The Story of Us, Part 5

 

Being grown ups?

When I first asked Greg how old he was, he told me 12. And he was going to stay that way. (He was 18) then. Now 1989 but he and I finally, after 7 years in earning our 4 year college degrees, were entering the world of teaching. All grown up but possibly in denial. 

Our last year in college, we both were attending night classes, and student teaching full time at North Medford, Oregon High School. And so our hours at work for our minimum wage, fast food jobs were seriously cut back and we took out student loans to do that last year. Suddenly we were both hired to teach full time in the same district, by the coast, in the redwoods. We figured we’d stay about five years and pay off the loans and see where we ended up. 

But what a jump in income! From $4,500 dollars combined income for the year, we were hired at ten times that almost. $21,000 each plus an extra bonus of my teaching special education meant that each year for 5 years, 20% of my loans were forgiven and I never had to repay a cent. 

So we went bird brained. Greg had wanted a blue and gold macaw ever since watch Dr. Doolittle as a child. I got him two cockatiels, but he still bought himself the macaw when we walked into a pet store with one and My brother Lance was along. I asked what its name was and the store owner said, “whatever its new owner names it” and Lance leaned forward and said, “hi Becky. Becky, Becky, Becky Bird.”

We had rented a two bedroom duplex and had only three aquariums for pets. But before long we had 12 large parrots screaming inside our living room. Fortunately our neighbor, Ruby, never complained and was often gone overnight. 

We both liked teaching, he was doing classroom music for kindergarten through 8th grade, and I was teaching severely handicapped, 3-7 year old students. Summer school was only 5 weeks and several times if I took my kids on a field trip he came along. Then we often drove over 3,000 miles both summer and Christmas break going back to Wyoming and looping the perimeter of the state to visit family in three corners. 

My dad’s sister and her husband drove up from Anaheim, CA and my parents drove out from Wyoming. Through Utah, Idaho, and Oregon to us in CA. Both had about the same 1700 mile drive. 

My Aunt Rachel walked in the door and looked at those birds and gasped, “you seriously need to have a baby. Talk about misplaced maternal instincts.”

Netherlands, Denmark, Poland and Germany

Summer of 1992, Greg had been singing with a Choir in the next county south, and signed up to tour four European countries. 
I came along. We did decide to get healthier before the trip and did a plan through our Dr. where we drank three meal replacement shakes and ate 8 ounces of meat and a salad each day. By the trip we had both lost about 40 pounds and we packed our luggage full of boxes of water and shake packets. All through The Netherlands, Poland, Denmark and Germany we ignored chocolates and breads and pasties. Were we Dumb? Absolutely. Still a huge regret. Idiotic and of course once we got home we fell off the diet anyway and gradually regained all the weight and more. 
But as we drank those medifast shakes we created luggage space for amber necklaces, lacework, matryoshka dolls and crystal bowls. Being pre Jurassic Park, we didn’t know what amber was until we wandered into an Alley lined with booths where every one sold amber carvings and jewelry. I even saw a huge Viking ship with chains where every link moved but were carved from a solid chunk of amber. 
We toured castles and the Berlin Wall, met two incredible tour guides, one on whom is still a dear friend. The chorale sang in cathedrals with massive organs and we saw legos and ceramics and stayed in fancy hotels and the homes of locals. I indulged in licorice and my heart stopping excitement at learning I was only a block from the Ten Boom Clock shop made me sneak away from the Haarlem Cathederal and run to see where Corrie Ten Boom had helped her family protect what Jewish people they could save, before all being captured themselves. She has always been my number one hero.

