Happy New Year

A couple of days after New Year of 1980 began the house had gotten nice and quiet.  The in-laws had headed home to Oklahoma, hubby Dennis was back at work after two weeks off, whirlwind Wes was back at school and Wally and I had the house to ourselves.  Time to take the tree down and enjoy the peace and quiet. 

The dismantling of the tree was interrupted by the phone ringing in a strange manner. There were two short rings, silence, then two more short rings. I answered it to have a lady say Happy New Year, Donna. She then went on to give me her name and welcome me to my new answering service. What answering service was my question?  After laughing she explained to me that their services had been paid for by someone for three months.  I was given a phone number that I could give to clients instead of my home number and they would answer the phone and take messages when I was not available.

They would answer the phone, say I was currently out of the office and take a number for me to call back.  I could call in at any time to pick up messages and return the calls when it was convenient for me. I have to say this all sounded pretty cool to me.  No more calls during dinner or wondering if I had any calls when I was not home. The last thing she told me was that I did have one message and that I was to call Barney.
Well, that answered the question of who had purchased this service for me.

There is something pretty special when you call someone and they proclaim it had been nineteen days, sixteen hours and thirty-three minutes since they last talked to you. I hadn't calculated it out but that was the longest we had gone without at least chatting on the phone since I had moved to Kansas City.  It was nice to hear his voice and I asked him why he purchased the answering service for me.  He said since I was going to become the most famous Interior Designer in town people needed to be able to get in touch with me.  I laughed and he said not to laugh as he was spreading the word all over town. I tried to protest but he just told me to meet him for lunch on Thursday and we would talk about it.

Wally and I spent quite a bit a time at the wholesale place that week.  While I looked at fabric samples Wally got to be played with by everyone in the building and got to eat ice cream bars in the break room. We also managed to get in an afternoon of roller skating.  At five years of age Wally was getting to be a pretty good little skater and he was really fun to take places.  

I have to admit that there were several times in the nineteen days, sixteen hours and thirty-three minutes when I had the thought that maybe I should just stop seeing Barney.  I could make it sound so easy in my mind by just telling myself I would not call him and if he called me I would just be busy all the time.  After all, we were not having an affair, we were not making any plans of being together, we were just friends. I may have even believed I could just stop seeing him until the answering service or until he could tell me how long it had been since we had talked to each other or until I heard his voice.

Lisa called that evening to tell me they had moved everything into the house.  She said it was a mess but asked if I could come by on Saturday morning to look at everything and to meet her husband, Jim.  I agreed to meet them on Saturday morning as I was quite anxious not only to meet Jim but also to try to understand his collections and the strange designations for all the rooms. This was going to be interesting and I was getting excited for Saturday to arrive.

Naturally on Thursday I woke up to a very beautiful snowfall.  Luckily Wally's church school was open so I dropped him off and went to the Plaza to meet Barney. Ever since I had moved to Kansas City I had thought the Country Club Plaza Shopping Area was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. With a layer of new fallen snow on the tile roofs it was really special.  Barney was not hard to spot as there were not any other people sitting on the edge of the fountain with a gentle snow falling. Walking up the sidewalk towards him and seeing his smile when saw me made me realize that there was no way I could just stop seeing him. As complicated as our relationship was life would be much worse without him.

He grabbed both my hands gave me a kiss and said that now it was a happy new year.  I had to agree with that and we walked four blocks to the little piano bar/restaurant.  The bartender was glad to see us and referred to us as his favorite customers. Actually we were the only customers at that point which made it a great time for Barney to sit down at the piano.  He had brushed up on Barry Manilow songs over the holidays to avoid Lauren's family visiting from California. We had great time with some of them like Copacabana but some are pretty touching. 
Of course I knew all the words since I owned all of Manilow's albums.

We talked about him purchasing the answering service for me.  I told him he didn't need to do that but he wasn't listening.  He said I needed it since I couldn't answer the phone when I wasn't home and besides he might need to talk to me sometimes.  Never again did he want to go so long without seeing me or talking to me.  He also confessed to giving Jim and Lisa my name and I told him I thought it was a payback for my Gorda routine.  No, was his answer, I was due for a big payback on that one.

