Forty years together

Some Memories of our Years Together

Just looking at those bookend numbers: 75-79, makes me think of the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds won two world series during that time: 75 and 76 and then after that, began to dismantle the team with the trading of Tony Perez.

Another tip of the hat is required for the great job done by the Kentucky Wildcats in the 1978 season – National Champions in college basketball. They won the NIT in 1976, got beat by North Carolina in the elite eight in 1977 and lost too early in 1979, but 1978 was a magical season with Kyle Macy, Rick Robey, Mike Phillips, Jack Givens, James Lee, Jay Shidler, Truman Claytor, Lavon Williams, Fred Cowan, Chuck Aleksinas, Scott Courts and Tim Stephens. I know I am leaving out someone, but those were the main guys. They were an offensive machine.

You and I met in the Fall of 1975, after the Reds had won the World Series in 1975 and around the time the Edmund Fitzgerald sank – November 10, 1975; killing all 29 crew members. We would, perhaps appropriately, marry less than two years later on August 6, 1977- the 32 anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I never get tired of that joke. I have never heard your opinion on it, one way or the other, or at least if I have, I do not recall it.

Apparently I had sung at a BSU coffee house in the spring and you remember it, but I did not recall seeing you there, or at least noticing you. My first recollection of seeing you is in the Fall of 1975 when you were standing out front of the BSU and people were sitting around on the steps, the wall or milling about and you were telling some story that was making people laugh. I have always had a weakness for women with a sense of humor, beginning with my dear mother – and ending with you.

You had on overalls with a red and brown plaid shirt and your hair was in pig tails – or it may have been a pony tail, at any rate, your hair was pulled back in front. I suspect you had on those brown and white saddle oxfords you wore – but I am not entirely sure of that. You were funny and met every requirement I had for looks, with your curves, your blondish hair and your darkish skin. I was never turned off by learning you were JR’s sister, the way some of the guys said they were. I think they had trouble with the idea of a female version of JR. It helped that I met you before I really knew him.

We began to see one another more and more, and to talk. I cannot remember many of the details now, but soon after we had begun to hang out together, I went to Phil Ashcraft, whom I had heard had been taking you out, and asked if he thought it was okay for me to take you out. He said, sure, that he and you were high school friends, but he had no control over what you did. I never learned whether he ever had second thoughts about saying yes.

One of the first things we did, I am sure, was to see a movie together. I am not sure what we saw, but it may have been a Billy Jack movie or it may have been Walking Tall, or something like that. We began sitting together at Vespers, we would take walks around campus, and we would watch TV or just talk together, at the BSU. When the choir toured, we would be together on the bus and during practices. I am not sure about you, but I have trouble remembering details from those days.

Most of what I remember is how it felt to be that close to someone, to finally have someone who was always around – in high school I never saw girls I was interested in, other than in classes or the hallways. At college, we could pretty much bet we would run into one another if we went to the BSU. I wonder how many of the married couples that came from the BSU, got their start by just walking down there and running into the same people, ultimately the one they would marry, over and over. This sort of variable-interval schedule of reinforcement is powerful, even addicting. I was learning that in my psychology classes.

I would assume that if we had not had to rely on random meetings, we might not have had the same sort of attraction toward one another. That was a time before we would call people up, unless we had already gotten to know them pretty well. These days, young people who are interested in one another, will likely share cell phone numbers and begin checking in with one another that way. Texting and calling probably has a way of helping you become addicted to the other person too, but there was an unmistakable delight waiting when you walked into those doors at the BSU, looked to the left and there she sat, watching TV or something, the one you were hoping would be there.

There were not that many people who went to the BSU on a regular basis, so the odds of seeing the same people and in particular, that special person, when you went down there, were pretty good. Also, if you did not go down there, you might miss seeing that person and so you did not allow yourself to incur that risk too often. Another fact that played into couples getting together was that there were not a lot of other social options on campus. We were not fraternity types – neither of us drunk alcohol- so it was a way of spending time with compatible people when you were not studying. Also, we all could rely on people at the BSU have been raised in the Baptist church, the way we had. That meant that most conversations started a little further down the track than: what is your religion.

I have no scientific evidence on this, but I suspect marrying someone you went to college with will tend to make you remember your college days more. Furthermore, if you keep in touch with other couples you knew at college who also married and stayed together, you are likely to be even further invested in your college memories. In our case, we have kept in touch with three other couples that we knew in college, as well as a few others from those days. We help one another remember what happened and to maintain an affinity for it.

You drew work study and social security checks during your college days and that helped fund some of my breakfasts with Raleigh. He and I would go to Jerry’s even when you had to go to class. You were my primary means of financial support from that point until 1988, when I got my first real job. So, you kept me afloat from 1976 until 1988. That worked out well for both of us, because you do okay now, sharing my income. We are both fortunate to have had good jobs recently, but it all started with your dad passing and leaving the social-security money and you working and going to school at the same time.

The memories I have of that time are mostly of us walking together on the sidewalks or riding in a car. You did not have a car at school, but I did. We made good use of it. You worked at the library and I frequented it. You played a mean game of foosball and I hated losing, so we played a lot so I could sometimes win. We all wore pants with the legs flared at the bottom. Guys and girls had hair of similar length.

In the choir we sang songs of faith. Some of our group would occasionally express strong emotion at the thought of having hope in Christ. That was nothing new to me. I had grown up around people who were frequently quite taken with the notion of life eternal, sins forgiven, hairs on their heads counted by someone way up in the sky. It’s no wonder people have positive reactions to such messages. Who does not want to feel like they are being watched, being appreciated, selected, chosen? There are too many people on earth and too great of a chance to get lost in the shuffle, to not be enamored of the thought of being special in the eyes of someone important. What could be more special than to be given a crown and a home on a street of gold and who better to afford you those things than God himself? What made it even better, was that young people can relate to the story of the life of Jesus and conveniently, Jesus is also God. I can recall thinking of myself as having the same thoughts and feelings that Jesus must have had when he was growing up and going out into the world, leaving his parents and figuring it all out.

His life was a little different from ours. He was God, the son of God and the brother or something of the other one, the holy spirit. His life story made the Christian faith more accessible for him having lived among us rather than living in the sky as the great dictator behind the clouds, sort of like the wizard of oz. No matter, though, it all dissolves into myth worship and we were no different from the young people who have grown up in a religion, throughout history. We loved the comfort of it all. It gave us something to talk about, to dream about, to fantasize about.

None of us at the BSU were all that religious, though, compared to what I had seen as a young man. None of us would shout or cry and wave our hands in the air. That would have been too much. If that had gone on, eventually people would have stopped going to the BSU. They would have found safer places to be, because if there was anything we all needed more than even salvation and the feeling of importance it brought, it was the knowledge that we were not freaks. Insecurity is a powerful force in the lives of teenagers and young adults. It’s no wonder that many young people commit suicide after being bullied or shamed among their friends. It is sometimes hard to remember how much it mattered to be accepted back then. After a while, you get past that point and finally figure out that you are not going to be accepted by every group and that there are many groups you would be better off not being part of and maybe most importantly, that everyone else in the world is just as secure as you. What you took to be your own private predicament, is actually the human condition.

After we became close and started spending most of our free time together, we began sharing the stories of our lives as children. There is some risk in doing that, since we both felt our stories were inferior to everyone else’s. We both felt that the circumstances into which we were born defined us as people. So, if you start opening up about your humble upbringing, about those things that you consider weird, that no one else went through, you have to trust that the other person will not find it ridiculous or not be turned off by it all and have nothing more to do with you.

