Linden

 

I was both surprised and tickled to find the condo on Linden for sale. It seemed to have a mini version of those things I loved about my house on Monterey. There was a large pond, or lake, with the condos built up around it like some kind of Swiss village. It was a two story with a balcony off the bedroom looking down at pine trees and the lake. There was a jacuzzi bath tub that was even better than our house, because it was exactly the right size for me and I could fill it up every day if I wanted to.

Downstairs there was a good sized kitchen with a dining area next to it, facing the lake. And the living room had a wood burning fireplace, a smoky mirrored wall opposite two tall windows that flanked the fireplace and a step up to the foyer. The foyer led to an open staircase with a skylight and there was a small sheltered porch directly in front of the door to my garage. It was spacious and private with two bedrooms, a large walk in closet and two large extra closets upstairs. There were two baths with the lower one having a washer and dryer instead of a tub.

The condo fee was only $60 a month, but the monthly fees in the beginning were pretty steep for me. I was working at State Farm, still part of a dream group, and had a new best friend who lived at Ironwood, which wasn't too far away. I put a garage door opener on my garage and stored my bike in there. This condo was right off the Constitution Trail so I rode daily, usually out into the country and back, but sometimes all the way across town to the grocery store, or through downtown Normal.

I joined a divorce support group that taught me a lot about what to do and not do as a recently divorced person and enjoyed this group so much that I continued to go to it for some time. The first winter was hard. I had not worked at a full time job for a long time and I had pneumonia three different times that year. We had a snowfall with so much drifting that my second story windows were halfway blocked and going from my porch to my garage was like going through a hallway of snow taller than my head. And I bought a computer!

My friends from India, who I had known since our boys were playing first year soccer together kind of took me under their wing. She offered me help with weight watchers and he put together my first computer, then showed me how to use it. Soon I added internet to my life and got my first email address so I could communicate with my friend Carol in California. Carol had grown up with my ex. Her dad was the priest at the Episcopal church by his house, but she had kept in touch with me throughout all the years of our marriage. First we used snail mail. Now we emailed and through these emails I learned to navigate the internet.

Carol was a counselor and knowing my ex as well as she did, had a lot of information for me. I actually flew out to California to see her twice and while I was there I got to visit one of My Thots subscribers, Suzanne. Suzanne was a fantastic musician, singing and playing guitar and I will never forget the first day I met her. She played and sang for me in a little garden house on a hill behind her house. Then we cut up apples from her yard to make applesauce and picked blueberries to sweeten it. She had rescued dogs and turtles and it was a magical afternoon. One of her turtles followed me up to the porch at the end of the day and I was enchanted. Carol was the person who recommended books on Narcissism and helped me to understand my crazy marriage. These vacations were the first time I learned to travel on the BART and explore San Francisco and the places near by on my own. When my son, Jim, went out there with me to buy his classical guitar we spent hours at the shop while he played them then picked a different ethnic restaurant for lunch everyday. One day we walked across town, through the park to see a school he was interested in. We ended up off the trail and came across of pond filled with turtles. There were so many turtles sunning there that they were stacked up one on top of another and as we came in they all tumbled into the water. 

I only had one scary experience during these trips and that was the night I rode the BART to hear Latif Bolat perform in Berkley. I got on a bus going the wrong direction and thought the bus driver was throwing me off because I was asking her questions. It turned out she was merely pointing me towards a bus that would take me back the way I needed to go. I went to that concert, met Latif and his wife and walked back through Berkley late at night all by myself to catch a bus to the BART and then walk back to Carol's house. It was quite a night.

Jim got really sick that year. He had tonsillitis and the doctor said they had to come out. We decided he would stay with me during this time and all might have been okay except for the weekend before surgery. He must have gotten into some poison ivy while camping out. It wasn't really noticeable, but the nurse did see it just before they put him out. He just had a patch on his wrist that they decided to put a bandage over and ignore. Unfortunately during his early recovery he must have scratched it and spread it over large parts of his body. The medicine they gave him for pain for his tonsils helped some, but the itching was intense. He spent nearly ten days at my apartment suffering. I gave him my big king size bed so Jenny could stay with him and help him while I was at work. We made jello and soup and did whatever we could but he was miserable.