Tales from the dark side

OK, while we were living together, we had a few big fights, joking about red heads tempers and letting fly with targeted insults and actions. So by the time we got married, when Greg said, “just a warning, I won’t ever think about divorce,” and paused dramatically, before concluding, “murder maybe, but never divorce.” I was pretty confident that I could handle the worst he had to offer and that he loved me even at my worst. 
But we still had some doozies. I had been bullied as a child and was insecure and often afraid to admit to wanting to be included until I was specifically invited. So sometimes I stayed home when he went out just because he hadn’t said the right words to ask me. And my mom had similar memories, having told me once that she remembered her Dad asking her if she wanted to come along to the next town and she said, “no.” So he went without her. And she curled up on her bed and cried for the afternoon because she had definitely wanted to go, she had just wanted him to want her badly enough that he asked her again.
In my family we didn’t say what we wanted directly, often circling it in what my husband came to call Beightol-ese. My maternal side of my family would say, “I remember going to that ice cream shop up above Yellowstone.” And everyone knew to get in the car. But after 40 years of marriage my husband couldn’t figure out, or ignored, the times I pointed out a favorite place as we drove past. Then he couldn’t figure out why I was mad that he hadn’t turned around and gone in. 
This picture. Our first home together. He took the photo of me retrieving something from the trash. I’m not sure what it was that time, but I’m sure I threw it away, tore it up or something because of a moment of frustration I had no words to express. I threw my wedding ring away once and when he dug it out of the coffee grounds and washed it - threw it away again. Looking back I can’t even remember why but probably because he’d smoked a joint or had a margarita with friends. I had an unreasonable terror of anytime he had anything like that. And it became a test of “do you love me more than you need a drink.” And mind you, he wasn’t an alcoholic. I saw him hungover a few times before we were twenty and once he stuffed a baby food jar of marijuana in my lap when he was pulled over for speeding, but as college freshmen in 1982, he was nothing out of the norm. 
As we got older we argued less, and they were less volatile. Once I threw a plate at the door as he walked in at 1 in the morning from closing shift at Dominos pizza, and our downstairs neighbors jumped from their bed wondering what had woken them up. Once he stomped on my cassette tape because I ordered him to get it out of his car, because I wanted to play it in the house. A few times we screamed insults. I called him a “fuck head idiot” and after that he started signing love notes and birthday cards, “from your FHI” 
I always figured I would have divorced everyone else in my family at least once if that were a real, quick option, so I just pretended it wasn’t an option in marriage either. 

The Story of Us, part 4

 

Moving away from Family

After our summer theater time was up, we did one of the impulsive moves which seemed to make up our lives together. We took the old closet doors my father-in-law had just replaced and made railings around the grey Silverado short bed truck and moved to a place we had never been. Our last year in Wyoming we kept randomly hearing about Ashland, Oregon in odd but repeating mentions. A man from there stopped at the gas station where my future husband worked, and offered to trade potatoes for a bit of gasoline. A instructor from the creative writing department came to our Jr. college from Southern Oregon State College, because we were near one of the WWII Japanese Internment camps and he had been a child in one and was touring them to promote his poetry book. Lawson Inada was his name. 

It was before google, so we looked at anything we could find. Including the free paper magazines of motel ads which had a tiny thumbnail showing mountains in the background. 
And so we moved. In our time together we moved 13 times in the first 12 years and then not again since 1996. 

Ashland wasn’t the same as being near family, and we took a year off to work and get state residency before continuing with college classes so we could pay in state tuition. Him at Domino’s Pizza and me at Taco Bell. We made friends from both places and I still have some of them. 

The college was a quarter system, which made making friends harder. 9 week classes, then a change meant we didn’t really get to know other students well and our first Thanksgiving away from family was at the community dinner, the second at Pizza Hut. It was a depressing and lonely time and I cried alone at home a lot of nights when I worked days and he worked nights and then went to practice at the theater he had found small roles in. 

Ashland was famous for theater, especially their Elizabethan Globe Stage and the Shakespeare festival. They also had a mild climate compared to Wyoming and flowers and green leaves year round in Lithia Park. We loved a lot of the things in town but couldn’t afford to see many plays or eat out often, so we spent a lot of time in the park and nearby hills. 

Ni Hao, Jung Guo 

In August of 1987 we moved to Beijing Teachers College foreign student dormitory as exchange students. We had the best luck. A financial aid officer at our college got us qualified for grants to go, and a high school girl who’s family lived only a block from our Beijing College, moved to Ashland as an exchange student just as we were leaving to go. She sent us with introductions to her family and we quickly made friends who gave us access to their homes and family traditions and took us to explore things the other students in our group didn’t get to do. 