You and I were good for each other, in this regard. We had life stories of which we were equally ashamed. You told me of having no bathroom in the house until after your sophomore year in high school and I told you of us having no water for long stretches at a time, using the woods as our bathroom, without even an outhouse.

Those first years together only amounted to two. We met early in the Fall semester of 1975 and married August 6, 1977 and during that two-year period we had several months of estrangement – from around March until July of 1976. I was unfaithful, as you may recall. When we got back together, it was with a renewed passion that for me became intense. I think you felt it too. We were past the bad times and moving on. Maybe what we learned then could be applied now. Our love for one another has a way of coming back stronger than ever.

It was still a time of writing letters when we left school for the summer of 1977 with plans for getting married at the end of the summer, so we did, we wrote numerous letters, which we still have. The ring had been bought and paid for when I worked in a jewelry and gift shop in Beattyville during the winter of 76-77. I had put it on your finger outside Aunt Sylvie’s house at Christmas and you had gone back inside to show everyone what you had just gotten. The wedding plans came together during the spring of 1977.

I had gone to South Carolina to work at the beginning of the summer, but then I quickly figured out that was not going to work and so I came back to Kentucky and did my third summer in the oil fields. You worked that summer too, and together we amassed enough money to pay for a few nights of motel stays in central Kentucky, for our honeymoon. All during the summer, on almost every weekend, I would come home from work on Friday and then get in mom and dad’s Pinto and head to Falmouth for the weekend.

We were both sort of old people at heart. We did not stay up late, we did not drink alcohol and we worked our jobs with dedication. I had great ambition. I wanted to be famous, to be a great writer, to be known by everyone alive and to live on in the memories of the future dead. You could never have cared any less by such nonsense. You wanted to be happy and to make your mother happy. You never had a subversive or rebellious streak. I had already begun to doubt my religion, but yours was still secure.

If a factory had gobbled you up, I can imagine you would have adjusted. If you had not finished college, you would have been happy marrying someone local, like Bobby Angel, Larry Adams or someone like that, and you would have had several kids and lived with your extended family in a different sort of bliss than what we have found with our more nomadic approach to things. Falmouth and Northern Kentucky were never something you were looking to escape. You could have been content staying there for life and not seeing the 43 states, you have now been in.

When we married in 1977, Roger was 35, Bennie was 26 – and helped marry us, and JR was 23. Roger’s boys, who all looked the same to me, ranged in age from eight to 14. We had no way of knowing that in under eight years, Roger would be gone and then by another four years, Lannie too. Also remarkable, is the thought that within four years, we would have a child and be living in Knoxville, Tennessee; never to live in the state of Kentucky again – at least until now.

Roger’s boys painted the Pinto with shoe polish, which did not want to come off, but we took the Malibu and headed to Lexington and the Days Inn. My recollection is that the room cost us $24. We ate at Ponderosa the next day and I think I threw my meal up. I still had major issues with digestion, with a nervous stomach, I suppose. But none of that mattered so much. We were headed far away to the great city of Bardstown, where we were going to do something exotic – see the Stephen Foster story. There, we stayed in another motel, for a similar price.

The next night, which would have been August 8^th, we stayed in Cave City, Kentucky; in the honeymoon suite, which had a canopy bed. The next day, we played putt-putt golf. We headed back to Falmouth for a few days, packed up our stuff and then we made our way to Morehead and Lewis Apartment #9. The first day there, August 16^th, I was washing dishes and listening to the radio when it was announced that Elvis Presley had died. I am not sure people today can appreciate what a shock that was for everyone, then.

We had no air conditioning in our efficiency apartment, so we put the couch mattress on the floor between the front window and the back, so we could have air moving above us at night. It is hard for me to remember now exactly how small that apartment was, but it was our home for the winter of 77-78, through the Fall of 1978. Both of those two winters, 77-78 and 78-79, were particularly cold, long and snowy. We lived the winter of 78-79 with your mother on Straightshoot. We took jobs in Falmouth, you at the health department and me as a social worker where you had worked the summer before, at the department for human resources.

While we were still in Falmouth, in the fall of 1978, I had taken the GRE. My scores came in the mail and we knew the envelope contained them, so I had you open it up and hold them while I guessed my verbal and then my math scores. I started guessing low on each and you kept saying higher, higher, higher. By the time you had told me, 660 and 620, I was elated. I had gotten above 600s on both and in so doing, was virtually guaranteed entrance into the programs I was applying to.

I say you did not care about fame and that you probably thought it was nonsense, but I do not know that for sure. It sounds sexist when I hear myself saying that you did not want as much from life as I did. In fact, you may have wanted more at some point. Maybe you were more realistic than me, or worse – for me, anyway- maybe you gave up the things you wanted so I could have what I wanted. How many women have done that in history? That may be the most rhetorical question, ever.

Once I knew my scores were good enough, I began applying to masters programs. At the time, I was not sure you could go straight into a Ph.D. program, without a masters; and in fact, I might not have been able to do it. Statistics was hard for me at first and I may have been shell shocked by it, had I not gone to a masters program before the Ph.D. program. On the other hand, I could have cut off two years from my graduate studies, had I gone into a Ph.D. program rather than a masters, straight out of undergraduate.

We spent the long, cold, snowy winter of 78-79, living on Straightshoot with your mother. We could not get out in the car several days, at one stretch, the snow was so bad. I read Somerset Maugham’s: Of Human Bondage, that winter, along with a biography of Thomas Jefferson. I read some other things too, I am sure, but I know I read those. The pattern started then and it continues to this day: when I have time away from studying and work, I like to read great works of literature or non-fiction. I have never read for entertainment.

You were a reader then, too, and you still are. During that time, you read actual books and that continued until phones became available to read on, around 2008, for you. Before ten years ago, you were accumulating paperback romance novels or swapping them back to bookstores, such as McKay’s in Knoxville. That passion for reading, as you recall, came from your mother. She was a reader. She liked to let you braid her hair while she read. Seeing her read was probably your inspiration to do the same thing and maybe, also for you desire to work in a library.

So, no doubt you read that winter and no doubt we visited the library in Falmouth, several times. I worked as a census taker – as a quality-control enumerator. I made a score high enough on the test that they made me an inspector of the work of those who were gathering the census data. I checked census work across northern Kentucky, from Buttermilk Pike just below Cincinnati, to Owenton, which was over toward Louisville from Dry Ridge. I was proud to be working on something like the national census. It seemed like important work, although it did not pay much and it was temporary.

You worked at the Health Department in downtown Falmouth, with red-headed Helen and another lady whose name escapes me. They were both characters and you learned a lot from them. They seemed to inspire you to be more independent and assertive. I worked with the people you had worked with the summer before. You basically got me that job. I worked with Julie, Sheila, Judy and Donnie Moneyhon, Lacy - all women. My boss was a man named Delbert Spaulding, but his office was down in Dayton, Kentucky or somewhere like that. He would come out occasionally, to check up on me. I was one of two social workers in Falmouth, in 1979; the other being Nancy King, who was also straight out of college.

You and I both had decent jobs that we could have kept for as long as we wanted them, probably. We had an apartment just a few blocks from our jobs and before too long, if we had stayed there, we probably could have saved up enough to buy a house somewhere in Pendleton County. We bought a life-insurance policy through Woodmen of the World, that we soon cashed in, after we left for Indiana. That policy would be worth a lot, if we still had it.

When we lived in Falmouth, from February until August, of 1979; your mother still lived on Straightshoot. She would not move into downtown Falmouth, until after we had moved to Terre Haute. The house she would move into was right beside the building where I was a social worker. Where I worked, we all had cubicles walled off in one big warehouse type room. If someone came in or called about elder abuse, child abuse, juvenile delinquency, or adoption; they would get either Nancy or me as their case worker.