My first email was with Juno and later AOL. Carol sent me emails by someone who wrote as Eman8tions. I loved reading them and thought it was really just her pen name at the time. I also began talking to people through messaging and enjoyed the anonymous flirting and discussing of so many things. Once in a blue moon I actually went out for coffee or a drink with some of these people; like I did with the guy who loved Hildegard Von Bingen. We met in the lobby of his hotel, both of us carrying our Rumi by Coleman Barks books to recognize each other. None of these meetings amounted to anything, but I loved hearing, "You've got mail!"

One day I did not get an Eman8tion and I was so disappointed that I decided to write back. That was the beginning of My Thots and a new relationship that has lasted to this day. He turned out not to be my friend Carol, but instead a man who was based in St. Louis and a former symphony conductor.

Then I met Pan. Pan and I started out on instant messaging, pretending we were Wendy and Peter having adventures in Neverland. We were two night owls who just had fun connecting online until one night he asked to meet me at Denny's for coffee. Imagine my shock when I walked into Denny's after midnight and met a six foot three, blonde haired, blue eyed, twenty two year old! He didn't seem put off and we talked for hours. Then we went to Miller Park to watch the sun rise. As we walked under the trees he would spontaneously twirl me around like we were dancing, or hold my hand and just start running. It was magical and so sweet. When he said goodbye, as we ran for our cars he raised his hand and called out, "Remember! Second star to the right and straight on to morning." Pan and I saw each other for several months, but his mother's name was the same as mine. She was also my age and he was so much younger, I began to feel a little awkward. Then Eman8tions, who I had started writing to, and actually met, acted jealous and I decided to end it. Pan cried. I was sad too.

Eman8tions was a man seven years older than me who wrote meditations and poetry and played Native American flute. He was hobnobbing around the country visiting the subscribers to his thoughts and finally ended up back in St.Louis living with one of his best friends, a woman and her husband. He was her maid of honor at her wedding. The first time I drove to St.Louis we went to a kite festival at Forest Park. The second time was mother's day and I took my two adult son's with me to meet him at the Butterfly House in Chesterfield. He had another woman with him and I ended up taking us all out for Chinese food after he finished performing. I was already hooked, but so were a lot of other women. Including the woman he was with that day. That was the beginning of a long relationship where I learned things and did things I never expected to be part of. Wherever he performed there would be women madly in love with this sparkling eyed, modern day guru who spoke with such heartfelt words. He also filled in for some religious places when their ministers were out of town and I often went with him. He spoke to the Science of Mind people in Milwaukee and quite often at the local Unitarian church. He officiated at a Wiccan wedding and several other places. We explored different philosophies like the Vedanta Society and a sweat lodge. He made Native American drums and I helped, then we sold them at pow wows or just to people who wanted them. I had birthed my own drum many years ago on a small farm outside Blue Mound, Illinois. That was a very ritualistic and meaningful experience, but working with him was also meaningful in a different way. 

One time we were invited to a psychic fair in Atlanta and drove all the way down there to put on his concert and attend their fancy masked costume ball, but the person in charge evidently did not do enough advertising and they lost money on it. They still paid us with a big check, which promptly bounced when we tried to deposit it. We never did get our money for that, but I did get to meet his mother on the way home. And we also stopped at Bobby's house in North Carolina on that same trip home. We arrived around midnight, put on our costumes for the masked ball and knocked on his door. When Bobby opened it he was greeted by a very large bumble bee complete with antennae and gossamer wings and an angel with real feathered wings! 

We were very active politically, going door to door to make sure people got out to vote and even giving rides to the polls. I remember we ate breakfast with Dennis Kucinich and I used my first mobile phone to make calls from his headquarters. We sat on the floor for hours going through our lists.

When he was on the road and I was alone I would build a fire in my fireplace and burn incense and practice meditating. I even made a doll that looked just like him to sit across from me. It wore a tiny navy blue jogging suit, real tennis shoes and had a brown yarn ponytail. Typical of me it was all or nothing. LOL

In the meantime I still had my dream group. I have always been a very prolific dreamer and I remember some of my dreams as if they were actual experiences. My dreams are so real it is as if I have two lives. I've always wondered if that is a throw back to my Ojibwa great great grandmother. My friend, Tom, was still a big part of my life too. Both in dream group and with my son, Bobby. Being on my own for the first time, I was clueless about things like taxes and ended up having to pay $3000 that first year. I didn't have it, but Tom loaned me the money and I paid him back little by little.

