog, Ninna, out to live with us and there were dozens of things to do together. For one thing our landlord had a big boat and he invited us out on the lake. One day when we were out there a big inboard motor boat filled with teenagers flipped up in the air and turned over! I'll never forget seeing those kids leaping like frogs into the water. One night a week we joined the long line to Pizza Hut where anyone could get a medium pizza and a coke for one dollar. Sometimes when he had to work overnight he would bring home Spudnuts, the best donuts ever!

We were proud of our little trailer and bought an angora shag goat rug to put under our Danish table topped with glass, our only personal furnishings. Our friends were mostly the men he had been in Vietnam with and those people became our surrogate family. All of us were young, far from home, and eager to establish relationships with each other. When the army kept us from going home on a holiday we spent it together. All of us lived in furnished trailers of one sort of another, had one car and learned to lean on each other in times of need.

Other couples we met were a veterinary student, his wife and their baby, Will. She was a telephone operator and on the rare occasions they could go home we filled in for them at the Veterinary school insemination labs where we swept the floors around the gigantic bulls stabled there. In return he would trim Ninna if she needed it. 

This was the year I had to go to an army dentist and discovered my wisdom teeth had grown in pushing down and to the front,  All of my teeth were being crowded and deformed by those teeth and needed to come out. It was a horrendous process leaving me with dry sockets both times and in so much pain I thought I would die. Then, when it was all over, they said I had an unerrupted tooth above my canine tooth that needed to come out. That time the dental surgeon actually hammered a rubber triangle into my mouth with his mallet, springing my jaw. I went home looking like the bride of Frankenstein with three long black sutures hanging down from my top gum and a plastic plate in my mouth. None of this was especially painful, but my jaw was so damaged from being sprung that I couldn't open it. By the time I had recovered from this I weighed 102 pounds, which is not much for a five foot seven woman.

We bought a five foot Christmas tree that year from a place called Paradise and since money was tight we bought a cheap pink feathered angel at the dime store for the top. We called her our Floozy Angel. I made cookies to hang and we sewed long chains of popcorn and cranberries to decorate it. I was going to decorate styrofoam balls with sequins, but that turned out to be more expensive than buying some small red glass ornaments. We soon discovered that one of the downfalls to decorating a tree with food was the company that followed. At night, while we were watching our tiny little black and white television a little gray mouse would come out, climb up in the tree and munch on cookies and popcorn. He was cute, but he was a mouse and my husband put out Decon much to my distress.

That year for Christmas I asked for a strawberry cookie jar and got a mushroom one. I don't remember what I got him, but we were happy.

When my parents came out to visit I proudly served them stuffed duck and pudding ala messe. Imagine their faces as I undid the safety pins I'd closed that duck up with! It tasted great though the stuffing was so dry you could blow it away with a breath. The pudding, which was supposed to be a chocolate cake from a recipe I got from his mother's church cookbook never turned into a cake, but scooped over ice cream it was delicious!

I had three other visitors from Illinois that year. One night we were having an argument when I looked out the window and saw two people I did not recognize coming up our driveway. "I suppose you invited somebody over and forgot to tell me!" I exclaimed indignantly. He glanced out the window. "That's your sister!! He was right! It was my sister, who had always been a petite size 5, and her new husband. Evidently being married improved her appetite immensely. And another week, when he had to spend the week out in the field,I drove home by myself and brought back my eighty year old Great Aunt Lela! On the ride back she asked if we could turn the air conditioner in the car back on and I had to tell her that it hadn't been the ac she felt. It was simply the vent under our dash. She wanted me to teach her how to drive that week, but we had a stick shift and I didn't think eighty was a good age to take up driving, so instead she taught me to crochet granny squares, which I quickly forgot after she left. Still it was fun having her there.