Even after forty years of marriage I might say those 4 months were one of the most influential parts of our lives together. It showed us that people are people who love their families and are curious and good hearted even when they live very different lives. I might have never gone. I’m more than a bit agoraphobic but Greg was always my safe place, so I could go anywhere with him. I’d always said that I couldn’t learn languages, and that my years of German were only to teach me empathy for my students when they struggled, but when you are immersed in a world where you can’t speak or read the language, my brain found a way to learn, and when my fledgling Mandarin failed, even to dredge up every German word I’d failed to access on test days. 

photo 4999

In Sickness and in Health

When you first take these vows, You think that you’re talking about the two of you and whether one of you is sick and the other one is there to take care of them. But it didn’t take us long to learn that we were taking these vows to include his family and my family, which is now become our family. Or that sickness didn’t just mean physical because a lot of the things we’ve dealt with over four decades together have definitely been more of a mental illness.
Within the first four months of moving to Ashland Oregon we both came down with the flu. This wasn’t just a mild stomach flu. This was the one that convinced us that yeah, flu epidemics could easily kill thousands of people. We were 1300 miles from the closest relative and didn’t really have friends in our new town yet. We were living in a tiny one bedroom apartment above the stores on Main Street. It would’ve been bad enough if one of us was sick and the other could take care of them, But that’s not how it worked. At a time when each of us was struggling to figure out if we needed to sit on the toilet or kneel in front of it. There was only one. And neither of us had the strength to even climb into a shower. So that little apartment stunk. But I’ll never forget how he looked up, wiped his mouth, and said, “I’d rather be this sick with you than healthy with anyone else.”
By 10 days later, we knew we would survive, but we had each lost about 30 to 40 pounds. There came a knock on the apartment door and a big package was delivered. Greg got up and went to get it but was too weak to lift it into the apartment I couldn’t even see what he was doing, but I called out. “Don’t roll it it’s a TV.” It was. His brother had sent it to us but I have no idea how I knew what it was.

So we learned early on that sickness could take us both down and we could survive together.

Then we had a few years of being fairly healthy when I woke up screaming in pain on a trip up the coast with my parents and Greg. In one of the things I still regret, I slept on the bed knocked on my parents store and ask my mom to drive me to the emergency room without even waking Greg up. My only excuse is when you’re that sick you want your mom. It’s not a good enough excuse. She ended up having to drive me to an emergency clinic 25 miles north, and from there to the hospital another 25 miles north By the time Greg and my dad and my brother arrived I was being prepped for exploratory surgery, When suddenly, I felt a pop and the pain went away. 11 months later it returned with a vengeance. In the meantime we had our exchange student trip to China and I was nearing the end of my student teaching and preparing to graduate. This time I didn’t think the pain would last so I didn’t go to the hospital. When I did my body was starting to shut down and ejecting fluids from every orifice. My appendix had perforated 11 months earlier and my abdomen was a mess. But Greg was there at my side every time I swam up into some sort of consciousness.
Before we got married, I spent time with him in Billings, Montana, while he had surgery to cut his femur apart and stretch it out and put a metal pin in it. And attempt to adjust for having spent nine months in a body cast after a motorcycle wreck. At 15, while one leg grew and one healed. During our marriage he needed a couple of minor knee surgeries, and then both knees replaced. I had my appendix removed and my gallbladder and then had an emergency C-section 5 1/2 weeks early.
And then we began with a part of sickness, that was the family, my grandmother’s colon cancer, two times spending six weeks near a major medical hospital once in Rochester, Minnesota and once in Denver, Colorado, with out two young sons along. There with his mom as they tried to figure out her personality change and depression. Even trying a session of twelve electric shock treatments. my dad‘s esophagus cancer and horrific death, my mom‘s dementia, his dad‘s motorcycle wreck, one of his sister’s motorcycle wreck’s was fairly minor in the grand scheme of things but worried us for awhile. his other sister‘s mental break down, and another sister‘s death from heat stroke in the Grand Canyon. Then our granddaughter’s mom had mental issues and basically stepped out of her life when she was one year old so our son and granddaughter came to live with us. For awhile there was just so many deaths, his nephew was hit by a train, My dad died in 1997 but the other three of our parents died at the holiday time in three preceding years 2016, 2017, 2018. It began to seem like the only times we saw family was when we drove 3000 miles round-trip for another funeral.
Life is so hard and both Greg and I fought our own issues with depression at various times, but I always thought it was better together. 