I had my piano, but I wanted to learn to play the flute, so I bought a flute and took lessons. At first I couldn't get a sound out of it! I was used to the oboe or saxophone and blowing over the flute took me a while to learn. Eman8tions was the person who finally taught me how to do that.  At the end of the year I actually played in a recital, but I didn't tell anyone about it. I was so nervous. I'd never played a recital anywhere, so just doing it was enough for me. My teacher accompanied me on one piece and a Russian conductor/pianist accompanied me on another. It was a success and I felt pretty proud. In fact I was kind of sorry I hadn't invited anyone to hear me, but there were a lot of other people there. Mostly parents whose children were learning to play instruments for the first time.

Christmas that year the boys played their guitars, I played my flute and Jim's future wife played the piano while Eman8tions sang carol's.  It was a dream come true for me to have everyone together like that.

The next year on Christmas I moved the big round dining table into the living room by the fire and put the tree up in there. It felt very old fashioned and cozy. Everyone was there, Eman8tions, my boys, Becky and my three tiny granddaughters, Brooke, Tiffany, and Alicia and we opened presents. The following day I cooked a big traditional Christmas dinner for all of us and we waited. We waited and waited, but Becky never showed up. I didn't see or hear from her again for months. It wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened, but it was still a disappointment.

Eman8tions helped me get Jim ready for the Honors program in Austria. Being a musician who had done some traveling Eman8tions helped him pack his classical guitar so it could withstand the trip, Bobby went off to work at Camp Arrowhead Boy's Camp in North Carolina for another year as a camp counselor. I heard Becky was staying at the Mission with the girls and I went over there to see if I could talk to her. It turned out the door was already locked. It was past opening, but as I turned to walk back to my car someone assaulted me, knocked me to the ground and raspy, alcohol tainted breath breathed down on my ear. I don't know what would have happened, but right at the moment a carload of rowdy teenage boys came zooming through the lot, screaming and yelling and whoever was on top of me ran off. Nothing really happened but I was traumatized. I never went back.

My job at State Farm was great when I was assigned to work with some of the career level women in our department. I got to travel and help run seminars for our top agents and do all sorts of wonderful things, but the woman who ran our department was horrible. She would go through our trash and check out any floppy disks to see if they were really useless and she did not train anyone. If you couldn't get trained yourself you would be out of luck. 

She had been told I could do anything and for some reason she just didn't like me. I've never had that problem before or since, but it made my life miserable. She bounced me from one person to another so I was always working for somebody different.  I had several people ask for me back, but she always had excuses for why that couldn't happen. Then she decided to have us all take the Myers Briggs test. Afterwards she called me in and said, "You are a square peg in a round hole and you better just get over it!"  I started looking for a new job. 

She wouldn't let anyone transfer out of her department, so I looked outside of State Farm and stumbled on Novak Flowers on Main St. I had no idea what a job there would be like. I imagined just waltzing in and arranging flowers in vases. I got the job! However I learned their flower arrangers had degrees in some kind of horticulture or design. One even had a masters degree! I worked in the front showroom answering the phone and helping customers. They said there were no benefits and I would start at the minimum wage for six months, but a couple months later they gave me a big increase and when my State Farm Cobra insurance expired, they paid half my health insurance on a private policy! It was a family business and such a great place to work. I loved it there. I learned how to take orders for funerals and weddings and just general flowers. I learned to use the computer to do long distance flowers and in my spare time I plucked the roses and fluffed the carnations! I felt like one of the family. I never learned to make bows though! It became a standing joke that I would wear out my practice ribbon before I ever got a presentable bow, but I knew how to snip the ends of stalks and wrap them in wire for simple vases. I knew how to add a bit of filler and I helped people identify the potted plants in the greenhouse. It was a very fulfilling job. By the time I moved on I knew the name of almost all the plants and flowers.

During this time I got a call that my father had died. My brother's friend, a nurses assistant, had been feeding him breakfast and he simply died right then. No pain. No suffering, but unexpected. He was just a few months short of his 73 rd. birthday, I had asked him what he wanted for Christmas and he said all he wanted was to be with my mother. He died December 26, 2000 and in some ways I was happy for him. He was a man who had started college at barely sixteen and been called one of the most intelligent men the Superintendent of Public Education had ever met when I was a child. The nursing home had nothing to help him stay mentally active or happy and he had no will power left. Eman8tions and Jim played at his funeral and I gave a speech about his life. It was the best I could do. To me he was the greatest man I've ever known.

The condo elected a new board and they decided the snow needed to be scraped off the roof tops that winter. We'd never done this in Illinois and it was a bad idea. They destroyed big parts of the roof, dropped snow down on my deck crushing my furniture and left some apartments with big leaks in their ceilings. Mine was fine but everyone's condo fees went up way over a hundred dollars. My mortgage was reevaluated and went down.