We were always trying to think of ways to save money and one of those was by not sending his fatigues to the dry cleaners. I washed them at home and hung them on the trailer court clotheslines. After they were dry they had to be starched and ironed. Starching was quite a process. I dissolved the starch in a green wash tub and soaked the clean uniform in it, then re-dried it, sprinkled it with water and put it in the refrigerator. Finally I ironed it the rest of the way dry in order to get the proper creases and stiffness required. 

We also thought I could cut his hair when his unit bought a barber's chair and set of clippers. Of course we couldn't use the chair, but he brought the clippers home and insisted I try. "Just hold the hair in a comb and run the clippers over it." He said. I did. I scooped up a big thatch of hair, ran the clippers over the underside of the comb, which knocked them out of my hand and promptly left him looking like a tonsured monk! Fortunately only the really tall guys in his unit could see this.

I decided I should get a job, so I applied for positions near Camp Funston where he was stationed during the day. I got a job pumping gas and rode to the post with him early in the morning then parked at the gas station until my job started at ten. When he got off after work around 4:30, he waited until 6:00 when I was done. It was not a bad job. There were five us working there and we rotated between working in the cooler, selling beer and pop and pumping gas. I learned to use a cash register, but somehow no matter whether I worked the pumps or the cooler I tended to come up with too much money! My boss thought maybe people were tipping me. I didn't, but we will never know. Of course men were always trying to give women a hard time, so if they asked us to fill it up and we did, then they said they'd only asked for two dollars worth, we just had them pull inside and someone would siphon out all the extra plus enough to start the siphon. Once a man insisted that his Volkswagen beetle radiator needed water and no matter what I said to him, he insisted, calling me names and being a general ass. I finally just opened up his trunk and put the hose in. As the water began to pour over his engine he immediately recanted. I was not prepared for working on my first army payday. The lines for gas never stopped and it was 120 degrees out. I was so sunburned that the part in between my braids could not be touched for days. Those were good days, but hard.

Eventually we decided it was too hard. Then I applied for a job in Manhatthan. I would drive him to work when he couldn't get a ride and then I would go into work. I was a Bumper Bunny at a local gas station. It was all women except for our boss and we wore white cowboy hats, short white shorts, red tight shirts and washed windows with squirt guns. The money was great, but the job turned out not to be. I had men grab at me and paw me and one guy even cut me with his ring. I still have the scar. That was when I quit.

My husband thought of himself as a swinger. He loved the movie, Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice, and since we were always having get togethers for fondue, or Bridge, or something, he wanted to have a party that was risque. The only problem was that I didn't and neither did our friends. He thought this was simply because we didn't get it, so he invited them to a Pajama Party. Everyone wore pajamas, but they all put a humorous touch on it and that party was all laughing and playing party games like passing the spoon on a string through your clothes, or passing the orange using your chin or your body. It did get a bit rowdy but that was because he was drinking and mixing drinks and towards the end he was mixing liquor with liquor instead of coke or seven up, We all survived. Both physically and as friends.

The only sad thing that happened that year was when my husband kept signing up to work nights. He would have his best friend come keep me company. We would go out to dinner, or dance, or simply sit and talk and we got way too close to each other. Finally it was too complicated, awkward and painful so we had to break off.  They stayed friends, but I don't think he ever realized how close we had come to destroying everything..

When his time in the army was finally coming to a close he began job hunting in Illinois. We thought Bloomington might be a nice place to live since it was midway between our two parents and we were close to both of them. His mother was now a widow who shared a hundred year old family duplex with her sister and my siblings were still all living close to home.

Junction City

 

We bought a little second hand red Toyota sedan, packed up everything we owned into the smallest U-Haul trailer and set out for Kansas, only to arrive and find out there wasn't any place to rent because the army was bringing so many people to Fort Riley that some families were camping at the lake. We went door to door knocking and asking if they had an apartment or room to rent. Finally, late that night we found a man who said he had an apartment he could rent us, but not for a few days. He agreed to put all our stuff in his storage shed if we paid him a month's rent, about $65 I think. That meant we could return the U-Haul, but we still needed to find a place to spend the night. 