I was not good at the paperwork part of the job. We had to keep files and that seemed to me the worst part of the job, but some days, that was all I did – work on files. I was out of the office quite a bit, sometimes with Nancy, but more often by myself. If I had to go out in the field, it was usually not the most pleasant experience, since I would be dealing with parents who had abused their children or something like that. I do not recall any successful adoptions, while I was there.

Lacy did not have a college degree, I do not believe, but she was knowledgeable and love letting you know it. Her cubicle was next to mine and she would spend much of her day talking to me in mine. I would mostly listen, self-consciously, not sure exactly what to say in response. She was witty and full of stories. I was just a naïve preacher’s kid who had grown up without a TV. I was not good at small talk, but she was its master. She could talk as small as a grain of mustard seed, to use a biblical simile.

Before we graduated Morehead, finishing our classes in December of 1978 and going through the ceremony in May, 1979; we were youth directors at Central Baptist Church in Maysville, Kentucky; where Charles Hedrick was the pastor. He and his wife had two children, biologically, and one adopted son. Our youth group consisted of young people who were anywhere from seven to 11 years younger than us, which means that by now, they range in ages from 49 to 54. They were well-behaved children and we were well-behaved young adults. That’s about all I remember from our interactions.

Perhaps my most vivid memory was driving back to Morehead from Maysville, for what was apparently a Monday evening event at the church, the night that Kentucky played Duke for the national title in 1978. A cattle truck had turned over on the road and we were stuck there for a long time while they rounded up the cows to load them on another truck and removed the disabled truck from the road. By the time we arrived to our apartment, it was halftime of the game. Kentucky would go on to win, behind Jack Givens’ 41 points. It was a memorable night.

You were just beginning to be a Kentucky fan, but I had been one for around nine years by then. Those who had followed them since their last championship in 1958, must have been even more elated than me, considering the long wait between banners. Prior to 1958, there had been championships in 1948, 1949 and 1951. There was also the undefeated team of 1954, which Rupp refused to take to the tournament, due to violations the NCAA said they had committed. That eleven-season stretch, with four titles, spoiled the Kentucky fan base forever. They came to feel it was their birthright, to win it all. But enough about basketball, back to us. J

By the time we walked through our graduation in 1979, the one after which mom declared her surprise that your diploma was as big as mine, I had already received word that I was admitted into Indiana State’s grad program in experimental psychology; and that I had an assistantship under Wayne K. Aller. He would become an important person in my life, as would Dr. Schnitzer and Dr. Levy; two other professors there. Levy taught me statistics and refused to give me an A instead of a B+, because I had made a D on the first exam. The fact that I made the highest grade in the class, on the final exam, did not make enough difference.

We lived in the Farrington Avenue married student housing, our first year in Terre Haute. After I received a D on that first statistics exam, I would come home to our apartment and go into our second bedroom and study for hours while you watched TV or read, in the other room. You did not know it, but that was just the beginning of your time to sit alone while I studied. Of course, you would not sit entirely alone, after a couple more years, because Stephanie would be with you.

We attended First Southern Baptist Church, of Terre Haute and after a few months of going there, we were found out. They discovered that I was a singer, so I sang sometimes in church and I even sang in a trio with Kim Burke, as I recall. I also was the player/coach for the softball team and we became youth directors, as well. The youth director job brought with it the parsonage, which sat right beside the church. We came to somewhat regret agreeing to take our payment in housing, given that one Saturday morning they woke us up around seven a.m., pounding on the roof, putting new shingles on it. I was expected to help, but as I recall, I did not do so. I cannot remember their reaction to that, but it was probably not good.

We had lots of friends in the church: the Swaffords, Craig and Judy with their two daughters, the oldest of which, Rebecca, was in our youth group. There were the twin Burke’s, Kevin and Kim with their wives: Carolyn and Terry, respectively. The pastor and his wife, were also our friends. There were several others, but their names are not on the tip of my tongue. The pastor’s name was Rondell Stovall, I do remember that. I cannot remember his wife’s name – Luela or something.

One of the couples, whose name is now escaping me (but you later recalled as Bob and Judy Kaisers) had a daughter named Tracy and he worked at the prison. There were also the Morgans, Tom and Nancy, who had come from Knoxville, who told us that when we moved to Knoxville, we would become Vol fans. That never happened, but I can see how they might imagine it would. Another set of friends who had were Ron and Cindy Harris, who moved away to a town south of Terre Haute.

During the year of our youth pastorship, we bought a Volkswagen Rabbit, which turned out to be a lemon, despite its cool, taupe, color. We were so enamored of that car when we first bought it and confident too. We gave our Ventura to mom and dad and they drove it for a few months. Meanwhile, we were learning just how much of a nightmare the Rabbit was, during that same time. It quit running, or would not start back up, a number of times, right in the middle of the street, or after we had parked it somewhere. The problem was the fuel injectors. At one point, we spent around $900 getting them cleaned, money we did not have. We had paid $5400 for it and we wound up selling it before we moved to Knoxville, for $3300. That meant we had lost $3000 on it, during the few months we had it. We got our Ventura back from mom and dad. It had a bad transmission, but you would drive it from Terre Haute to Knoxville, with us putting several cans of transmission fluid in it, before we arrived.

As youth directors at First Southern, we had a few issues that started turning us against the idea of being church youth directors. There was the incident where the boys with the paper route told us they needed to go in their car, to start the paper route, but instead they went to potentially start a family, in their car. We had a meeting of me and parents after that lock-in and that was when I told them that I could not be expected to do with their kids in one night what they had been unable to do in 16 years. That was not the most well received comment I ever made, and there are a lot of candidates.

On another occasion, we took our group to Six Flags over Mid America, in St. Louis; and in a matter of minutes after entering the park, my name was called over the intercom to come to the manager’s area. I went and they had detained two of our boys, for possession of marijuana and they were going to kick them out of the park. We took the boys to the parking lot and left them for the day, while the rest of us enjoyed the park. A few things would have been different if that had happened in today’s climate. Their punishment would have been much more severe, I suspect, than being kicked out of the park; and even if they had just kicked them out, I doubt if we would have left them in the hot parking lot given the threat it posed to their health having no way to get in out of the swelter. What does that say? I suppose our society is less tolerant of drugs these days with harsher punishment, but we are also more likely to frown on adults being abusive to children.

It was in Terre Haute that I got Larry Bird’s autograph at a tire dealer, I hit a bicyclist on the way to work, you turned our car into the side of a pickup truck, I left you at work until way after you had gotten off, and we conceived our one and only child.

We were on our way to school and work on the ISU campus, stopped at an intersection and you said that is Larry Bird in that car. I looked at sure enough, Larry Bird was driving a K-car with one temporary tire on it. We got in behind him and when we got to your work, I let you out and continued following him. I followed him to a tire dealer, parked and got out of my car, walked into the car dealer waiting area and there Larry sat with his back to the door reading a newspaper section that said: “Larry Bird selected first team all-rookie NBA.” I walked up behind him and stuck a piece of note paper in front of him with a pen and said: “Larry, would you sign this?” He took the pen and signed it with his left hand.

One of the first times you let me out in front of the building where I had an assistantship and most of my classes, I walked up the steps away from the car and toward the building and I heard the sound of two cars colliding. You had turned left into the side of a pickup truck. The lady driving the truck also had the last name of McCullough, which served to momentarily confuse the police officer who was working the scene. Dare I say it? In forty-five years of driving, that is the only accident you ever had that was your fault and one of only two, total. I just knocked on my wooden desk.