The story of us, part 3

 

Why we stayed a third year 

After we graduated from the two year junior college, where we met, we heard that the northwest singers were going to be traveling to the Philippines and China for a music festival the next year. By then we were living with the drama teacher that we had made friends with, Kermit Hurd. He had played the Paige in the movie version of Rogers and Hammerstein‘s Cinderella and he’d been in attack of the killer tomatoes. His name is Kermit Hurd, but we called him guru Bob. We had started by renting a room in his home for the summer while he was out of town. When he returned, we found a tiny one room basement apartment that flooded every time the upstairs neighbor took a shower. Then Kermit’s son died in an ultralight accident and he didn’t want to live alone so he asked us to move back in with him. After he told us about the China trip,  we decided that Greg should stay and do the trip to China, and I had graduated except I was missing one PE credit credit because we signed up for a kayaking class and then Greg ended up having surgery on his femur to correct the shortened leg and curved femur resulting from a motorcycle accident when he was 15, and we didn’t take it that class after all. We had already taken a spelunking class together, but he had an extra PE from a tennis class his first semester before I met him, so I thought I’d actually get a PE credit and my AA degree and he’d go to China. The third year was wonderful because we did all those electives that you want to do and college was inexpensive enough that you could work minimum wage jobs, pay rent and still have a great time. He had a lot of fundraisers to get the money to go to China, and some of his old hometown friends helped a lot. Then shopping in China was inexpensive enough that he brought me back lots of ivory rings and silk robes and treasures of the orient. Pretty sure it was fake ivory. anyway that third year proved to be influential in both of us deciding to be exchange students to China three years later.

Justice of the peace

We had lived together since October 18, 1982 but in May 1984 we were graduating jr college and had gotten a job in a summer repertoire theater in the Black Hills in Custer State Park. We had told them at his audition that we were married so we could go together but it was close to Greg’s parents and his mom really didn’t want her friends to see programs noting us as married when we weren’t. We were packing to move when suddenly we just decided to go buy $7 Kmart rings and pick up my parents. Get a blood test and get married just before the office closed for the day. My family lived near the college. So we were storing our stuff for the summer at their house and just invited them along. We didn’t tell his parents until three hours later after my parents had taken us out for Chinese food. It hurt his mom’s feelings too much and I’d suggest either elope and include no one. Or include everyone. Once his parents believed that we really were married, you could never ask for more loving in-laws. 

Honeymoon bitterness

Working in summer theater is brutal and we couldn’t admit to being newlyweds. We got room in an old ccc cabin that was fifty years old and infested with mice and squirrels and would be torn down as soon as we moved out. 
We worked 8 am to 1 AM except Sunday afternoons and every other Monday. We ate in the mess hall. I did the box office and the snack bar and he did sets and acting. 
Perks were we had places of beauty everywhere and a free pass to every attraction but no time to use it. All our family and some friends from Germany visited. We had buffalo on the path home in those moonless midnights when we were feeling with our feet to see if we were still in the gravel path. We had mountain lions screaming like women behind the cabin. We did our laundry by stomping on it while we showered and hanging it from the trees to dry. We had buffalo licking our window and leaving nose prints with heads bigger than the window. Mice eating the hot chocolate packets in our bookcase headboard. And we saw buffalo with an itchy head turn a tree to toothpicks. And we made friends we still have forty years later. 

 

The story of us, part two

 

A good Goode family. 