I don't remember who threw the first snowball on the way back to the parking lot.  I can imagine that people who might have seen two well dressed, grown adults in a continuous snowball fight for four blocks wondered about us. It was a perfect afternoon and a good start to what was to be a challenging new year.

Christmas Presents Come In Different Ways

I had my doubts about the phone call from a homeowner who insisted I come and look at her house on Christmas Eve.   First of all there was something wrong with me that agreed to meet her in the first place.  Who in their right mind goes out on Christmas Eve to meet a new client?  Do I want to work for someone that demanding?  After I thought about it it had begun to sound like maybe someone was paying me back for a joke I had played on them. 

Driving to the house in the Leawood addition I was trying to remember what the address of the "Gorda" house was.  Could this be the same house and the foreign accent the homeowner had did seem a little fishy. At least I was going to be prepared if it turned out to be a payback.

Arriving at the address I discovered it was not the "Gorda" house but one much larger and rather stunning.  There was a lady standing by her car in the driveway in a beautiful fur coat.  Her name was Lisa, she was in her early thirties and she had come to America from the Philippines.
I began to have the feeling as we toured the house that this was not a joke and also began to realize that Lisa's original question as to how much it would cost to put something on a window was not dumb but the only way she knew how to ask.  

Terror began to sink in as we moved from room to room.  I can honestly say I had never been in a house as huge as that one much less decorated one.  The foyer was as big as a basketball court with a two story ceiling with sky lights. A gently curving stairway and cat walk led to three bedrooms one on side of the upstairs and the Master bedroom on the other.  The dining room was the only room that had any furniture and sitting in it was a mahogany table and chairs that sat sixteen guests. Who has sixteen guests for dinner? The living room and kitchen were as impressive plus there were two other rooms large enough for bedrooms downstairs.

By the time I had measured twenty-two windows the only thing I could think of was that I wanted to run out the door and never answer the phone again. Two things kept rolling through my mind.  One being that I had the impression when Lisa had called and asked how much it would cost to do one window what would her reaction be when hit with the cost of twenty-two.  The second panic-attack realization was that the was that she stated they were purchasing all new furniture.  Walking through the house that day I could not get any feeling for what I thought they would like, colors, patterns or anything.

Most of the little decorating jobs I had done were in houses that clients lived in.  I had gotten pretty good at listening to what they liked or what they had seen plus the decor they already had. It was funny but I had learned to listen very carefully as most clients told me they did not know exactly what they wanted.  Nine times out if ten, if I listened they gave me enough clues that the decisions were easy. Listening to Lisa and making little notes that made no sense as we went from room to room was terribly confusing.  One bedroom was the camera room, one the music room and the basement was the theater.  

The interesting part of the tour of the house was Lisa's tidbits about her and her husband, Jim.  She, a dietitian, and Jim, a plastic surgeon in his forties who had never been married, had only been married a short time. They were currently living in his little two bedroom house with all of his "collections".  Evidently there was so much stuff in the house that there was not very much furniture so they were purchasing a larger home.  That did help explain some of the strange room designations but there were still a lot of unanswered questions.  They were moving in the next week and she wanted me to come back after the New Year and we would talk some more. My hope was that when I could see all their belongings in the home I could get some feel as to what they would like.  That thought was perhaps a little far fetched. Then there was that nagging little thought that Barney was behind all this and I was not real sure I would hear from Lisa again.

Christmas Day came and went, Dennis was off for the week between Christmas and New Year's Day and his parents showed up the day after Christmas for a visit. That week could not have been very memorable since there are no family pictures except that there was more cooking and cleaning than usual.

New Year's Eve usually found me asleep by ten o'clock.  Perhaps there were thoughts about how good or bad the past year was but never any resolutions for the up coming one.  Never in my widest dreams would I have thought that 1980 would be the most exciting, educational and rewarding time while also being the saddest and most devastating.

