Cast of Characters

It was amazing how lost I felt the day after the ice show was over.  For six weeks I had done nothing but show things like making the costume, trying to learn how to skate better, going to rehearsals everyday and still trying to run a home and a business. I spent a couple of days letting my blistered feet heal and bemoaning the fact the my showtime was over.

The time came when I needed to call all my clients back that I tried to ignore during the ice show time.  Top of the list was Claire.  Claire lived in my old neighborhood in Farmington.  She had me come and wallpaper her kitchen during all my turmoil with the divorce and my oldest son, Wes, deciding not to speak to me.  Nothing like making a complete fool of yourself crying while you are hanging wallpaper in some total strangers kitchen.

She was super however and told me some things she had gone through when she got a divorce.  She was married now to a very nice guy who was an attorney for Ford Motor Company.  They had two little boys, Jay who was nine and Mark, who was five and was born with Downs Syndrome. She managed to make me feel rather lucky after all she had been through.  We had visited a few times before I moved and during the ice show she called to say they had bought a home in Bloomfield Hills that needed a lot of work.  One of the reasons they decided to move was that Jim, her husband, had ordered a new car that was delivered to their house.  The neighbors instantly became rude to her.

 The new house was built in the 60's and had all the possibilities of being a showplace.  How many houses have a wrapping closet in the upstairs hall or full servants quarters complete with a kitchen in the basement.  It was more than a little mind boggling but I knew it would be fun to do especially because it was Claire and Jim.  Who knows whether it was fate or karma that got us together but for both of us it was the beginning of a friendship rather than just a working experience. As they used to say in the New Neighbors League in Kansas City people don't just pop up on your porch and want to be your friend.
Maybe Claire and I were both in the right place and needed a friend.

Out of curiosity I went to the costume sale at the arena the first week in June.  All the costumes from the show were the property of Ice Company and the director, Ron Basten, sold some of them at the end of each show. He sold ones he knew he would not use again and evidently had some in storage he would pull out to sell. The gold lame' thing with all the beads that I wore was on sale along with the Toy Soldier ones. I had no intention of buying anything but how could I pass them up especially since I had worked so hard on the gold one.

Ron, who had done quite a bit of yelling, was surprised to see me.  When he greeted me by name and told me he was glad to see me I almost fainted.  Maybe he remembered me out of a cast of 134 because I was the worst skater.  The sale was not very busy that day and we sat and talked for a hour or so.  I asked a lot of questions and found out that he had been a US Champion Pairs skater years ago and then skated all over the world with Ice Capades for fifteen years.  That made me realize that the format of Southfield's show was the same as Ice Capades with the kiddie number thrown in for new skaters and lots of parents in attendance. He asked a lot about me and by the time I got ready to go home he asked me if I would be interested in being a costume chairman for next year's show.  I had not even thought about being in the next show but of course I jumped at the chance.

Charles had told me that he would definitely not be interested in doing another skating show.  He did not give me a reason and I did not ask why.  I know he was struggling with the skating part but there was something more than that.  I think Charles was very homophobic.  That was never a subject he and I discussed but I guess it would be difficult to be in a dressing room with twenty some men who were gay.  I am not prejudice in any way but that was just how I was taught.

Actually Charles had a very interesting story.  He was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.  His father disappeared shortly after he was born and it was just Charles and his Mother.  She had a job but it was not enough to really support them.  He remembers coming home from school a few times only to find all their belongs on the street because they were evicted.  He only had two pair of pants, a couple of shirts and one pair of shoes when he was in high school.  So he did not look poor he would wash one pair of pants every night and polish his only pair of shoes. There was never money for movies or anything but if he had a dime he would ride the bus the the Museum of Art and spend the day.

After high school he went to cosmetology school and by the seventies he owned a very successful beauty salon.  He married and had two girls and had a nice home and money to go more places than the art museum although he still went on a pretty regular basis.  Charles was not any taller than I am and had a small frame.  I can imagine because he owned a beauty salon there were those who thought he was gay.

Wally did not like him at first but not liking him had nothing to do with Charles himself.  It was perhaps a fear of someone new coming into our lives.  But I wasn't ready for anyone more than just a friend. So we would see each other at the skating rink, Charles would come over to see Bowser and feed him expensive cheese and he would take Wally and I to dinner.  If Wally was at his Dad's Charles would take me to dinner or to the Museum of Art so I guess we were dating.

When school was out the middle of June I was rather concerned about leaving Wally alone when I had to go to work but a lot of times he would go with me. He learned how to paste and hang wallpaper that summer and we went camping a lot.  Living a mile or so from the Detroit Zoo we spent a lot of time visiting with all the animals.  All in all it was a very nice laid back summer.  That was a good thing as Wally would start middle school in the fall and there a lot of other interesting developments.