Eman8tions and I were seeing each other regularly by then. My first attempts at using my own charge cards had left me with two large accounts. I wanted to pay them off and I wanted to move closer to him so I wouldn't have to drive so far when he didn't come to my house. I began house hunting in Taylorville, Illinois where my siblings lived. Life was much less expensive there.

I finally rented a small house a block from my brother's ex-wife and on moving day I rented a big moving van and drove it to my condo. Then two of Jim's friends came to help me since he now lived in Seattle. My sister also came, bringing her new boyfriend who turned out to be more of a hindrance than anything. He insisted he knew how to pack everything into the truck and turned what should have been a couple of hours into almost a whole day. It was frustrating because I was paying the boys and they were doing their best in spite of him. Eman8tions helped too, but he had to leave early to get back to St.Louis. My sister's boyfriend drove the van to Taylorville.

Monterey Drive

Building the new house was fun. We found a lot across the street from our old neighborhood on Nicki Drive. We picked a house our builder had already built somewhere else and added three more feet to the width and nine feet of windows to the master bedroom facing the lake. I was able to make almost all the changes I wanted, which included taking the laundry area in the back hallway and turning it into a half bath with a pocket door. That left room to put a laundry room hidden behind our master closet with a built in ironing board and some storage.

Our master bathroom had two sinks and a large jacuzzi tub as well as a tile floor. We used a greenstone rocky colored tile everywhere but the bathrooms and a green tartan carpet throughout the main parts of the house. In the bedrooms we used a beige plush carpet.

The house had three bedrooms, one downstairs was the master with an ensuite and a door to the deck, two were upstairs, one the size of our master and one smaller. There was another bathroom upstairs, and a loft overlooking the living room. The kitchen and living room were one big L shape with white cabinets that were two sided between the kitchen and dining room with glass doors. There was crown molding and a sliding patio door that looked like French doors. We couldn't have the real thing because of the space we needed for our round antique table and my husband's family's antique sideboard with my mother's huge antique gilt mirror above it. This was a family home.

It had a mallard green shingled roof and dark red brick front with our house number embedded in stone next to a dark green door built under a curved stone lintel. Every detail in this house was carefully curated by me. Even the basement had an egress window and the house was built using steel beams so we would have unimpeded room for the pool table. Bobby added stone block steps in the little hill going down to the lake and I planted pink lilies and French lilac bushes around the outside. We had a landscaper put in three big Austrian pines and I thought we would live here forever. The house was big enough for the children to come home to and small enough for retirement.

We had one big Thanksgiving dinner where I came out carrying my signature beautiful bird to a table filled with my children, my sister and her new husband and I planned for one big Christmas dinner to follow in December. I'd spent weeks making Raggedy Ann dolls for my granddaughters. One big one for Brooke and a small one for Tiffany. I made matching clothes for both of them. Our tree was a lovely one, right in the front window, but I got the flu Christmas Eve and my husband soon followed me into the bedroom where we lay moaning while the kids opened gifts without us. Bobby made spaghetti for everyone and on Christmas day we felt better. However nothing was defrosted or cooked for dinner and no restaurants were open, so we had French Toast!

Becky was divorced and had to go back to work, so I babysat the girls and potty trained Brooke using stickers and some cute 101 Dalmatian panties that she really wanted. At first this was fun, dancing under the sprinkler, coloring, and reading stories. Then my dad fell and broke his collar bone. His wife had been an impulsive mistake on his part. She had no interest in helping him at all, so we brought him to our house. We intended to put him in our smaller bedroom upstairs, but halfway up the steps he froze and could go no further. We had to call Jim and Bobby to come help us get him back down and set the bed up in the dining room!

Suddenly I had days spent with the television blaring because my dad was going deaf while I tried to keep my granddaughters from annoying him. It was wonderful and it was horrible trying to juggle the three of them. He would wake up in the morning and my husband helped him get to the bathroom and dress. Then he wanted two pieces of bacon, two eggs, two pieces of toast and coffee made just right. We bought a second hand bicycle cart so we could take the girls on bicycle rides around the neighborhood and  just dealt with all of this for a while.