When we first got there, you took a job as a sales clerk at Zayles Department store. One night you were scheduled to get off work at your usual time of four or five, and I was studying in the library. Instead of coming to get you, I continued studying until way after dark, maybe something like nine o’clock. As we were driving away from Zayles, back toward our apartment on Farrington Avenue, Supertramp’s Take the Long Way Home, was on the radio. You were not amused when I pointed out how ironic it was that the song was playing after what had just happened.

We ate lunch together when we lived and worked in Falmouth and we continued that at Indiana State. We liked hearing the lady working the cafeteria line, say: “Spatia,” which was actually special - she was telling her workmates to prepare a special for us. We tended to get whatever the special was, just to hear her say spatia. Once we left Terre Haute, we would continue eating lunches together and we kept that up in Asheville, NC; and for a while, in Jackson, until you got your job in Covington. So for the first 20, or so, years of our marriage, we ate lunch together and now, for the second 20 years; we have not.

One cold morning, probably not the morning when Terre Haute was -23 degrees and the coldest place in the continental U.S., but cold nonetheless, we were driving to work on those narrow streets when we passed a guy on a bicycle. He was trying to go between our moving car and a parked car and he did not make it. He wobbled between the two vehicles and wound up on the street. I was sort of in a hurry and when I looked back he was getting up and checking to see if his bike was okay. I continued on and we never knew if his bike was okay. He appeared okay, to my quick glance. Something about that episode does not seem right, but then it was not a major impact he had received. He simply bumped against both vehicles and went down. I am not sure if we had stopped, if it would have made any difference. That sounds right, anyway.

We probably watched more TV in Terre Haute than any other place we have lived, more in that part of our marriage, than in any other part. It was before smart phones and PCs, so we did not have those options. For in-home entertainment, a person could listen to the radio, play cassettes or vinyl albums, rent movies or watch TV. We watched Trapper John, MD, The Love Boat, Ten Speed and Brown Shoe, Dallas and Fantasy Island. We would also watch part of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, before we went to bed each night. Each morning we would tend to turn on the Today show, to have on as we got ready for work. We would never do that sort of thing now.

It is hard for me to remember what we ate then. I need you to help with that and maybe you can for another version of this, but I am sure you did all the cooking and I am guessing we ate at home a lot, given how little money we had for eating out. Hamburgers and hotdogs were surely a staple, eaten with potato chips or corn chips. I do recall one recipe I think you had then: taco casserole, which used Nacho-cheese flavored Doritos as the base. You would sprinkle browned hamburger over the Doritos, cheddar cheese, onions and enchilada sauce, as I recall. That was a pretty regular dish we ate.

You would also fix a tuna casserole, using cream of mushroom, cream of chicken and cream of celery soup. I am not sure about all those soups, but I am pretty sure it had cream of celery in it. You used egg noodles and a large can of tuna, as I remember.

I would bet you would fix things in the crockpot to cook all day for us to have when we came home. That would often have been beef stew or chili, I bet. If you cooked vegetable soup, it would have likely had hamburger in it.

At some point you started cooking pork chops or those little pork tenderloins in bar-b-que sauce in the crockpot. It always smelled so good. After a while, I started cooking ribs, making a version of bar-b-que sauce from a recipe you had that involved grape juice, if I am not mistaken.

You also made chicken with sour kraut in the crockpot. You would take chicken breasts and put them in a can or two of kraut. That was a pretty simple recipe and it smelled good too, when we would get home.

I don’t remember when I started making mashed potatoes, but it was definitely not as far back as Terre Haute. It was probably in Asheville, I am guessing, maybe Knoxville, perhaps even as late as Jackson.

When we did eat out, we had the International House of Pancakes just up the street from our apartment on Farrington. I think we would sometimes walk up there, right? During those days, we would eat a lot of Arby’s Roast Beef sandwiches. I think that was before McDonalds starting serving biscuits, but when I worked at McDonalds, they would give me three dollars food allowance and I would get an egg McMuffin, hashbrowns and coffee and a cheese Danish. Or, I would get pancakes and sausage. I don’t think I could get all of that every time, but I would switch it up.

Of course, we both loved Chicken planks from Long Johns, although, I think I would get both planks and fish. That was a favorite when we would go out and eat with your mom.

It's funny to think now, that about the only thing I can remember eating in those days, had to do with meat. We ate vegetables too, I guess, but meat was the main thing and then vegetables were something that got added and those vegetables would be French fries if we ate at a restaurant, not anything with any color.

Speaking of meat, you would also make a chicken casserole. You cooked a lot of casseroles back then, it seems like. You would use cream soups for that too. One vegetable you always liked to boil was cabbage. I think you would put hamburger in it too.

While we lived in Terre Haute, Phil and Denise came over and we went to Six Flags over Mid America, or maybe it was called something else back then, but we went there and then we went to eat at a Chinese restaurant in St. Louis. That was the first time we had Chinese food at a restaurant. I loved the shrimp Rangoon. As I remember, the food came out family style and we all shared the dishes. That was before Benny helped us discover Hot and Sour soup, so we probably had egg drop or wonton. We borrowed $40 from Phil and Denise on that trip, to have enough money to get home on.

We both always liked fried hot dogs. You would split them a little so they would lay out flat in the pan and get brown inside and out. I am sure we did that as far back as Terre Haute. We would even sometimes have those for breakfast, along with eggs. I ate my eggs sunny side up, because I liked to sop up the runny yellow with a biscuit or piece of bread.

A couple of things I would eat that you would not were cornbread and buttermilk and oyster stew. At some point I started making my own cornbread, but probably not in Terre Haute. That seems like more than I would have been able to handle back then. I liked beans and cornbread too, but you never were much on beans, unless it was navy beans. I am making myself hungry, right now. I think I might go out and buy some navy beans and cook them until they split and the broth gets thick and make myself some cornbread to go with them. I could steam a little kale to go with them. Can you imagine how different things were back then? Had kale been invented in 1980?

These days we buy food, clothes, gas for the car, almost without thinking about it. On our most recent trip we paid for the bill of the table beside us, which was twice as much as ours, before you caught it and we had it fixed. That happened because I have a habit of not paying any attention to the bill I am brought at restaurants. In Terre Haute, we were far from that. You worked at Zayles and then at the science library on the ISU campus and I received a tiny stipend as a graduate assistant. We also had student loans, but all those combined were barely enough to allow us to live in married student housing and live in a subsistent fashion. I know we fought over money a lot, but I cannot recall the exact nature of those debates. We were probably just frustrated then by money, the way other things frustrate us now. The amount of anxiety in one’s life seems to stay about the same, only the sources change. I think there is actually science to back up that statement. Distress can be found everywhere, if you are looking for it; as, fortunately, can joy – also, if you search it out.

Another source of stress for us in Terre Haute was that we were away from our family and friends for the first time, too far to visit easily. One way that got solved was that they would come see us, not often, but they came. Even Uncle Ivan, Aunt Sylvie, Jimmy and Veronica, came to see us. They liked the fact that we lived near the Wabash River, which gave everyone an excuse to sing the Wabash Cannonball. Uncle Ivan liked the location of their hotel near the cemetery, for its convenience. He was not the type to be sarcastic about their choice, just interested in the odd juxtaposition of the two things. He and I walked together as we followed the women through stores and he said this is just about the tiringest thing you can get into. That, after all the hard work he had done in his life.