Now you see why I titled this the Cast Of Characters.  Wally, Bowser, Charles and Claire.  There will be lots of adventures and fun with this group.

Too Many Eggs in the Basket

The Goats in Spain did not stay mainly on the plain

                   
I don't know how many people have told me that as you go through life you tend to only remember the good parts.  Somehow you are supposed to forget the struggles, the disappointments and all the problems and only remember the happy times.  When school started in the fall of 1977 it seemed like smooth sailing to my graduation from college but there were a lot of stumbling blocks along the way.

By October the Boys and I were settled back into school.  Enrolled in eighteen hours of some really tough classes like pathophysiology, cell biology, zoology and quantitative analysis meant my sleeping time was reduced to three to five hours a night. No problem with that as I had always thought that sleep was a waste of time and going to class everyday was a requirement.  The problem arose when Dennis announced we had to go to Spain in a Ford trip. There was no "not going" because of school and in reality how could someone pass up a trip to Spain for seven days.

The view from our hotel

                                      
                   

Dennis's Mother came down to take care of the boys and off we went to the sun-soaked Costa del Sol.  Too bad it was a tinge off season and the weather was slightly cool and sometimes rainy. There were five hundred people on the trip that Dennis, as a host, had to make sure had a good time.  It was an interesting feat to try to take care of some of these people.  One man from Tulsa filled his suitcase with food as he was afraid to eat anything in Spain while another man brought his wife who was dying of cancer and then there was the assortment of people who were never happy anywhere at any time. Need I say there was never a dull moment.

                   
Actually I had a great time touring Granada, the Alhambra, loved all the Moorish architecture, the Cathedrals and the food.  One day we took the ferry to Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar which was an interesting trip complete with me getting to ride a camel. It was really a fun trip until it came time for us to leave.  Seems like there was a strike at the airport and no planes could take off.  That was a huge problem as we had to vacate the hotel since another group of Ford people were on their way.  

Granada

                                                    

Somehow the tour company came up with an interesting solution.  Four Hundred and ninety-eight people were loaded onto buses and two into an ambulance for a trip across Spain.  There was something very nice about going through the countryside filled with olive orchards and beautiful scenery to the Portuguese border.  The border was a small river that we crossed on a wooden flat-bottomed platform a few people at a time.  Then it was back on more buses and off to Faro, Portugal where we met the Ford group that was just arriving.  We got on their plane only to be taken to Lisbon for twelve hours since the flight crew was out of flying hours.  We finally arrived home after a fourteen hour flight and two days late. The trip was fun, at least for me, not so much for Dennis as usual.  Since I had filled my suitcase with a couple of text books the extra travel time created some study time.

                                                   Touring the Spanish countryside

Christmas came and went.  Wes always hated the artificial tree decorated with red velvet bows and apples.  But in the picture I can't seem to remember if they were amazed at the amount of presents or disappointed. When the semester, hopefully my last, started I found out they were not offering the Botany class I needed to take. My adviser let me take three hours of graduate research instead.  This actually was his master plan to get out of teaching Zoology labs himself and have me do biological research by ripping the sciatic nerves out of live mice resulting in their death. Nice that I had just taken Zoology the semester before so it was fresh in my mind - not so nice killing the little mice.

As if trying to finish my last semester of school wasn't a chore in itself with the extra hours added on from teaching and research the home front got more complicated.  Dennis spent a couple of days in the hospital when his blood pressure went to 240/140, he decided he did not like the 37' Ford he dragged home and traded it for a table saw, another Ford trip popped for the month of June and he found out that he was being transferred to Kansas City.  Even though Dennis thought I could snap my fingers and make everything perfect I had to take one event at a time.

I finished up the semester in great shape.  Somehow I managed a composite average of 3.65 for the fifty-tw0 hours of math and science which was pretty unbelievable to me.  I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Biology and Chemistry.  With all the college classes I had taken at the three previous schools I could have also had a degree in Liberal Arts with only three more hours in art but I just wanted to be done.  Graduation Night was a pretty proud moment and I no longer had to hear how Dennis never thought he would have to put his wife through college.

After graduation I spent two weeks getting the house looking spectacular, put it on the market For Sale By Owner and held an open house on Memorial Day. It was an absolutely beautiful day and I guess people don't have anything to do on that day so we were flooded with lookers all day.  I don't know if it was the smell of the fresh baked cookies in the house or the sparkling pool in the backyard but I had nine people on a list that wanted to purchase the house.  I kept a list just in case a potential buyer backed out or could not qualify.  Remember how a year before I balked at buying a house for $50.000.00?  Well, I sold the eight year old house we paid $20,000.00 for with an added $8,000.00 swimming pool for $45,000.00.  Plus because I sold it myself Ford gave us 10% of the selling price as a bonus for not having to fool with it.  Not too bad.