My dad had no privacy since his bed was in the dining room and it was very hard for him to get around because of the weird way a collar bone cast must be worn. When he needed to go to Springfield to have his hearing aid checked I nearly lost him on the steep ramp into the building. The doctor, himself, actually came out and helped me get him back down. Shortly after that we arranged to take him back to his apartment and his wife. She promised to do better. She didn't. A few months later we got a call from the family. They had put him in a nursing home until his collar bone healed. He was only 72, but he never got out. 

My husband's computer was in the upstairs loft and if he was home he was usually up there. I started writing and began using his computer more. One day I discovered all his messages with other women. One where he tried to arrange for her daughter to get into our son's band. Another full of the kind of sweet talk you make trying to woo a woman. It was a blow. Nothing had changed. We had numerous screaming arguments about all of this and then things settled down.

He seemed to be more receptive and was spending more time with me and our granddaughters. Everything appeared to be in good order. Until the night before his 52nd. birthday. I was trying to make him treats to take to work when he told me he was moving out the next day. He moved out March 6, 1998. Our new house, the proof that he would never leave, wasn't even a year old.

He had already moved most of the clothes in his drawers without me noticing it and he moved into an apartment complex about a mile away. He wouldn't give me the address because he said he was afraid I might do something mean. He also said this time he would pay for an attorney that I picked.

The next morning I called the attorney my friend Tom had told me about when I was in the hospital. She looked exactly like Xena the warrior princess and was part of a good local firm. She told me if he would agree to go to mediation she would do the divorce for a flat fee. 

He called the next day, accusing me of stealing his Jeep windows.  I had no idea what happened to his windows and I could have cared less. I never even drove by his apartment to see what it looked like. He said I'd better get a lawyer now! He was not being kind, but I told him I already had one and what she said. That surprised him. 

He liked the idea of saving money and agreed to go to the mediator the lawyer recommended. He made a list of everything we owned and we took turns picking who got what. Of course he took his family's heirloom sideboard first. That seemed fair since his great great grandfather had made it. He promised it would go to Bobby some day, since Bobby was the only kid who wanted it. 

I'll admit these were hard days for me. Suddenly I was living alone for the first time in all my life. I alternated between riding our stationery bike for hours on end and walking around the neighborhood at night looking at all the houses where families sat together inside and, I assumed, were happy. Our friends and his co-workers came by, or called, to tell me stories of my soon to be ex-husband taking photos of girls in the park and telling them he was scouting for Hollywood models, or lewd photos at the billiard hall where he claimed to be doing advertising photos. Evidently he was fond of   stories about his escapades at work.

I found a good counselor, Feli Sebastian, who helped me navigate all this. When Feli asked me what I wanted from her I had to think. All those years of counseling had never seemed to do a thing, but I needed help. For the first time I knew I was in counseling to change me. I asked her to be my mother and tell me what to do. She told me to get a notebook and write down the first time I did anything new. Then she told me to start looking in the papers for a job I might like. And so we started. I got my first checking account in just my name. I did small things with a big impact and wrote each one down in that notebook. It was the most affirming thing to look at. It showed me what I could do and I still have it.

We finally started mediation at a hundred dollars per hour. It was the best thing I ever did. Our mediator had us fill out seven pages listing every bank account, all our stock, our salaries, every tiny detail of our financial lives. It was easy for me I was a retired preschool teacher. He, it turned out, had secret bank accounts and all sorts of other things I didn't have any idea existed. (This from a man who once refused me enough money to buy bread and toilet paper for our house in between paychecks!) I had spent our marriage scrimping away to dress our children and myself and make our life affordable according to what I was given to work with. After ten sessions with the mediator, a much more educated me made him an offer he totally refused for alimony. We discussed it under her supervision and thank goodness one of the contract rules we had signed on for required us to always be civil and never raise our voices. We divorced September 6, 1998 and the judge commented that he had never seen a couple who seemed less likely to want a divorce. I thought that was interesting.

I ended up getting enough money out of each of his paychecks to live comfortably, if frugally, even if I did not get a job. 

I got a job in Education and Training at State Farm and on the day he got his paycheck and realized how much of it went to me he called my lawyer and screamed at her so loudly that other people in her office could hear him. Then he called me, at work in the same building, and did the same. 

For a while he was very combative, refusing to answer questions or give me any information that I needed in order to file my taxes and do all the things our mediation required me to do. I finally told him if he didn't want to cooperate I would simply not file my taxes the way we agreed. (Which was to his benefit.) He wanted his little chunk of my tax money, so he complied. Money always spoke to him.

We sold our house and I was able to get a mortgage on a lovely condo in Normal. 