We didn't have any camping gear and all the motels were full, so we kept driving east towards Illinois and finally found one room just outside of Manhattan, Kansas. It had four double beds, but the manager said if we promised to only sleep in one of them we could rent it as a single room. We were exhausted and grateful. I remember waking up all night long wondering if he was going to rent those other beds to other people. He didn't. The next morning we drove back to Illinois and stayed with my parents until the apartment was available.

It was an old two story house behind the landlord's house. We went in the back door to the kitchen and the only other rooms were the old dining room which was now our bedroom and a bathroom that had a brown wooden shelf built into the wall for toiletries. The people who shared the house told us where to put things so neither of us could peek into the other's bathroom through the pinholes in that shelving. It was a bare bones apartment with paper curtains over a box closet in the kitchen and all the windows. A bare bulb hung in the middle of the kitchen ceiling. There was an old gas stove that I had to light with a match and an oil stove in the bedroom for heat. I was afraid of lighting matches so my husband gave me a long rod that could hold one match when I lit the stove. One day the match blew out and I didn't turn off the gas while I got another one.  As I lit that match the whole room flashed around me and there was an awful smell. Later when I looked in the mirror my eyebrows looked funny. When I brushed them, they fell off. I had burned them, my eye lashes, and the fringes of my bangs right off!

Our bed was up against some old fashioned pocket doors dividing our apartment from the adjoining one. We did not think about this the first night when we went to bed as a newly married couple in our first home together. The next morning the girl who shared the house with us laughingly told us about all the banging our bed made on their side of their living room door. I was so embarrassed, but most of the couples around us were newlyweds. I remember hanging laundry on the shared clothesline and hearing people making love in their bedrooms around me.

Money was tight and we only had one car which he had to use to get to work very early every morning, so I tried washing clothes in our bathtub. I aso spit shined his uniform dress shoes by using a piece of cotton dipped in water and shoe polish until I could see my face in the shoes. Anything so that the time we had together wasn't spent doing chores. The army had lots of rules and sayings. One of them was, "If the army wanted you to have a wife they would have issued you a wife." That meant mess up and they will require you to move back into the barracks!

I wasn't working so I had lots of time. The girl next door and I became friends and she put some eggs on to boil for tuna salad while we walked to the grocery store to buy a can of tuna. When we came home something smelled terrible before we even opened the door to her apartment. The eggs had boiled dry and exploded all over her wall!

I polished the windows, bought a plastic lamp shade I could screw on over the kitchen light bulb and I cooked. I bought a clear round plastic cake box so I could make a pie and display it on top of the refrigerator like they did in cartoons. Then I made a butterscotch meringue pie like Grandma used to make me and put it in the box. I felt like the perfect homemaker! Imagine my surprise when I went to get it after dinner and discovered the heat from the refrigerator had melted all the meringue. 

I had learned to cook by cooking for our family of six growing up and helping the nursing home cook cook for forty. My husband would come home to a huge plate of pork chops, a bowl brimming over with mashed potatoes, a basket of hot dinner rolls, and a big bowl of vegetables. No one in his family ever ate more than one piece of meat and small portions of other food, but they did eat dessert almost every day. I loved the idea of dessert and made all sorts of things, including caramel dumplings which was a recipe his Scottish grandmother passed down to his dad, who taught me how to make them. Eventually he began bringing home his bachelor friends to share our food.

For entertainment we would play Putt Putt Golf at night or go see movies like Oliver. Sometimes we would go to the NCO club for dinner or dancing, but I always had to dance with friends. Once in a while I just danced with another guy's wife! And then there were places like The Rogues Inn. They sold 3/2 beer because you had to belong to a club to sell real beer and they had live bands singing things like Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay, or I Could Put Time In A Bottle. They also sang homemade songs like "Never let your dingledonger dangle in the dirt" when they drank out of their four foot stein.

We were happy, but we only lived here for about a month. It was a distinctly army town and once when I was downtown alone, a guy called me over to his car to ask directions. When I got there he tried to pull me into his car. Luckily my neighbor's husband saw us and intervened. 

