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 8th,
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 16th, 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.