On April 4th my oldest sister in law would have turned 74. But she died at 56 of heat stroke while hiking in the Grand Canyon. When I first met her baby brother, he was living with her and her husband. I called the handsome college kid. I was hoping to carpool with and she answered the phone saying “this is April“ and my heart sank, thinking he’s living with a woman.
Over the next decades, sometimes they lived close to us. Sometimes they lived 3000 miles away, but they ended up being the best of friends to my husband and I  - and the good aunt and the evil uncle to our boys.
She had moved to my hometown, but my husband’s family actually lived across the state of Wyoming and the first time he took me home to meet his family. I was terrified. He told me if I love you. They’re gonna love you. I wasn’t sure I believed him.
But that’s how it went. His family became my family and my mom told me that if we ever got divorced, she was keeping Greg. 
This picture from 2000 was my husband‘s parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, they actually ended up married 66 years but I love this picture because it was the first time that the whole family had been born or married into the family and while everybody was still healthy.
The 2022 picture had to be cobbled together because not everyone could be there. It was after the oldest sister had died, and at a memorial service for the second oldest sister,  both my mother and father-in-law had died by then and within a year my sister-in-law Fran, would also die. The oldest grandchild had died when he was hit by a train, so his mother’s memorial service was also filled with memories of him. 
That second picture was missing five people from the first photo but my three grandchildren and the spouses of several of my nieces and nephews had been added so the family continued strong.

Northwest Community College 

While he was doing choir and theater, I was taking creative writing and painting classes. We both loved the sciences so I took extra biology, oncology and genetics for fun and he took chemistry because he was good at it, but I went to every performance of his shows and he read my poems and inspired most of them. We made friends in the poetry classes and in the art building and the theater whom we would have for the rest of our lives. 

Meeting Family roots

My Grandma grew up here but ended up going to Wyoming to her sister’s wedding, and staying to marry her sister’s husband’s brother. One other sister died young of a ruptured appendix, one brother died in a military hospital in the Philippines after surviving the Bataan Death March, and one brother died as an infant. The two remaining brothers and my great grandmother ran a Dairy/hog farm in rural northern Illinois. My childhood summers were often including a few weeks  spent running loose on the farm while mom and grandma did a deep clean on the farmhouse. I loved the dairy and riding on the tractors in the bucket while bringing a new born calf back to the barn. 

The story of us. The beginning

 

Since 1982

For single shot April on a photo a day website I’ve posted in since 2011,  Instead of choosing one item like I have several previous Aprils, I chose one relationship. This is a repost of those thirty days, three days at a time. 

It began in 1982 when we were both first year students at Northwest Community College in Powell, Wyoming. I had noticed him the first semester in fall of 1981 but in January of 1982 he moved from his dormitory to his sister’s apartment in my hometown 30 miles away. I was taking evening classes and he was doing rehearsals for Godspell. He advertised in the daily hotline for someone to carpool with and I answered. That first drive home from the college in my mom’s brown mercury zephyr station wagon, I was nervous but he was easy to talk to. He patted my shoulder and told me to relax when I kept apologizing for how I drove. I thought he lived with his girlfriend because when I called to set up the carpooling, his sister answered, “This is April” and 43 years later I can still hear her voice and feel my heart fall. 

I’ve always been a visual person and I’ve filled the walks and bookshelves with pictures recording the life we created together. 

Music

When Greg and I first met, he was a chemistry major and I was an art major at a two-year college in Powell, Wyoming. But I was taking creative writing classes in the evening and he was taking theater and was one of the cast members singing “all good things” in Godspell. 
Music seem to surround everything we did. Because our first conversations happened while we were carpooling, there was usually the radio playing. Because he was rehearsing in a musical. He was often in humming or singing songs from Godspell. But the very first place I saw him was when a friend had invited me to watch her rehearse in the Northwest Singers Audition pop choir group. I didn’t sing, but I had grown up with the northwest singers coming to do concerts at my elementary and junior high and high school and I already loved that group.
By that time, Greg was living with his big sister April. The first time he invited me home, we walked in the door and he put on a Cat Stevens album, called Teaser and the Fire Cat, which includes peacetrain, and morning has broken, but my favorite was “how can I tell you.”
10 months later, we were living together and he had changed his major to music and theater. He said chemistry wasn’t challenging to him, but he loved the challenge of making good music in theater and I have to admit for 40 years. He has been wonderful at adding music, theater, drama, and delight to my life.