Gas was about twenty eight cents a gallon and we would drive out of our way to save a few cents, but we were actively looking for a new apartment. Eventually we found a place in Manhattan, Kansas and it was time to move.

College?

 

My parents settled me in at my brand new dormitory and as I watched them drive away down the long driveway, I was stunned by the wave of homesickness that completely enveloped me!

Then I met my first roommate who informed me that she came to have fun and if I wasn't happy about that I should probably get a new room. Approximately three weeks later I gave up and transferred to another room on the same floor and we were both relieved None of this helped my homesickness. I went home every single weekend even if it meant getting a ride with someone part of the way and making my parents drive thirty miles to pick me up.

Higgins Hall was built on the ninth hole of a golf course and it was not finished when I moved in. The phones did not work for the first week or so. Neither the cafeteria nor the laundry facilities were up and running so we had to walk to the boy's dorm across a long parking lot for both of those things. 

My resident advisor seemed very old and grown up to me. She was twenty one and she and her brother were both RA's to help pay their way since their parents had been killed in a car accident a few years before. I was seventeen but so immature and so homesick. I alternately sat in her room crying or playing little tricks on her like putting a squishy frozen gargoyle in the bottom of her bed.

I met an English major at English club, but he was Japanese and into Japanese poetry. We tried sitting up in the empty football stadium on school nights and sharing poetry, but it just never jelled. Then my girl friend invited me on a blind date with her and her date. My date was a drama student. He worked part time for the local radio station during basketball games and I loved listening to his shows. Sometimes I even got to accompany him. We would practice his parts for plays in my dorm lounge. Back then no boys could go above the first floor of a girl's dorm. I felt very cool sitting on his lap with the script hidden behind our chair, reading lines. with him.  We were very dramatic!  We had to walk everywhere we went because freshman could not have cars, so when we went to the show we would act out scenes along the way where he was stalking me, or a detective was pursuing me, or once I was a cat, and he was chasing me around the park. Goofy kid things. Very funny and just reeking of a need for attention. He made me much less homesick, but eventually he wanted to seriously make-out and pet. I thought only really bad girls did those things. We ended up breaking up and I was heartsick

My freshman English teacher was a hippie who perched on her desk in old brocaded mini dresses and black holey ripped stockings. She had a boyfriend who had just published what was reportedly the dirtiest textbook around and we had to read it. It was pretty bad. I remember one long poem dedicated to a menstrual spot. She would give us credit for going to sporting events and once a poetry reading that was so bad I crawled out halfway through. 

I also had to take a speech class and I was terrified. I thought I would die before I got up in front of people; but that teacher was amazing, allowing for lots of creativity, which was good. One time I forgot I was supposed to have a visual for a speech that I had not even written. I got up at the last moment with a handful of paper scraps and gave a speech about my pet monkey destroying my visual aids. 

They put me in fifth year French and I was lost. My years of French had been juggled around different schools and different methods, mostly just learning to speak it. Our professor expected us to read Balzac!

Gym was required, but I discovered that if I signed up for specialized classes when I showed up they would inform me that I wasn't eligible and then let me pick the class of my choice. (Otherwise those classes were often closed or full.) I managed to get bowling, golf, fencing and archery before they caught on to me.

That year was more about socialization than anything else I think. I learned to live with other young women and take part in their ceremonies and events instead of just being with my family. We used to have a thing called a Candlelight. Someone would post a note in front of the elevators that said there would be a Candlelight at 7 pm. When we went to the lounge and stood in a big circle our RA would pass a lit candle around the circle while we sang, A Tree In The Meadow. The secret person would blow out the candle when it came to her and announce her good news. Usually that she was pinned or engaged. 

I ate in our cafeteria and gained the freshman twenty plus pounds, eating hot rolls and desserts. I met girls who would iron my curly hair on the ironing board at the end of our wing, because straight hair was the "thing." I shared clothes with other girls and they became my surrogate family. I also learned to do my own laundry and discovered there were pianos in the practice rooms on third floor if I wanted to play.