Schroeder

 

Our marriage was suffering, our kids were growing up, and we decided we could use a house with a different layout. When we drove by the house on Schroeder it looked like a great neighborhood and when we walked into it for the first time it seemed even better. Looking back I think we were in love with the huge living room window and as we turned around all we saw, in the distant dining room window, was a Japanese maple backed by a gigantic swimming pool. The whole backyard was a swimming pool, complete with water slide and steps on the wide shallow end and a diving board on the smaller deep end. A rose garden surrounded the pool and there was a big screened-in porch off the deck. Inside were five bedrooms, three and a half baths, two family rooms, a formal dining room, formal living room and a sprawling kitchen with a patio door looking out at the pool. There was even a balcony off the master bedroom and a fireplace in the main level family room. It seemed too good to be true and we bought it.

We lived there until both boys graduated from high school and it was a trip. The first thing we noticed right after we moved in was that we would find the front door wide open on many mornings. We began double checking to make sure it was locked the night before and we made sure Becky locked it when she came in late at night. That mystery was never solved. 

One night I was in bed reading when my husband came in and went into our walk in closet to change clothes. He did this because the big patio doors in our bedroom provided a clear view of anyone standing up at night with the light on if the curtains were open and I liked to watch the water shadows on our wall when I went to sleep at night. But I was not sleeping this time. I saw him come in and walk into that closet out of the corner of my eye. I continued to read for a while and he didn't come back out, which finally seemed odd. I yelled at him and asked if he was okay, but he didn't answer. Finally, I got up, went over and opened the doors to the closet. No one was in there! I couldn't believe it. I knew I hadn't seen him come out, so I went downstairs and there he was in the family room. Fully dressed, reading one of his technical magazines. He said he had not come upstairs at all and he thought I must have been dreaming. I know I was not.

There was a small hallway between the front foyer and the back of the house where our kitchen and family rooms were. It had a half bath and that was all. I can't tell you how often someone thought they saw someone standing in the doorway to that hall. Sometimes at night I would see someone in my peripheral vision there too. No matter how hard we tried no one could figure out what was causing this sight. There was just no explanation for it.

We had a lot of vandalism in our pool area from people who had a problem with the previous owner, so we installed outdoor motion lights. We never caught the people who destroyed our mailboxes, or our pool robot cleaner, but we did catch a lot of raccoons and opossums , and, once, a fox, who crawled in under our porch when they came up from the Constitution Trail that ran behind our neighborhood.

Birds, mostly ducks would fly into the dining room window, stunning themselves and sounding like a small bomb had gone off. In the winter ducks liked to fly in and swim in the water that collected in the top of our pool cover. They made a lot of racket as the males chased the females round and round trying to mate.

I was still working part time at Noah's Ark. The boys had part time jobs after school and Becky was working at Hardees, but we had many social events at this home. First of all it was perfect for Bridge nights. It accommodated my Dream Group when it was my turn to host. We even had our shamanic meditation group meet there, because there was room for everyone to lie down and travel and still hear the shamanic drumming.

Jimmy had found his place in high school He was an outstanding student who reveled in the social life available to kids his age. He was on the Valentine court and wrestled varsity. He was in the next to the top band class and that caused many problems. The band teacher wanted him in the top band class and Jim refused. He didn't want to devote that much time to band, which was already pretty time consuming. My husband and I were band parents and traveled everywhere the band went to play or compete and that was a lot of work. It was a class (5A, I think) band. We would carry the timpani around the football field and set it up for a performances, or do whatever needed doing.The head band teacher had bought our house on Nicki Drive and blamed us for problems they had after they moved in. In the end problems with this teacher cost Jim National Honor Society and we took him out of high school and put him into college early to avoid more problems. The school superintendent lived across the street and he sympathized, but could do little more than advise us. We bought Jim a used guitar and he taught himself how to play. A couple months later he qualified for the classical guitar classes at the University and that became one of his majors. He was now a psychology and performance major with a minor in German. He published under his professor in psychology and went to Austria with the Honors program to study for a semester in Vienna because of his music major. 

Bobby finished junior high and began high school.  He also began going places with one of my friends in the dream group. Tom was an ex-chemist and psychologist who went to our church and did an internship at Noah's Ark so he could experience young children. He and Bobby would take long bike rides through the countryside, or go to indoor climbing gyms to practice belaying. They even did some climbing competitions and Tom taught him to drive a stick. Bobby ended up joining our dream group too, because of him.