In between selling the house and the trip to Freeport in the Bahamas it was time to find a place to live in Kansas City. Dennis had been looking since he went to work there the first of June and I had to fly up to see what he had found.  Actually I was ecstatic to be moving.  I was sad to be leaving the pool since we had not even had a full summer to enjoy it but the thought of leaving the Dallas/Fort Worth area and all the unpleasant memories that the area brought to mind was sheer happiness. My Dad had grown up in Kansas, went to the University in Lawrence and worked in downtown Kansas City when he graduated from college in the 1920's. Uncle Tom had grown up there and told me many stories.

The actual looking for a house was a nightmare.  The real estate agent kept driving me by shopping centers in the suburbs and possible schools in areas where they were building new houses. If the economy depended on me spending time at shopping centers it was out of luck and who says the shiny new school is the best.  Dennis was looking for the palace befitting a company junior executive while I was looking for the old house with the flowers and white picket fence. All was becoming pretty bleak and I began to wonder why I was even included in the house hunt.

While sitting in the motel room one day waiting for Dennis or the real estate agent I used the time to read the telephone book.  Reading the telephone book had become a habit of mine in travelling as you can learn a lot about a place and the people who live there.  Just by chance I came across something that took my breathe away and maybe my heart even stopped beating.  Suddenly Kansas City and any old house would do.

Love Is More Than Just A Word

When Barney came outside and said he needed to talk to me after I had sort of forced him to answer a phone call he wanted to ignore I did not have a good feeling. I had been sitting on the steps for what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes.  My mind had been going through what was a near-death-experience where the last six weeks of our relationship was flashing by trying to give me some idea of what I had done wrong. Why did I think it was something bad instead of his grandmother calling to see how he was or a friend wanting to meet up for dinner?

In the six weeks since we met there had only been two days when I did not talk to him or spend time with him.  Nothing was ever said about old boyfriends or girlfriends or that either of us was seeing someone else. The word "love" had not been tossed around between us like people do in their high school years when they love everyone they date.
He didn't even kiss me goodnight until the third date and it was 1965 when nice girl's didn't hop into bed with everyone they dated.  So, just where did I stand since I was hopelessly in love with him.

I followed him inside and sat down on the sofa.  He pulled up a chair and sat in front of me and took both my hands in his and said he was glad I made him answer the phone.  That he had needed to talk to me since our first date but never could come up with a way to start the conversation.  Then he told me the story about Sarah.

He and Sarah had been dating steadily since they were sixteen.  She went to college in St. Louis and he came to Columbia and he had been going to see her every other weekend for the past two years. Last year she quit school, went to work and decided it was time for him to move to St. Louis and they could get married. He had gone to summer school and loaded up on classes each year so that he could graduate and then go after his MBA before he even thought about getting married. Their weekends had turned into arguments and he realized that they both wanted different things out of life and whatever they had in high school had disappeared.  He had taken a few girls out in Columbia but didn't find anyone special until I came along.

At this point I was going to say something but he stopped me and wanted to finish what he needed to tell me.  He apologized for lying to me the first weekend when he sent me the flowers and said he had gone home for the weekend but would pick me up on Sunday at 3:00.  
He actually had gone to St. Louis to see Sarah and it had been another bad weekend with her.  Ever since that first date the only thing he wanted to do was to be with me and that he had worried all the time I was gone for the spring vacation that I would not want to see him when I got back to Columbia. Sarah had been calling and demanding he come to St. Louis but breaking up with her on the phone just did not seem to be the right thing to do.   If I agreed he would go on Saturday to talk to her and end their relationship.

Now it was my time to talk although it was difficult to know what to say.  First of all I told him that I had thought at times there was something going on with him that he had not told me and maybe that was what made me get him to answer the phone.  He did not need my permission to talk to Sarah but that he needed to do what he felt the best about.  There is no easy way to end a relationship especially one as long as they had and in a way I felt sorry for her. He seemed surprised at that but I told him that ever since our first date I had had trouble thinking about anything but him and could not imagine being without him.  I told him I had never been so at ease with anyone, that I felt like I could talk about anything with him and actually be myself.  I asked him if he really thought I would walk away because there had been someone else?  He admitted that he had been worried. Luckily by the time we finish talking it was time for me to get to the dorm by curfew.  It could have been one of those times that it would have been difficult to stay in the "1965 good girl syndrome".

Monday at 4:00 was my hearing by the Hall Council to decide my punishment for the 23 late minutes a month before. I dashed into the dorm at five minutes before 4:00 from class to find Barney sitting in the dorm lobby.  When I asked what he was doing there he said he came to find out what my punishment would be since he was the one who caused the problem. I didn't think I would be kicked out of school but who really knew. When I came out of the hearing smiling he knew it couldn't be bad.  After both of us worrying for a month I ended up having to come in one hour early on the next Saturday night.  Maybe sometimes worrying does pay off.