I spent more time doing almost everything except studying that year and went on academic probation the following year. No one in my family seemed to notice! There were no recriminations about wasting their hard earned money, or advice on what to do next. It felt like it might be true. I was only there to get my MRS. My dreams of some day being an architect or anthropologist just all got lost in the chaos, but I never stopped writing and I never stopped playing the piano.

On May 17, 1968, my friend Mouse invited me to join her and her friends on a blind date with a guy who had a car! Now any car was something in those days. His car, it turned out, was a 1950 Jeep with a 1946 engine. It was dark green and went down the hills of the state park much better than it went up. Going up only the driver got to ride. The rest of us had to get out and push. My date turned out to be the driver. a very good looking guy who was 22 and a graduating senior. We were on what they called a laker, my first drinking party at Lake Argyle State Park. There was an assortment of liquor they placed on a blue blanket along with a carton of fresh strawberries.  The park ranger came by and my date tossed a blanket over our booze. I remember the ranger saying how glad she was to meet students  picnicking and not drinking. I had my first drink that night. I think it was CC (Canadian Club) and coke. Then I had more and more and finally I had to pee, so I went off into the trees, but I got lost trying to find my way back. By that time there were dozens of people partying out there. I stumbled from group to group calling out, "Strawberries! Who has strawberries?" When it was time to go home one of the other guys drove and my date kept throwing up in a bucket in the way back of his Jeep. Every time he did that someone would push the bucket under my nose just in case and finally the smell got to me. I ended the night throwing everything up on the way home.

The next day I called his room on some pretext and left my phone number for him to call back. He called me and asked if I wanted to go see what ducks do in the rain? I thought this was so creative and we began to date. He asked me if I wanted to go on a camp out with him just before graduation, so neophyte that I was, I called my mother and asked her if I could go! She of course said no and I, of course, went anyway. 

I was probably lucky my period started just before that camp out, because while it never occurred to me that he might expect to have sex, he was determined to until he found out I couldn't. Instead we roasted hot dogs and made s'mores. That night I saw his beer opener had a name on it. It said, "Angell." I thought this was hysterical. "You named your beer opener Angel?" I laughed. That was when I discovered it was his name. I was dating an angel, although not the heavenly sort. His  name was spelled with two L's. The next morning I woke with the sun glaring down into my face. I had just spent my first night with a boy and he was leaning over me, backed by that halo of sunlight. The radio was playing,  Angel of the Morning and these were the words he said to me, "You've just complicated my life. I think I might be falling in love with you." I was completely overwhelmed and, I thought, in love.

He graduated and I sat with his parents during the ceremony. He was easy to spot. He was the only guy wearing a mini gown for graduation because he had failed to try it on until it was time to go. Afterwards he drove me home to Taylorville and met my parents. When he went home a week later I went with him to meet the rest of his family. 

One night when he was he was at his house in Dixon, Illinois and I was at my house in Taylorville, I had a terrible dream. I dreamed I was in a church with an upside down cross and he was the priest doing a black mass. He would point at me and I would say one of the ten commandments. "I will not honor my father and my mother, "or "I shall commit adultery." I could hear ominous chanting all around us and I woke up terrified. My dad was working in his office next to my bedroom and I told him about the dream. He said to get a drink of water and go back to sleep on my other side. I did. And I had the same dream again! Maybe that should have been a warning of some kind. But I chalked it up to the fact that he was so active in his Episcopal church. Sometimes, when I was visiting, they would call him at the last minute to be an acolyte for a wedding. In fact, the church had a hidden button that would call him back from the Rec room where he played pool during communion if there were a lot of people. That way he didn't have to just stand there waiting.