The basement pool table was a hit with all the kids, but the backyard was the big draw in this house. Everyone loved the pool. When we had our house blessing we invited seventy people to come and join us. Our new priest knocked on the door and asked to be let in. Then he went to each room and blessed it. I've always assumed if there was anything unusual living there, besides us, it probably wasn't evil although that is not why we did this. It was more of a social occasion and reason to show off the house than anything else. The day of the house blessing a big old possum came up and licked the grease off the bottom of our gas grill while our enthralled visitors watched. Pretty typical for this house I would say.

My husband bought me a used white convertible and put a new roof on it. It was beautiful and my license plate said, MRS A 2. That was because MRS A was our neighbor's plate! My husband drove it in most of the parades around town, as did hers. White convertibles are very handy for displaying pretty girls. He bought himself a Jeep that he could take apart or put together like a large tinker toy. He liked to take the roof and doors off and drive around the countryside. The kids learned to drive on an old Buick Skylark we bought for cash (and he immediately burned the engine out on it when he forgot to put oil in it, so we had to put a rebuilt engine in it.) We didn't buy them cars. I figured those were things they could purchase when their studying paid off and they wanted to buy something.

Television was something I had carefully controlled the whole time we had children. Instead of just aimlessly watching it, we read books, played family games, rode bicycles, or participated in local events. When they graduated from high school, we bought each of them a television.

Becky was dating now. She was twenty two years old and working. We took half her pay and put it in a savings account for her in lieu of rent. Over time I noticed she seemed to be getting heavier, but she insisted she could not possibly be pregnant until I finally insisted she see my gynecologist. She caught the chicken pox right after that and I gave her some crystals and taught her how to focus on them to help with the itching. She had some false labor pains, but used the crystals to work through them. Then one night Bobby woke me up and said Becky was sick. 

She was wearing long harem pajamas with elastic around the ankles and I'm glad I told her to throw on some clothes while I called the doctor and her dad started the car. We drove up to the corner across the street from her elementary school when she stood up and exclaimed, "Mom! The baby slipped out!"

I looked back and there was the baby swinging from its umbilical cord through the leg of her shorts! I don't remember how I got to the back seat, but I scooped up that tiny baby and it was barely bigger than my hand! It was silent and I knew you couldn't spank a baby that small. I tipped her forward and used two fingers to rub her back while saying, "Brooke Michelle You breathe for Grandma!" And to my great relief she began to mew. She sounded like a little kitten, but she was alive and, I hoped, well. Then I said, "Welcome to the world Brooke Michelle. I am your grandma."

We arrived at the hospital minutes later and they carried her in on Becky's stomach, leaving my husband to park the car and me to find a place to wash my hands. I remember opening the bathroom door in the waiting room and a big man was in there peeing. It felt as surreal as the rest of the night. The Peoria hospital sent an ambulance straight down with lung surfactant and they transferred Brooke to the intensive care nursery at St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria. Brooke is now Social Worker!

This was just the beginning of a very long and very rocky relationship with Becky, the baby's father and his family. Becky, even though in her twenties, was still pretty immature and she was very possessive about the baby. She would only allow us to see her if she was with us, but she lost interest in sitting there quite soon. It was several months before Brooke could go home and even then premature baby clothes were too big for her. Becky moved in with the father and thus began many years of on again, off again relationships with our own daughter. She had another premature baby (Tiffany) with the same man and we learned about it through a friend.. We saw her babies when it suited her or she needed us. She remarried when both Brooke and Tiffany were under three and one day I went to visit only to find her in bed with the baby and the older two eating peanut butter out of a jar in the living room. That marriage disintegrated too, mostly because Becky still had needs that mature men couldn't deal with. She delivered a son conceived when her ex-husband raped her just before she married her second husband. They put that baby up for adoption. Her second marriage produced another girl, Alicia whose father got custody of her when they divorced.

The best thing about her son's adoption was that Jim, who was adopted, was old enough to understand what was happening and be part of it. He watched her go through counseling and helped us make a book for the baby about her childhood. He watched us decide which of the prospective parents might be a good match and he was there when we handed the new baby to his new adoptive parents. Ironically they wanted to keep a name Becky had given him as well as using one of their own, so he ended up being named the same as Jim. James William was adopted in an open adoption and they kept in touch with Becky through Babyfold until she lost touch with them and never really reconnected.