When we lived in Terre Haute, 79-81, your mother would have been 61-63, or close to the age we are now. I guess she seemed older to us, or maybe a better way to say it is that we were yet to acquire sophisticated first-hand knowledge of how the aging process works. Thirty-eight years on now, that little deficiency has been removed. We could both write a long novel on the subject of aging – its surprises, its ironies, its humilities, and, even its benefits.

Terre Haute was a good size city, something similar to Jackson, where we live now. It had a mall, probably started around the same time as the one here – in the mid 70s. According to the two ladies we just met waiting for a horse carriage on Mackinac Island, Honey Creek Square, that mall in Terre Haute, is still there and going strong.

They had a buffet restaurant where the food passed by you on a conveyor belt. The belt would go back into a curtained-off area and when that section of it returned to your area, it would sometimes have new food items on it, or at least the dishes had been replenished with the same food items. We thought that was something else. I think it might have been called the Grand Buffet. I do not believe it lasted too long. Also, back then, they referred to such buffets as smorgasbords, which is presumably a Swedish term, but that has now disappeared. We proud Americans do not need to stoop to using a foreign term. We are just fine with the term buffet. [Leave it to the French to come up with a term that is irreducible, untranslatable, even in the Good Ole USA.]

Our church was progressive, although I did not think of it that way then. In fact, there was no such thing, in my mind at least, as a progressive or conservative church, because churches had nothing to do with politics then. That was about to change in a tremendous way, given the rise of the Moral Majority and the Reagan plan for America.

Our pastor liked to preach on tithing, but he was also big on things like the beatitudes, stewardship, taking care of the poor and not be indifferent to the suffering of our fellow man; so, certainly he was on the progressive side, before a line was drawn. Now, he would be a liberal. He would be out of favor with the vast majority of Christians, who have moved far away from that message and closer to a message that Jesus himself would not recognize as having anything to do with what he talked about.

One afternoon, while we lived in Terre Haute, it came on the news that Reagan had been shot getting into a limousine. One of the people with him, was severely injured – Jim Brady – a severe head injury, but Reagan wound up being okay. I walked home with a group of the other graduate students - for some reason I walked that day - and I can recall us talking about the incident and I do not recall being particularly pleased that it had happened and being sort of sad even though I disagreed with him on everything. I was not a fan of Reagan, but I had not yet gotten so strong in my opposition to the conservative movement. I do not believe any of us thought they would actually try to do the things they said they would do, such as take away welfare for the poor, social security for the elderly or bargaining rights for workers. Boy, was I in for a rude awakening. Not only would they do these things, but they would seek to give the government over to the religious right, as opposed to keeping separation of church and state as our forebears had envisioned. Those were heady days, when we took that severe turn to the right as a nation and we have not stopped turning.

We ate in Terre Haute, we entertained family and friends, we studied, we worked jobs, we helped educate children in religion and being good people, and so we did the usual things and one of the most usual of them all is, we made love and on one of those occasions, we produced that greatest joy our lives have known. Think about that. One time, and one time only, when we made love; did we create a new life, and not just any life, but the life that has led us to see all these national parks and to understand what is most important in the world, first hand, not through some politician. Yes, I must confess, I believe in magic, if by magic, you mean new transformative life from a single act, a single moment in time.

In the spring of 1981, we received a notification that we had a certified letter to be picked up at the post office. We did not often go out to eat in the mornings, but that morning we went out to eat breakfast and then we went over to the post office and got our letter. We sort of knew what it was, because the card we had gotten indicated the zip code from which the envelope came, and it was a Knoxville, TN zip code; so we got to the post office early and with great expectation. What a nice ploy – right? For the I/O program to send the letter certified so you had to go pick it up at the post office. They might as well said, in the note, you should probably go out and eat breakfast before you come pick up this letter, because it could be life changing. The response you make to this letter may well set the course for the rest of your lives. The card did not say that, but we did have to make a production of getting it at the post office.

I got it while you sat in the car and I did not open it until I got back to the car. We opened it together and read that not only had I been admitted to the Ph.D. program in I/O Psychology at the University of Tennessee, but that I had been granted a graduate assistantship that would pay a stipend and my entire tuition would be paid for. All we had to do, was decide we wanted to come and then choose among the various options for married student housing.

If I think really hard, I can recall how great I felt at reading that letter and beginning to contemplate the fact that I was, if I chose to be, now going to be studying for my Ph.D. and that if I worked hard enough, was smart enough, was patient enough and so on; that in a few years, I would be known for the rest of my life as Dr. Mike McCullough and that I would, more importantly, get to work with my mind for the rest of my life, instead of having to work with my hands, which literally nauseates me.

I can recall that feeling and I almost have a nostalgia for it. Perhaps I should have appreciated more how few times in a person’s life she or he is going to feel something like that. But I never knew how you felt when we read that letter. I know you were happy for me, but how did you feel for yourself? Were you thinking of what you would have to sacrifice? Were you concerned that you would be moving to yet another place that would take you away from your family and friends? Did you feel like you were being subordinated to me in our marriage and that you would have to wind up giving up your life, in essence, for me to have exactly what I wanted?

If you felt any of that, you never expressed it. You kept it well hidden, if you had any second thoughts. We were jubilant together in that car. We knew, or at least I did, that I would not be entertaining any other offers from schools. That was the one I had wanted the most and even though we had gotten that glorious first phone call from Milton Blood at Georgia Tech, I knew all along that if Knoxville came through, I would be going there. I had first fallen in love with the idea, when I learned that one of my favorite professors, Allen Childs, had gotten his Ph.D. there. He was cool. I wanted some of that coolness for myself. I guess I naively thought that Knoxville was a source of that sort of coolness, that the University was making people wonderful.

You had called the main library at ISU, where I was studying, and had them page me. When I went to the desk, you were on the phone and you said I had gotten a call from Milton Blood at Georgia Tech and that he wanted me to call him back. I drove straight home and called the number he had left and he explained to me how tough and quantitative the program at Georgia Tech was and how challenging it would be. He wanted to know if I had questions and of course one was whether they would be able to give me an assistantship and he said they would be able to after the first year. My heart sunk then, because I knew there was no way we could afford to go unless we had our way paid.

We also had acceptances from Virginia Tech, LSU, and SIU Carbondale; and Virginia Tech even sent us a letter telling us how registration was going to work and welcoming us to the campus, despite my never have agreed to come there.

From the morning of the certified letter, we began talking and dreaming of Knoxville. That appeared to be our new future home. 

Things got a little more complicated a few days later when we learned you were pregnant. We may have paused a moment and thought about what this might mean for our future plans, but I do not recall us dwelling on it for long. We set about trying to figure out how we could make it work. The timing was not good, but then, two wonderful events were headed our way. If we could squeeze through the narrow opening, life on the other side of that next year, would be so much better than the life we had before. That few months in our lives was exhilarating, attention getting, frightening, motivating.

You still had your library job, but my assistantship had ended with the spring semester of 1981. I tried to take two jobs, one at Pizza Inn and the other selling vacuum cleaners, but when the people at Electrolux found out I was working at Pizza Inn, they said I had to choose between the two, so I only worked night day at Pizza Inn and I devoted that summer to selling vacuum cleaners, carpet shampooers and floor buffers. I wound up selling 17 machines. The commission was 35% and machines probably averaged over $400, so I made a little money that summer, but we needed a lot of money.

We tried to save, but we did not make that much more than we needed to live on, plus, we took a loss on the Rabbit we were paying on. We were able to slip out from under the payment by selling it for $3300, but that meant we were in a hole and wound up having to pay the difference to be rid of it. I do not recall exactly how we did that. I suppose we kept making the payments even after we had no car, or maybe we took our student loan money after we got to Knoxville and paid it off. I know a few times, and that was probably one of them, dad co-signed for us to get a loan at Peoples Exchange Bank in Beattyville. We had no family members who were in good enough shape financially, to help us out, but we did have dad’s payment history at the bank.