When we spent time at his house his cousins said we could use an empty house on the river if we wanted time alone and at first I thought this was awesome. It turned out not to be. He kept pushing himself on me and finally forced me into having sex with him. It was so unlike anything I had ever dreamed of that I didn't know for sure what had happened. It certainly hadn't been making love. I remember saying, "I guess it would have been okay if we'd made love." The shock on his face when he realized I didn't even know we had had sex for the first time was memorable. He continued to push himself on me whenever he came up to the room where I was sleeping in his house and even my threats to call his parents didn't stop him. Of course I was too ashamed to ever call out for help or tell anyone. I think he counted on that.

It was going to be a long distance romance. The Vietnam war was in full swing. Graduating seniors were just waiting to get drafted. He decided to enlist, theoretically it meant he got to choose what he did in the army. My Dad talked him out of being an officer. He said those guys were just cannon fodder. He asked to work in supply and eventually became an E-5 Supply Sergeant.

When he was in basic training at Fort Leonard wood I rented a trailer with another girl who was dating a guy down there and we rode with that guy's entire family down to see them graduate. Their family slept in the trailer. We slept in the car. I remember they were very religious and the whole family would pray when they crossed a bridge, or it began to rain. After all that traveling I only saw him for that one afternoon and there was nowhere to go so we went bowling.

We both agreed that we would date while he was gone. I probably would have been happy not to, but he was insistent. Still, we wrote every single day and once he called me from Vietnam via short wave radio.  The surprise call came through in the middle of the night and we had to talk through someone and say "over" when we finished our sentences. When it was done he said "over and out." Then in August of that year his father died unexpectedly and the Red Cross flew him home for the funeral. I went up and stayed with them while he was home, but he only had three days before he had to fly back.

We planned an April wedding, because that was when he would come home. He took his R and R (Rest and Relaxation) in Australia and had a big fling with some Australian girl. Back in Vietnam he was fixated on the girls who did the laundry or girls he called Donut Dollies.  

During this time I also went back to school and did much better because I was less distracted. Although I did have a few funny escapades now that I felt so worldly (having learned to drink and having had sex?) Once I was at a party where we were all dancing and singing Hava Nigila. They would push someone into the middle of the circle at the end and everyone would dump their beer into that person's glass so they had to chug it. By the end of the night I was seeing two of everything and I assumed my date was even drunker so I refused to ride home with him. I stayed on the couch in the living room and it was funny because when I said goodnight he stood up to undress! I quickly put a stop to that and he fell on the floor in a stupor where I let him sleep.  Another time I was riding through the beautiful snowy Illinois countryside with my friend, Gross Eugene, so named because the first time I saw him he was carrying two big bottles of beer in his arms, one in each of his boots. The new falling snow in the light of the moon was truly breath taking, but then we came to a hill and his car's racing slick tires would not go up it! We had no traction. We went back and tried to go up the other way, but the roads had become too slippery. Finally, in desperation, we pulled into a farmer's driveway and asked him if we could stay until morning when, hopefully, the roads would be better. He said fine. And left us out there in the cold all night long! When morning came we were half frozen when they invited us in for breakfast. His wife made the runniest, most unappealing, flattest fried eggs I had ever seen and served them with yellow tinted water! I was almost afraid to eat, and I didn't drink any of the water, but we thanked her and finally made it out of the country and back to my dorm. The dorm matron grounded me because I hadn't come home the night before.

In those days women had a lot more rules then men in dormitories. We had to be in before ten on week nights, eleven on Sunday and midnight on Saturday. Skirts or dresses were mandatory unless it was ten below zero and a sign was posted in the lounge. Then we could wear slacks under our dresses!

Planning our wedding was awkward. I wanted to be married barefoot in a woodsy setting, carrying daisies. His mother and mine wanted a formal church wedding in the Episcopal church. Then I wanted gray morning coats and gloves and maybe even top hats!

In the end we were married in the Episcopal church with rented tuxedos and a Juliet bridal dress with bishop sleeves and a lovely coronet covered in pearls. I carried white roses and my bridesmaids carried daisies.  They did let me have a cake with white doves on it instead of the traditional bride and groom. We had the reception in the basement of my grandfather's restaurant and left for a honeymoon in The Ozarks.