Love me, love my brother

When I graduated from High School you might think I would be eager to get away from the town where I had been bullied. But oddly I wasn’t. Maybe because I had found school to be filled with a lot of pain and danger, I wasn’t eager to see what else was out there. So I went to college as close to home as I could, and that meant I lived at home and rode 25 miles on a Jr. college school bus each morning and came home at five PM

The first semester was a period of more growth than I expected. People smiled at me and said “hi” between classes and I kept looking shyly around to see who they were talking to, and there would be no one but me around. It took time but I gradually realized that I did not have “loser” branded on my forehead and I started looking up beyond my shoes and smiling first.
Then I needed a class only offered in the evening when the bus didn’t run. I bravely called a number listed in the school’s hot line (a daily sheet of messages printed and hung on various bulletin boards by student services) looking to carpool for evening classes. And with that call, I changed my life.
The other student was also a tall, skinny redhead, and would become my life long best friend and partner in everything. My first graceful words to him were rude, “I never met a redhead I liked” but he was funny and gentle and rowdy and confident and he passed the biggest test of all. He loved my brother Lance as soon as he met him and was soon coming with gifts to visit Lance as much as to see me. My grandma adored him, and Mom informed me that if I ever broke up with him, the rest of the family was keeping him.
I never considered breaking up with him though, he made me see myself through his eyes and for the first time ever since my first day of first grade, I loved who I am.

Rhonda Slack, in Memorium

 Rhonda Lynn Slack

November 4, 1973 - January 11, 2025

Cousins. They are the best of all worlds. The people who share your memories and family ties but with just enough distance to avoid a lot of the drama of daily life. Today I lost one of the best. Younger by ten years which was enough to let me babysit her as a child, old enough to become a good friend as we grew up. She was a fighter, an artist, the strongest and most loving woman. I adored you since before you were born, Rhonda Slack

 I loved her so much from before she was born. I remember helping Norma pick out snoopy patterned cloth to make maternity tops out of when she was pregnant and picking up all the straight pins out of the shag carpeting when she dropped them while sewing them. I remember the first time I held her and living with her dad, her brother and her  in the summer to babysit her and Steven and a couple more cousins. 

From early childhood she loved horses and was a creative force. She painted a portrait of my seven parrots when she was in high school and became a master artist in her chosen medium of leather work. She crafted chaps and saddles and was an inspiration for her dedication to making each piece the best it could be. 

I will never forget her coming to the hospice room with her then husband, and her tiny son, in Christmas of 1996 to cheer my family and laugh over old memories and let my Dad smile at the baby boy even as he lay dying of esophageal cancer. She was calm and kind and willing to spend time just being there. She dropped her busy life many times to come visit when I made it back to Wyoming and just sit at a picnic table and share memories and hopes while our sons played or fished. She brought hugs and laughter to my mom’s memorial service and so much love.  And again she was 100% there. She always was there for the ones she loved.

She loved her son with an intensity from the moment he was born and raised him to be a great man and a good friend to her, and ultimately her rock and shelter as she fought against the bile duct cancer that took her life but never her love. 

I can’t say anything that will make this less trite but she really was a light in a world that needed her laughter and warmth and her strength. She was a blessing and I am so lucky to have had her in my life. 

So, I kept “swimming” or, one painting a day.

 Twelve months, one painting a day and not quite sure where I’m going after this. I started on copier paper with a big pallet from Walmart with a water filling brush that I was given as a Christmas gift, then I changed to cold press 9 x 12 inch paper in a pad from Walmart and bought some finer brushes at Ross. My big goal was just to stop avoiding ever starting because I knew the finished product wouldn’t look like the image in my mind,  plus I didn’t want to add another thing to my craft pile in the storage room I’ve been ignoring for years. So I kept it inexpensive and quick, mostly about an hour a day.

Over the year I gave away a few paintings, sold a set of 4 to a Mexican restaurant, and won four ribbons in the county fair. Looking back some of my favorites are still from the first few months and I don’t think I can actually judge my progress fairly. The first pictures I often traced of my iPad to get proportions right but I no longer need to do that. My weaknesses are more evident to me than my strengths but it has been good for my mental health anyway. The very first was the killer whales based of a boxed painting kit I saw advertised and the last was using photos from the Denver aquarium that were posted on the page of photos free for artists use. Also of course, Dory’s quote that keeps me from giving up some days.