We took out the most loans we could each year at Knoxville, probably something around $5000. I had a monthly check of $580, I received from my assistantship and we made it until Stephanie was born and you got your job early in 1982, with the Management Development Center.

We put several quarts of transmission fluid in the car on the drive to Knoxville. The Burke brothers had given us a new set of springs as a sort of going-away present, so the car set up really high in the back and it did not seem like it could go much longer. We had given it to mom and dad and then had to take it back, after the Rabbit situation, and now we were trying to make it last a little longer. After we got to Knoxville, we got it over to a transmission repair center and they rebuilt it. But the car had other problems and could not last much longer.

We made friends with another couple, Anthony and Sheila Davis. He had fallen from a barn and broken his back, so he had decided to go to college to get a finance degree. She was staying at home and was excited at the idea of serving as a baby sitter for our little girl. Anthony and Sheila loved to dress her up and take her places and one of those places was the 1982 Worlds Fair. Our arrival in Knoxville coincided with the massive effort to get ready for that next summer’s fair. Before the fair, there were lots of skeptics and after it was over, there were a few people who went to jail and one suicide of a banker who was involved, but during the fair itself, lots of people came to Knoxville and it was fun. The little robots that went around the fair playing music were worth the price of admission and of course the fireworks each night, kept us entertained throughout that summer.

The first year of the Ph.D. program was the toughest. It was entirely possible that I might not make it through that year. I did make it, with a little to spare, but the workload had been extreme – the Kinkos article packets were massive, and we needed that summer to get our breath. You had taken on a new job and I had barely survived the first year of the program, but with the fun days of that summer’s fair, we got a little psychological boost.

Family came down for the fair. Ronnie Glen’s determination to get a Belgium waffle – “I see what I want,” was talked about for years afterwards. We lived in the most happening city in America, that year.

I passed the generals exam in the Fall of 1982. Only around half of the twelve of us passed the exam then, and a few others still had to take it again one or more times. So, in a year and a half, we had learned we were in the program, had learned we were having a child, had begun the program, had the child, survived the first year and then I had passed a huge exam that meant I could continue on in the program and would likely make it, if I could just keep up the heavy workload. You helped see to it that I could, because you were unwavering in your work habits – there was never any doubt that you would have a job, you were well liked and willing to do whatever they asked of you. I may have been reading a lot and taking a lot of hard tests, but your steady resolve, day in and day out, was what kept making it all possible.

Knoxville is 217.3 miles from Dry Ridge, Kentucky and Terre Haute is 281.1 miles from Dry Ridge, so we moved .8 miles closer to the epicenter of your family by moving to Knoxville from Terre Haute, but we moved much closer to Beattyville and Lexington by doing so. Your family beat my family in visiting us in both places, by a long shot. In fact, we have lived away from Kentucky since 1979 and the number of times my sisters have visited us can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Brenda has visited us about as many times as we have visited her in South Carolina, or perhaps even less, but we see her often in Kentucky, usually every Thanksgiving and of course, for every funeral, of which there have been two now.

One of the exotic things about living in Knoxville is that for the first time in either of our lives we rode a public bus to get to work and school. The busses swung through Sutherland Avenue and Golf Range Apartments, and then made their way back down Kingston Pike, turning right in front of the library and dropping us off in the Stokely Management Center Spam-Can/University Center parking lot.

Sutherland Avenue apartments were across Sutherland Avenue from the James Convenience store. We were in that store frequently, or at least I was. I can recall when you walk in, the proprietors, James’s I presume, were friendly in a funny sort of way. One day I heard a customer ask one of them if he had a match and he said: “Yeah, in Hollywood.” They were a rambunctious crew, cutting up with the customers and making it seem an attractive place to visit. You never knew what they might say to you or one of the other customers. And, of course, they had gutbusters, of which I must have bought a thousand or more.

I was buy a small sack of them. I cannot recall if I would buy eight or ten, but I think I paid two dollars for the sack. If there were eight, that would have been a quarter a piece. That sounds about right. They had chili and mustard on them and they were wrapped in wax paper. When Stephanie was old enough to eat real food, she would eat one, you would eat two and I would eat the rest of them.

Also across Sutherland Avenue was a Wonder bakery where we would buy wonder bread that was a few days past its sell-by date, for cheap. We would also buy donuts and other baked things at that store, at a reduced price. For a little while we went to church about a mile up Sutherland Avenue. The church was called something like Mars Hill, or at least some name that had nothing to do with Knoxville or the street, but referred to a place that was thousands of miles away with holy-land significance. We never joined that church, as I recall.

We had discovered a church on the south side of Knoxville called Sevier Heights Baptist Church, which did refer to the place in Knoxville, where it was located. The pastor was David Butler, who was the son of the famous Butler that pastored the famous Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, called: Ninth and O Baptist Church. For a while we took Stephanie to their daycare. She and I would stop at a little restaurant for breakfast a lot of mornings on our way there. As I recall I would get ham and eggs and a biscuit. I think she got pancakes.

One Sunday morning in 1984, during Reagan’s bid for re-election, we were at that church and the pastor had invited a republican politician to speak. He spoke and there were tables set up in the lobby registering people to vote. After a few minutes, I took your hand and you picked up Stephanie and we walked out. I could not stand to sit there any longer listening to them basically demand that people vote for Reagan. Churches are not supposed to do that sort of thing for fear of losing their tax-exempt status, but that church was apparently not afraid.

When we first moved to Knoxville, we had gone to one of the big churches downtown, it might even have not been a Baptist Church, perhaps a Presbyterian. We only went there a few times. We had not quite broken the church habit by that time and so every Sunday morning, we tended to find a church to visit, and we might even have joined a church, maybe Sevier Heights, but after that Sunday in 1984, we seldom attended church again, so we have effectively been out of church for over 33 years or over half our lives.

I think we both sort of felt it was nice to not have to get up early on Sunday, and basically have two Saturdays during the weekend, instead of just one. We probably had a few fights over not going to church, with you on the side of going, but gradually; the habit fell away and we stopped even thinking about it, except for when we would be at one of our two homes on a weekend. Then, we would attend either Pleasant Ridge or dad’s church; and when we did, I would invariably be pressed into singing and perhaps even praying or in some cases, preaching; at dad’s church. One morning, Stephanie and I sang: In the Garden, at dad’s church. She also sang a song by herself, as I recall.

Giving up religion is not something we ever sat down and discussed. It sort of went away gradually, and you never protested all that much. I did not have too many qualms, since my move away from it had begun at Morehead, despite the fact that we went on to be youth directors at two churches after I had begun to have second thoughts about religion.

You worked at the Management Development Center at UTK, a place where you probably had more social life than any other of your career. You had lots of colleagues working with you to make the programs happen, and of course, you had the many hundreds of businessmen coming through, all who were energetic, ambitious and full of life. They brought with them many experiences and stories and the members of your staff were expected to interact with them as much as possible, to show them hospitality. That meant you got to go to a lot of meals at the various restaurants around town, the best ones.

They needed someone to haul alcoholic beverages to the downtown Hilton, so I wound up doing that for years, at $25 a load. I always had someone helping me load and unload, so it was never all that much work and we sure could use the money. In the summer of 1984, I even went through the Institute for Productivity Through Quality, myself. The plaque I received for going through that program was more impressive than the Ph.D. diploma I would get four years later.

