Gorda

I was actually always a little sad when school started in the fall.  As much trouble as it was at times to have to make plans around Wes and Wally I really did enjoy the summer days when I didn't have to get Wes up and off to school.  Then when school was out for the day making sure I got home or there was someone for Wes to stay with. I guess I really liked the lazy days of summer if you could call mine that.

Probably living in the neighborhood we lived in with mainly young families all close to the same age with plenty of children made a big difference. A lot of that summer was spent taking a couple of car loads of children to the zoo, tours of the Royals stadium, the local pool, the art museum and any other place that we could find to entertain them.  When there didn't seem to be any particular place to go some one's front yard would be filled with bikes and the lucky house filled with children.

There were no children's television programming past nine o'clock in the morning, no cable networks, no computer games and Wes and Wally's childhood was much like mine in that how much fun you had depended on how creative you were in finding things to do.  A lot of my original decorating work was in the neighborhood so it was easy to take Wally with me and Wes would always show up with friends to visit especially in the new construction wallpaper work.  I may not have realized all the time back then but I really had the best of the stay-at-home Mom and the sort-of-working Mom worlds.

After school started it was time for me to show up at the Johnson County Health Department.  At first it was two afternoons a week but jumped to three afternoons very quickly.  As a Family Planning Counselor I did pregnancy testing and birth control counseling.  I had spent quite a bit of time during the summer hanging out there and watching the nurses and my boss, Frances, in their jobs and learning as much as I could. I had learned a lot in my previous volunteer job assisting the doctor doing exams one evening a week but the daytime position was another world.

Being a teenager in the early sixties had taught me a certain set of values and I learned very quickly that growing up in sort of  a middle class family I had sort of missed part of the real world. There were many talks with the young nurses at the clinic about the changing morality of the current teenagers.  I discovered very quickly that not everyone grew up in a nice house with a two parent family. Also that having sex before the age of twenty was the normal thing to do.  I remember them explaining to me that things were actually no different than when I was a teenager but that the age just kept getting younger.
I guess that I assumed that everyone was just like me not knowing that there was a whole other world out there that I knew nothing about. More on this later.

I had only seen Barney once when I delivered the rest of the blinds and drapes for the downstairs of his house in the five weeks between his travels and mine.  There had only been a couple of phone calls and of course the silly one from me from Oklahoma. When he called the day I got home and we made plans for lunch on Thursday. it was going to be fun to catch up on what we had both been doing in all that time. Needless to say I would not go into great detail about the exciting trip to Oklahoma or the misadventures of going to the race in Indy.

I got to our meeting place at the fountain by the County Club Plaza first.  He pulled up in his car and told me to hop in he had an errand to run before lunch.  As we drove through the streets of Kansas City the conversation was about how much we had missed each other.  It was rather difficult for me to embellish the trip to Oklahoma and ended up talking more about drag racing which he did not know much about.  We were so busy talking that I didn't pay much attention to where we were when he stopped at a rather huge empty house.

He told me to come look at the house with him and after I got out of the car he told me he needed me to count the "vindows". We both started laughing and I asked him when he figured out that Gorda was actually me.  He said he wanted to say that he knew right off but that he fell for it hook, line and sinker.  He dashed over to count the windows and waited for Gorda to call him back.  Finally yesterday he called the phone company and told them he had lost a phone number of someone who had called him on the day of the call to see if they could help. Actually he knew Gorda's suggestion to just Dial 9 would not work.  Being as charming as he was in his business persona they told him the call had originated in Warner, Oklahoma and gave him the number.  There was no one else in the world he knew that would call him from Warner, Oklahoma.

The laughter at lunch was so bad that it was difficult to eat.  Barney would try to look stern at me and mumble something about the fact that I was the one that did not learn phonics in school as he had to type all my college papers so I could even pass due to bad spelling.  Of course, I had to remind him that he actually said he remembered Gorda from a seminar.  Or just out of the clear blue he would start laughing and so would I.  At one point he wanted me to promise not ever to do anything like that again.  Of course I had to tell Mr. Barney I vould not do same thing again - maybe just little different, ya?