After Dad's visit and my retirement from the Health Department I thought I would have a less busy life. I had mailed off my application to two area medical schools, was enjoying the fall weather and thought the approaching holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas would pass quietly.  So much for my thinking.

There had been a pretty steady stream of little decorating jobs ever since school started. Most amounted to a pair of drapes here or wallpaper a bathroom there and one or two new construction wallpaper jobs for our builder.  The extra money was nice, Dennis had started travelling some and most of the time five-year old Wally could travel with me. Two things I had not paid attention to was how many people decided the first part of November they wanted to totally redo the house for the holidays or how without advertising how quickly the word of my little business spread. 

Every time the phone rang with a new person wanting drapes or bedding or wallpaper I would ask my self how did this happen?  How come a person who only learned how to do all this stuff because doing  it myself was the only way I could afford it suddenly get over whelmed with requests from other people?  In my widest dreams I never thought of being an interior designer as a career. Real designers have some sort of a degree that includes art and physics believe it or not both of which I was not good at.  Then there is some sort of certification test that I did not care to know anything about.  This was not my career choice.

One beautiful fall day Barney decided it was time for a picnic before the snow started piling up.  Sitting under a tree in the park I was lamenting about the decorating stuff while he was laughing at me.  I told him to stop laughing, that this was serious because I really did not know anything about what I was doing.  He told me to stop and think about it.
Maybe I should look a gift horse in the mouth and welcome it.

First of all he knew I liked having the time to be with Wes and Wally when they were home or had school activities.  He also had noticed that I was not very good at a regular job where I had to show up at a specific time and stay there until the end of the day.  Then he had to point out that the job at the health department had created an emotional wreck of me for three months as I could not leave everyone else's problems at the office. 

He went on to say that if I enjoyed doing it and working for myself maybe I should just stick with it until I heard about medical school.
He said he was laughing at me because I was sitting there acting like I really did not know what I was doing when actually I was one of the best he had ever seen by the looks of his house.  The analysis of my personality kept going and finally ended with him telling me I was the most talented, creative and caring person he had ever met.


Of course I didn't agree with him on all of his points and told him so.  The part I really did not agree with was the talented and creative stuff. When he asked why it was hard to explain but the best I could come up with was a very brief confession that maybe everyone but my Dad had always thought I was pretty stupid or at least made me feel that way.
He wondered if the "everyone" included my husband and I just reminded him that we agreed that subject was off limits.  

Barney also told me about always wanting to work on Wall Street, which he did for three years, only to find out that he didn't really like the regular hours and the pressure.  He quit and came back to Kansas City to start his own business that he did well at besides enjoying everyday of it.  Maybe that day in the park made a big difference in how I looked at a lot of things through the years and it was certainly one I never forgot.

The holidays were a total blur that year.  I do know we did not go anywhere and there is not a picture of Christmas or Thanksgiving.  Perhaps the reason is that my little decorating business was very busy getting everyone else ready for the holidays.  But then maybe I don't remember much about that year as I hated holidays from the time I was really small.  It seemed like I always put on the happy face and trudged my way through all holidays.

Two days before Christmas when I did not want to think or hear about drapes or anything else connected to decorating I got a phone call.  It was a lady with a foreign accent who wanted to know how much it would cost to do one window.  That was a really stupid question and it was difficult not to be really rude and hang up the phone.  I asked what she wanted on the window like drapes or blinds and she didn't know.  She just wanted a price which I told her I couldn't give her without looking at the window. As the conversation went on she wanted me to come and see the house now.  Loosing my patience I told her I was taking the next couple of weeks off but that didn't please her.  So I finally asked where this house was and when she said it was in the newest, most expensive neighborhood in Kansas City I couldn't resist.
I agreed to meet her the next morning even though it was Christmas Eve.

After the excitement wore off about the possibility of decorating a house in the Leawood Addition I had the thought that someone was paying me back for a joke I had played on them. After all wasn't the house my little Gorda was interested in the same neighborhood? Didn't the whole scenario sound as stupid as Gorda wanting to know how many windows a house had?

My appointment that Christmas Eve morning was very interesting.