I'm not sure either of us knew what The Ozarks were, but they were close. we could drive and they sounded nice so that's what we chose. We only had a certain amount of time before he had to report back on post and we didn't have a lot of money. After many hours of him driving and me navigating we discovered we had driven straight through the Ozarks. So we turned around, found a little two bedroom cabin with a blooming cherry blossom tree in front of the kitchen window and began our marriage.My mother had packed a white nightie and robe for me.  My godmother told me to put the nightie under my pillow in case of fire. He gave me a sheer black pornographic outfit every night, which I mostly refused to wear. It was not the most auspicious start. 

At breakfast I made coffee with a coffee pot you set on the stove. I had never seen anything but a percolator, so I kept waiting for it to stop percolating! That coffee was the strongest I ever poured into a cup, but we survived the honeymoon and packed up our wedding gifts to head out for Fort Riley, Kansas.

Taylorville

 

That summer of 1966 we moved to a large old rental in Taylorville, Illinois just before my senior year in high school. I dreamed of going back to live with Barb in Springfield, but leaving the family was unthinkable. It was the only really stable thing in my life.

This is probably why the trip my youngest brother and I took with my uncle's family was not a good idea. I was already feeling a bit fragile and right after our move to Taylorville Henry and I went to Tennessee to help our youngest uncle move his family to West Virginia. He was a mining engineer and he and my aunt had a baby daughter and five year old son. Henry and I had to share a bed with the five year old who was still waking up wet, Then there was the move and new job jitters my uncle had to deal with. It was a chaotic trip. My uncle had envisioned letting me drive part of the way, but I didn't have my license yet, so he drove straight through with two very young children, two teens, an unhappy dachshund and his wife. When we got to West Virginia things were not hunky dory. The house was covered in coal dust. The water was polluted and they had to put a nylon stocking over the shower head to catch worms and bugs that came through. The drinking water was non-existent. We had to take a clean barrel to a mountain spring and fill it up.  People there often thought I was the mother of my cousins and their mother was my niece! She looked so young. In the end my brother and I came home on a very long and harrowing bus ride that tore through the mountains like there was no tomorrow. We ended up at a bus station in Ohio and my parents waited for us to come in at another bus station in Ohio. It took four hours before they realized what was going on and found us. The next week that bus went over the mountain!

My other brother and my sister went with my dad to visit his mother and sister in Texas. They met the pet skunk and St. Bernard there as well as getting to eat Grandmother's fantastic cooking. Their trip was much less traumatic.

My brothers got the third floor bedroom and my sister and I shared a double room separated by a double pocket door that we mostly left open. At night she snored like a buzz saw and set her record player so that it would play and replay the same record all night. Bobby Vinton, singing Blue Velvet, is burned into my brain. She let it play every night. All night long.

I was back in band here and back in French class because they did not teach German. The first few French tests were horrific combobulations of French and German, but my teacher was very understanding. I also took chemistry, which was not my favorite subject. I spent much of my time for this class devising what I thought were clever tricks like making a very large pink spider out of dough and having one of the boys attach it to a piece of fishing tackle in the ceiling grate overhead. He let it dangle slowly down as she lectured until it came into sight. Then our first year chemistry teacher, a tiny blonde glamour girl, flattened herself against the blackboard and screamed like a banshee. I'm surprised we did not get into trouble, but we didn't. I also roasted marshmallows over a Bunsen burner and one day, honestly quite innocently, I poured the chemicals we were using into the sink together in an attempt to clean up quickly. Instead I flooded the school with the smell of rotten eggs. I also accidentally burned the tip off of several flame testers and generally made a nuisance of myself. All of this while my dad was still the Title 3 Science director for Illinois.

I resented having to go to this school my senior year. I felt it was a step in the wrong direction, but I liked band. We had one band for the whole high school and both my sister and I played in it. Boys in band sometimes asked me out thinking I was the sophomore and she was the senior, for some reason. 