Most of the people you worked with at MDC had good personalities or they would not have been working there. Judy was the most countrified of them all, but she may have been the best representative of East Tennessee – and she was irrepressible. CV was more suave and debonair, but equally as charismatic. It seemed to help a person get and keep a job there, if that person enjoyed drinking alcohol and being around others who did.

The professors in I/O Psychology sort of kept their distance from the MDC, to me, giving off the impression that they thought they were too good to participate in something so mundane as to offer insight into how to manage. They were more caught up in the science of it all, although many of them did little in the way of science, either.

The I/O Program was on the fourth floor of Stokely and your center was on the seventh floor, so I spent a good deal of time on the elevator between the two. I would come up pretty much every day and we would go to lunch together. If we were staying on campus – eating at one of the places in the UC, we would sometimes call ahead to the one place that had soups and ask if they had cream of mushroom, which was my favorite.

Sarah and Nancy were the ones we went to lunch with, the most often. Many times after we ate in the UC, we would browse the bookstore before it was time for you to head back up to the seventh floor. We could get money from the ATM in the basement of the UC. I think there was a bank there, but that was not our credit union. The credit union was up the hill a little from the UC.

The main places we ate on campus were the cafeteria, the one just inside where the busses loaded and unloaded and where the little guy sold his newspapers. Then down the hall and back to the left in a corner before you made a right to head up the stairs, there was a restaurant called Smokey’s. It was the one that would have cream of mushroom soup. The other place we would walk to, was up the hill a little – Ramsey’s Cafeteria. When you consider how little money we had, we must have had a strong desire to eat together, for a little treat, to go out to eat almost every day, instead of packing our own, cheaper, lunch.

MDC had a softball team and I played on it, at least one year, but I think two. I think I played the summer before we went to New Jersey and then again the summer after we came back. During one game, I was trying to turn a double play at shortstop and a guy around 6 feet 5 inches tall, ran into me with his hands extended and hit me in the side. It broke one or more of my ribs and I was in a lot of pain for several weeks.

Then and at Morehead, were the only two times in your life that you played any sort of organized softball. I had, notoriously, walked away from the one game I saw you play in at Morehead, when you tried to throw a runner out by pitching the ball high in the air underhanded; so I really did not know how well your tremendous eye-hand coordination translated from Foosball to softball. But I saw there in Knoxville. You would hit the ball no matter where it was pitched, pretty much every time you swung. It never went where you wanted it to or very far, but you almost never swung and missed.

They all liked you and you liked most of the ones you worked with there. You worked there from early in 1982 until we moved in August, 1988 – over six years. Those years, added to your twenty-four or so at DSCC, will give you your thirty and allow you to retire in 2018. The six years you worked in Asheville, were lost for retirement purposes, because we took that money and used it as a down payment on the house we now live in. 

We lived from September, 1981 until August, 1988, in Knoxville, Tennessee. By that time, we had spent fourteen years, minus a few months in the first part of 1979, with both of us and ultimately just me, enrolled in classes. We went an extra semester at Morehead, getting our teaching certificates, you in library science and me in English. The years we were at Terre Haute, really did not apply to the degree in Knoxville. There was no shortening the I/O program. If you had worked on a masters or come straight out of your UG program, the time was the same.

By the time our tenth anniversary came around in 1987, we remained in school – I say we remained in school, since in the well-functioning family, if one of its members is in school, they all are, not that we were all that well-functioning – with no end in sight. Actually, the end was just a year away, just a year away, right? To say we were tired of graduate school at that point, was quite the understatement. By then, I had long since stopped taking classes and I was teaching the required management information systems classes for the UTK college of business. Imagine that. For around two years, all the students who got their degrees in business at UTK, had me as their “professor.” That is a lot of students, because we were on quarters and I also would teach in the summers. I might have taught close to 800 students during that span of time.

Stephanie would not reach the age of entering school, while we were in Knoxville, but by then, she had a good start on her education. She was reading herself, every night I read her to sleep and when we were in the car, most of the time, something geared to inspire and encourage learning in children, was playing.

Our ideals and expectations for Stephanie were high. We wanted her to be a prodigy, to be precocious, but we wanted her to have lots of friends and be popular too, we wanted the world for her. We were naïve on a lot of this, since we had never seen this sort of thing done first hand. To this day, I cannot name mistakes we made. Anyway, whatever mistakes we did make, must not have been too bad, given the person she is now. Just between us, I feel certain she would make a great mother. She has been able to witness, first hand, how one does that.

During those years, we made a lot of trips to Beattyville and Falmouth. The drives gave us time to be together in a way that seldom happened outside the car. There was no TV, and if it were night, there would be no reading. We might listen to Marie Osmond or some other kid’s cassette, but if not, then it would be either silence or us talking, often me talking honestly, putting things into perspective. I grew up taking long drives like that, between South Carolina and Kentucky. I suppose I came to associate fatherhood with driving and delivering little mini sermons to the family.

The sermons I would deliver were the opposite of what my father might have said, but I am sure you would agree they were sermons, nonetheless. Finding the right words can be difficult when the people to whom you are talking are moving around, distracted, or both listening to you and doing any number of other things, but in the car; this tends to not be a problem. The audience must either listen or tell you to stop talking, there is little middle ground.

Stephanie would turn four in December, 1985, after we returned from New Jersey; so she has little to no recollection of having lived there. Honestly, my memory of it is also sketchy. I remember we slept on the floor in the living room for part of the time. The floors were damaged by termites, and the windows to the apartments beside us were just a few feet away. I am sure they heard our arguments as well as we did theirs. We spent of lot time on the front porch, talking to neighbors or just watching cars go up and down the street. You did not work, so you and Steph spent a lot of the hot days, doing whatever young mothers and their daughters do when they have no car in a densely-populated town in New Jersey. You pushed her in the stroller a lot, going to the grocery store, even though I am sure you did not always feel safe. One day she threw up on the sidewalk, probably from a migraine, induced by the heat.

We moved you and she to New Jersey on Easter weekend, spending Easter-eve in a hotel in Roanoke, Virginia. So, it was in that room that the Easter Bunny brought her the loot. You were well prepared for the occasion, despite us being on the road. I am struck by how determined the former versions of us must have been. We believed in what we were doing, that things would be better one day, that we had good reason continue working hard, to pursue opportunities that might be temporarily difficult, in order to get what we wanted later. Now we are living in the days we dreamed ahead to, then.

That was before GPS, so we relied on an Atlas, or on our memories of roads. I knew the route by the time we drove it as a family, since I had been back and forth a few times by then. We went by Roanoke, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Allentown, and into New Jersey. We did not have cellphones so we were not constantly calling or texting people to let them know how it was going. They would find out if they called us later or we called them, but I do not remember much about reporting on our progress to anyone. I suspect you called your mom when we got there and maybe I called my parents, but we may not have done so, maybe we just assumed they knew we were okay, since no one reported to them that we were not.

We were dreaming of a future that would be better for us in terms of money, in terms of education, in terms of quality of life in general. We had no way of knowing that some of the “better” would be due to our efforts and some would come about simply by continuing to live – better TVs, better phones, better navigation systems, more ubiquitous air-conditioning, more reliable vehicles, and much easier ways to commit words to the page – to digitize them, even; which we had no words for then.

Knoxville was a good choice for us, on many levels. It was not that far from both our families, but it was far enough away to excuse us from being there every time something went the least bit wrong. It was also a fun place for people to visit, given how close it was to the Smokey Mountains, Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. I am not sure of all the reasons why, but the state of Tennessee apparently was doing okay financially, then, because they had 12 assistantships available for the I/O program, and Jack Larsen was even able to give me what was called a capitol scholarship a few times, which was not much - $500 or so each time, but he knew we could use every penny we could get.