Life was never straightforward and easy on Schroeder. Our old church hired a man who lied about being a priest and we changed churches. We loved our new minister and I began printing a church newsletter that came out once a month. I stopped teaching Sunday school and attended the adult Sunday school. Jim was the first child confirmed by the new Bishop and our priest, John, the one who blessed our house, took him out for burritos the Saturday before. Jim always told people all you had to do to join the Episcopal church was eat a burrito as big as your head! (That was the way that restaurant advertised.) The Bishop loved telling people his first confirmand was an angel. That was close to the time when both boys began digging in their heels and not wanting to go to church anymore, so it was a little embarrassing when the bishop came to visit and in front of the whole church said, "My first confirmation was an angel! Is he here now?" He was not.

In the summers I went on retreat for several days with my friend Sheila to the Benedictine Monastery (not called a convent although they were all nuns) One time I felt homesick and called my husband, but it annoyed him. I learned why later.

On Jim's eighteenth birthday we went to Red Lobster and when we came home my husband told me he would be serving me with divorce papers the next day. He said he would keep the house and I could move out and get a better job so I could pay him child support for Bobby. I was in shock. He had moved out without warning once before, but I thought things were better now.

The next day was our big Fall parent meeting at Noah's Ark and I was scheduled to read Leo the Late Bloomer, like I always did, to an auditorium full of parents that night. I got up, showered, dressed up and filled a cooler with Diet Coke. Then I wrote a letter to Bobby, our only child still at home, telling him how much I loved him and laid it on his bed. I took the book I was reading and took a Xanax. I was so nervous. I just wanted to be calm enough to get through the meeting then I planned to drive out to the country, take the rest of the bottle and read until I fell asleep. Hopefully never to wake up.

While waiting to go into preschool, I still felt so nervous I took another Xanax and then another. I was so worked up they didn't seem to be doing any good, so I took more. Finally it was time to go inside for the meeting. I got out of the car and found myself tipping towards the stone wall of the church, ripping the should of my dress! One of my co-teachers saw me and I have no memory of walking down the stairs to my classroom. I vaguely remember sitting in the big rocking chair as Janice got ready for the meeting. It turned out she had also called Tom, the psychologist friend who was in my Dream group and like a second father to Bobby. Tom was out of town, but his wife came and picked me up. I thought I was being very chipper and normal as she drove me to the emergency room where they had me drink a glass of charcoal. 

I woke up in a huge, empty room the next morning.  All that was in there was my bed and a bathroom that had little teeny tiny towels with a camera on the ceiling. A nurse told me to shower and get dressed, then she took me to a room where they gave me my dress and a thread and needle and told me to repair the rip in my dress. I was in the psych ward! 

Most of the other patients were older teens or young adults, but there was one sad man who was bipolar. Every day the nurse would come in and ask if I wanted to hurt myself and of course I said no. (Lying at first, of course.) Then she would unlock the little locker with my deodorant and toothbrush in it and let me shower. After that breakfast came to my room on a tray and then we had a day interspersed with art therapy, drug classes, group therapy and free time when I either played the piano or played ping pong with one of the boys. I had guests around noon and my friends came bringing books about St. Therese who did simple things with great love, or books on divorce. Tom's wife sent him with the name of her old divorce attorney, and Tom kept me up to date on how Bobby was doing. He made a special effort to be with him during all this. 

I met my psychiatrist who treated me like an intelligent mature adult and had some concrete suggestions for how to support myself if I got divorced. My friend, Sheila, brought me a gigantic pink and white teddy bear who took up half my twin bed, but who I slept with every night. I was there for two weeks and then the night before I was to go home Becky went over to our house and found her father upstairs filming a woman in our bed! He told her he was just interviewing her to be a maid, but Becky called me crying. 

They made me stay another week after that.

When I went home Sheila's husband went in first and walked through our house to make sure nothing strange was going on. That night my husband came home from work and told me he was so moved by me wanting to kill myself that he had cancelled the divorce. To prove his love he bought a new mattress for our bed, one no other woman had slept on, and promised to build me the house of my dreams. He actually said this should prove he loved me, because I knew how much he loved money and he would never waste it on something like a house if he didn't mean it. 

I should have known better. We had been to many counselors in the past and nothing had ever changed, but I wanted to believe him, so we began to think about building our own house. 

I found out much later that it may have only been that he discovered his divorce attorney was known for draining every last cent from his clients, often leaving them with nothing to mediate except how to pay him. My husband may or may not have loved me, but he definitely did love money.

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.