When his state job in ended my father considered moving us to Australia where they would pay for our family to come if he would agree to teach for a certain amount of time. I imagined being the kid with the American accent and never seeing my cousins or America again.  I read about dingos and wild fires and I did not want to go. My mother refused to go and in the end Dad did not take that job, but he was not having much luck getting back into teaching high school. They said he was over qualified and too expensive to hire. He was offered one job teaching if he would also coach the football team. That was like asking an owl to teach English while playing hockey with wolverines  As a boy my dad wanted to play violin, but my grandfather said the only way a son of his was playing violin was if he also played baseball. My dad tried, but by the time the ball was in sight of his thick glasses it was always too late to hit it and it often hit him.

Mom went to work for Grandma at the Big House which was now a very popular nursing home with a long waiting list. She became the administrator and loved it. My parents bought two small Datsuns with stick shifts on the floor. They warned us that we had better never have three people in the back seat unless they were three very undersized short people. They gave me the old Dodge my mother had been driving so I could drive myself, my sister and my cousins to school. We called it Shasta because she has to have gas and oil, lots of oil. I would drive to my grandmother's gas station and Forky, the owner would fill my car with gas on grandma's ticket, then put the oil he saved from other cars into Shasta. She had a few other quirks like the push button gear shift whose buttons sometimes pushed straight into the dash. I had a screwdriver and could remove the plate, reposition the buttons and be ready to go in a minute! She also had a poor defrost system, so on rainy days with a car full of kids, everyone except me, the driver, would take turns holding their breath hoping it would keep the windows clear. But I considered her my car and I spent many hours driving around the countryside exploring with my cousin and my sister by my side.

Sometimes my friend, Barb, would come down from Springfield and we would spend the whole afternoon driving around in her car, eating M&Ms and listening to KXOK radio.

I met Greg on a band trip. He was a ginger haired junior in 4H and a member of Future Farmers of America who also played in the band. I remember him defining cows for me. He said, " A bull is a daddy cow. A cow is a mommy cow. A heifer is a young cow that wanted to be a mommy but wasn't yet, and a steer is a boy cow that will never be a daddy." His face got redder and redder as he said these things! His project for 4H was a heifer he named after me! We took care of her all year until one fateful night in late summer when his parents invited me to dinner. There was cherry pie and ice cream and steaks from that heifer! We spent a lot of time together. He taught me to shoot both pistols and rifles and his mother really liked me, but that first day he introduced us he was standing in the doorway at the top of the basement stairs when he said, "Mom, this is Caroline." Immediately realizing his mistake he turned bright red and immediately stepped backwards and fell down the basement steps. He was my date to prom that year.

I played saxophone in the marching band because one cannot march with an oboe. I found the band uniforms and marching in parades and at school games fun, but I remember losing a shoe marching around the football field in the mud at Homecoming. I went to the Homecoming dance with another junior and discovered that in Taylorville, the parents came and sat in the balcony above the gym so they could watch all of us at the dances. Now I realize why parents would want to do that, but back then I considered it pretty voyeuristic. 

I didn't make a lot of friends that year. I mostly wished I was back in Springfield, but I did have one girl friend whose dad ran the pound. She was also a junior. Otherwise I was back to my old habits of reading and writing my thoughts on life as it was and as I wished it was, and I played the piano. I didn't think anyone really heard me, but just recently a man said that he used to walk by my house and listen to me playing.

My dad took me to visit several different colleges, but what I was looking for was the college most likely to have my friends from Springfield. In the end I got a teacher's scholarship to Western Illinois University in Macomb and that was where I went.

The summer following senior year was spent working in the laundry at the nursing home, or helping the cook there do odd jobs. My mother shopped for all the things she thought I might need when I went away to college and many of them were bought with green stamps. WIU was on the quarter system then and my parents dropped me off  at my new dorm right after Labor Day,