Your job in the MDC wound up being perfect for us, putting us in the same building, giving me a connection to the MDC that most of the other I/O students did not have, and giving us a built-in social life, given the people you worked with, which we were not having that much of, given how we had dropped out of church around then. The I/O program was one of the best in the country and so close to home.

One thing that has never been all that clear to me, though, is why I/O Psychology? I was well into it before I realized how closely allied with business it was and I was way too naïve to understand what business schools and a degree in business or management, was all about. I had never had a class offered by a college of business and I had never even thought about the fact that such classes existed or speculated on what they might consist of.

I knew nothing of the political divide between academic psychology and academic business, which has only increased since I first entered the I/O program. I only learned of the salary differences between a management professor and a psychology professor, after I was well into the program. I was sheltered from the political divide because my classes were mainly taught by people who had been trained in psychology programs. Any management or business knowledge I received, I got from psychologists; and that was precious little. Yet, I have spent my entire career teaching business students the subject of management, as it would be taught by a person trained in a college of business.

Speaking of benefits that came from the MDC at UTK, the idea for my dissertation came from that Kellogg guy who worked in the MDC. I somehow managed to fritter away any of the money or fame that might have come my way had I gone into consulting using the instrument I developed in my research. The odds were probably against me being able to do that, but, to paraphrase Rudy Tomjanovich, never underestimate the stupidity of a backwoods boy from Appalachia. I have been able to pull off many similar feats, in my career.

And the Knoxville area was a good place to live if you did not have all that much money. We would drive to the mountains – how many times did we drive through Cades Cove, for example. Little did we know that our daughter would wind up working for the same national park service that governs the Great Smokey Mountains National Park – the most visited of all the U.S. national parks. She grew up near that park and the Blue Ridge Parkway; and JR gave her a subscription to the national geographic, which she received for many years. Those probably contributed to her interest in the park service.

We would walk the malls, East Towne and West Towne, quite often. We were there when the East Towne Mall opened, I think even the day it opened, we were there. As I recall it was so crowded it was almost impossible to walk around. They were giving stuff away and there was a generally high level of excitement. It gave us another place to go and not spend any money, since we had much more time than money, even though we did not have that much time.

Occasionally, we would go to Tyson Park for a picnic, but mostly we would put a blanket out on the grass inside Sutherland Avenue apartments and talk to our friends, Tony, Gloria, Scott and Arlene. Our friendships with them were stronger because we all had few choices as to how we would spend our time. Arlene and Scott seemed to have a little more money than the other four of us, but not even they had enough money to do anything exotic on the weekends. Arlene and Scott were frugal, buying only nice Landsend clothes and wearing them until they were worn completely out.

We learned a lot from Arlene. We learned about LL Beene, Landsend, and how to process bagels, slicing and freezing them. She also taught me how to take care of a cast-iron skillet, giving me the riot act after I once put hers in the dishwasher. Looking back on it now, I can only imagine how ignorant she must have figured out I was. None of the people I was around after I left eastern Kentucky were as hillbilyish as I me. I suspect I shocked a lot of people over the years, with the things I did not know which you would assume someone working on his Ph.D., would know.

You taught me to not belch so loud, you taught me that you are supposed to give a gift to your wedding partner, by pointing out, after our wedding; that you had gotten me a Bible and that I had not gotten you anything. You apparently gave up on teaching me to not bite my nails and you are still longsuffering when it comes to nose picking, although I am much more discreet on that than I once was. Life is hard, when you have bad or no role models; at least, the first part of your life, anyway, and in some cases such as mine, your entire life.

Knoxville is where Stephanie learned to walk, to talk, to read, to be amazing. It's where we learned to study, to parent, to budget, to be a family. We lived here (I am in Knoxville as I write this) for just under seven years. Bible scholars would be alerted to that amount of years, given Joseph’s seven productive years and seven lean years, while he was working in the service of the king. His brothers would come and have to pay homage to him, not knowing he was Joseph and he loved them from afar, making sure they got a little extra grain in their sacks to take back to their – and his- mother and father.

He had told them of a dream he had, when he was a younger brother at home, that they would someday bow down before him. Knowing a little, as we all do, of how dreams work; perhaps he was tiring of being the young brother (I think he had one brother younger than him, Benjamin maybe?) and being ruled by his older brothers, so his dreams were sort of a Freudian wish fulfillment. It’s no wonder the Bible became popular, right? It does have some good stories in it, this being one of the best.

It turns out that seven years is what they give you at the typical university, as a probationary time to be a faculty member. You come up for tenure at the beginning of your sixth year and if you do not get it, you have one more year to look for another job. If you get it, it may well take you another seven years (probably a decent average) to attain full professor status – although some people retire as associate professors and there is nothing wrong with that.

To apply this story to our own lives, we certainly had seven lean years in Knoxville, then we had six years of plenty in Asheville, only to have the last year wind up being something other than plentiful. The years thing breaks down at some point, but there is a bigger insight to be had here.

To make it through our lives, with as much hardship and doubt as most people experience, we need to be telling ourselves a story. We need to know something of how we want our lives to turn out and to be able to place ourselves currently, on the journey toward some place, usually some better place.

The choice we have is not between creating a narrative for our lives or not creating one, it’s between writing a hopeful one or a less-than-hopeful one. Our dreams, as they did for Joseph, surely play a role in it. We hope and therefore we dream and our dreams raise the height of our wishes and make us imagine we can do great things, that we can be a hero, that we can be a conqueror or some other mythological great. We wrote a great story together and a good deal of it came about.

We knew we wanted more than we had when we were growing up. I am not sure we had specifics in mind, but we watched the lives of other couples and sort of learned what was possible, from them. I had seen my parents lives and I did not want that. You had seen your parents lives and you certainly did not want that. But we also had Uncle Ivan and Sylvia Wallace, we had May and Bill Wallace, we had the Hedricks at Central Baptist, we had the various couples in Terre Haute, mostly Craig and Vicki Swofford. We had role models.

But most of the couples we saw around us, were not perfect matches for where we started or for where we saw ourselves going. Every couple starts out entirely unique, but they still fit into categories. The category we most comfortably fit into was two kids that grew up in Baptist homes, in poverty, but without violence and with lots of love being shared. My family was more overtly loving, yours more implicitly loving. We were more about words of love and your family, especially your aunts and uncles, were more about deeds of love.

So, yes, we could be categorized; especially in terms of where we had been, and there were certainly a lot of models to go by when it came to those categories, but when it came to where we were going, the models tended to be more in the news, or in novels or from the lives of people we were not around that much. You might say we had a fantastic story in mind. We had in mind outcomes that were grander than those of most of the couples we used as role models. That may not be too unusual, when you think about it. We all know much more about the categories we can be slotted into due to our past than the ones we can be seen as part of due to our hopes and wishes.

The dreams we had, the ones that informed our waking wishes, had a theme of less poverty, less stress, more feelings of having achieved, having made a name for ourselves, having distinguished ourselves. I may have added more of the distinguishing stuff, the competitive stuff, to the mix, but you certainly had the comfort, the less poverty parts going on in your dreams.

As we approach forty years of marriage, how can we say our stories have turned out? I know this is not the end, although we do know that it can end in strange ways if you are not careful; but this is a good reflection point, a plateau from which to look back down over the meandering path you just climbed. As I sit here this morning in the Hampton Inn, just off Papermill Road in Knoxville, the town where so many of our early memories are; the night before my trip to SC, I can say our story has played out well, with more chapters to come – if we are wise - and patient with one another.