The rest of the week was busy.  Pam and I decided to room together the next year so we had to go pick out our room in one of the Senior dorms, our on-campus sorority had elections of officers for the next year, I was the director of the Montage television show on Thursday night besides all the usual classes.  Barney and I saw each other everyday and on Friday night we went to see the movie The Americanization of Emily.  That was a real poor choice since it was about a couple who met, fell in love and then parted.  I cried my eyes out which is never a pretty sight. 
Poor Barney was at a total loss over the tears especially since he was going to St. Louis the next day.  It was hard to convince him I was just crying over the movie....or maybe just needed a good cry.

I was not looking forward to Saturday but it got brighter when I arrived back from morning classes.  There were red roses and a card with the magic word neither Barney nor I had spoken.

Bad Days Can Become Good Ones

Did you ever wake up in the morning with a warm glow and snuggle into your pillow remembering how much fun you had the night before?  
For awhile all your thoughts are filled with the dinner, dancing and that first kiss from someone you are beginning to really care about.  Then bam - you realize that everything is a blur after that kiss and you had to ring the doorbell for the dorm mother to let you in.  What was the story your date told the dorm mother for why you were 23 minutes late?  Panic sets in as you wonder if you are going to be expelled from school.

Maybe having to go to Psychology and English class that Saturday morning was a good thing. At least in class there were moments I could listen and not think about an impending disaster.  Walking back to the dorm after class I would tell myself I would call Barney so he could answer some questions then tell myself no, nice girls didn't call boys even in life or death matters.  There was the thought that I would never hear from him again.  It was difficult to even put one foot in front of the other.

Arriving back at the dorm I was met by Mrs. Wells holding flowers.  She was smiling which was a good sign.  She said she imagined the flowers were from my nice young man and that she had signed me in as 23 minutes late.  At some time in the future I would have to go before the dorm council for disciplinary action for my being late.  So I took that as a sign I did not have to go upstairs and pack my suitcases. 

The flowers were 23 yellow daisies with a card that said "Sorry".  How did he know daisies were my favorite?  As I am smiling at the flowers hoping that the "Sorry" meant just that and not "Sorry" I don't want to see you again the phone rang in the hall.  Since everyone else was still in class or off eating lunch I answered it.  Interesting how when I answered the phone and a voice said "Hey - how are you" in a concerned manner and I knew it was him.  The only other question was what was I doing.  Actually I was starving since breakfast would have not gone down well earlier but I just answered that I had just gotten back from class and thanked him for the flowers.  He said he would pick me up in ten minutes.  Yippee!

The best course of action was to meet him in front of the dorm to avoid running into Mrs. Wells again until I knew what story he had whipped up for my being late.  There are a lot of little moments we forget as the years go by but I have never forgotten watching him walk up the sidewalk to meet me.  I think I knew then that being with him felt different and special.  He asked if I was hungry which I was thankful for.  Off we went in that car of his, this time at a reasonable speed, headed for Stephens Lake.  Interesting as there was no food at the lake.

When we got to the lake he opened the truck and pulled out a picnic lunch.  It did not matter that it was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chips, store bought cookies and lemonade.  It was just unbelievably cute of him.  We spent the afternoon talking and laughing.  He was as worried about my being late as I was.  The story he came up with was that we parked out by the football stadium, a good mile or more from the dorm, and the car would not start.  We had to walk back to the dorm which took us a long time.  Somehow I found that to be an exceptionally funny story since he had never kissed me until we arrived back at the dorm that night.  Funny also because even though what ever people do in parked cars was not a forbidden thing at Stephens it was certainly not one girls confessed to.  I told him I wasn't sure a ruined reputation was better than being kicked out of school. 

I had to get back to the dorm by 6:00 as I had made plans with Pam to have dinner and see a movie since he had not filled in my dance card for that night.  He seemed disappointed and I have to admit I was too.  With Spring Break starting the next Wednesday we both had lots of class assignments to get done so he suggested we study together the next day.  Sounded good to me.

The evening with Pam was fun as all the times with her were.  I have to admit that when we met the first day at Stephens I was a little in awe and felt a lot like the country bumpkin as she had grown up in the L.A. area.  She was poised, confident and intelligent but to know her is to love her as she is as good of a person as you can find.  She did her best to keep the rest of us out of trouble and was always there to talk, or help and always the first to laugh at some of the silly antics that went on.

Saturday nights in the dorm were always hilarious.  Cathie would come in from a date with one wild story after the other be it flying all over town on the back of a motorcycle or how she ditched some guy who wouldn't leave her alone.  Erin never had anything good to say about dates she had which is interesting as I think she went out with everyone in Columbia and finally had to resort to soldiers from Fort Leonard Wood.  Sally never had a serious thought in her head and Woodie was totally lost in a fog.  Laughter was the best way to end a day.