Oh, Atlanta!

The Next Great Adventure: A True Story

Oh, Atlanta!

We were married on a Saturday night, and spent that night in a hotel we could afford in Denton, Texas. The next morning we drove to Rowlett, loaded a small U-Haul trailer with a few pieces of furniture, and various housewares and clothes, and hitched it the back of Cindy's Buick Regal. After lunch with her family, we headed to Atlanta. The plan was to drive until we were tired of driving and check into a hotel along the way.

We couldn't go very fast towing the trailer. Before we got out of Texas I noticed a funny smell. We stopped to get gas and while checking things out I noticed the transmission fluid was low and the dipstick seemed warmer than it should be. I bought fluid, topped it off and decided it would be better to drive slower. That seemed to help, but 55 MPH was miserably slow. We took turns driving, but Cindy definitely preferred driving to riding. We had decided to postpone the honeymoon until we had the funds to actually take one, and I had to be at work on Tuesday. We ended up spending the night on the east side the Mississippi River, in Vicksburg, and with a leisurely pace rolled in to Atlanta in the late afternoon Monday.

Atlanta is in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, on the Eastern Continental Divide. Arriving from the west on I-20 there are curves and hills and trees blocking your view as you approach, which is quite different from the open spaces of North Texas. Nearing Atlanta the sky was overcast; it was looking quite grey to the east. We top a hill, round a curve and there before us in the distance is the city. We can see the tall buildings from the city center. I pointed it out and Cindy started crying. She explained that seeing the city in the distance made her realize how far away she was from the only home she had ever known.

This was my first inkling that Cindy and I were opposites. She wanted her home and family close, and I just wanted to be somewhere else, someplace of my own making and choosing.

I told the story at Cindy's memorial of her screaming and crying when I accidentally scared her with a kitchen knife. What I didn't tell was the reason behind her reaction, which she shared with me later that evening.

One time when Cindy was babysitting, I believe it was the summer before her junior year in high school, a group of men broke in to the house where she was babysitting. It was in Rockwall. She was upstairs in the master bedroom, on the phone with Ricky, and the baby was down the hall in another room, asleep in the crib. She thought she heard a noise downstairs and the next thing she knew, there was a man standing in the doorway of the bedroom. He had a knit cap on and a bushy beard. She screamed and dropped the phone. Other men came into the room. They pulled the phone out from the wall and tied her up on the bed. They left quickly, assuming that whoever was on the phone called the police.

The police eventually arrested the group responsible and Cindy, as a key witness, was asked to testify. This was very traumatic. She would see men in knit caps or with bushy beards and have a panic attack in the grocery store, at the mall, while driving. She had terrible tension headaches. This went on for months, causing her to miss a lot of school. She worked with a psychologist who taught her relaxation techniques to get the panic attacks and headaches under control. Part of the training was to go through the relaxation exercise while staring at a green dot, so I finally learned why she had a green dot sticker on her rearview mirror; it was her relaxation trigger.

She didn't like to tell the story, another difference between us, but it explained a lot.  Whenever we

moved to a new apartment or house it would take her a few weeks to get acclimated. During that time whenever we came home we would have to look in every room and closet and under every bed. She did not like to be home alone and would often delay leaving work to be sure I would be home when she arrived. She was always easily surprised and for all the time I knew her someone appearing unexpectedly in a doorway would nearly cause her to faint.

For me this was all very unexpected. Cindy was smart, strong, independent, capable. I never expected this kind of vulnerability. Seeing this side of Cindy became very important to me. I recognized a need I could fill. I knew I needed her, and I knew she would be an ideal partner for me, but I struggled with what I could do for her, and how or why she loved me. Over the next 35 years it was both the simplest and the hardest thing for me to do ... just to be there when she needed me.

We settled in and Cindy immediately started looking for a job. She had been told that she could work at Kraft Foodservice because I worked in the Retail division, but we both thought it would be good for her to do something other than Kraft. She starting doing temp work with an agency named Adia, and got placed in a 90 day assignment as an HR clerk for Ciba Vision. The now familiar pattern began to play out. She quickly became a favorite of managers for the quality and quantity of her work, and she began making friends and social plans.

Not long after she began working there, the FDA approved some sort of colored soft contact lenses that Ciba had developed. Business boomed and they hired her full time. She had the added perk of getting free non-prescription contact lenses and so choosing her eye color became part of her getting ready routine. My favorites were the green ones.

We grocery shopped carefully, carrying a calculator with us to be sure we didn't overdraw the checking account. We would go out with her friends from Ciba on Friday or Saturday night to comedy clubs and concerts when we had the money, or simply have dinner at their houses if we didn't. It wasn't long before I was tagging along on company outings, like rafting through Atlanta on the Chattahoochee, or taking in the laser light show at Stone Mountain. On weekends we would go exploring, heading up to the mountains north of Atlanta for community festivals and scenery, or finding new restaurants to try in Buckhead or downtown Atlanta.

Only a few weeks after the wedding I had a car wreck. It was my fault and, much to Cindy's surprise, I didn't have any insurance. We got a loan and took up payments on repairing the other driver's cars, and I drove the wrecked Monte Carlo for several months, getting in and out of the passenger door. In the summer we flew to Amarillo and drove back in my high school car, a 1956 Chevy named Bessie, which my brother Bill worked on to get running for us. As we were leaving Dad offered Cindy a dusty old 'Cool Cushion' from his truck, to help with vinyl seats in the summer. She declined, but I took it. About 60 miles into the trip she began to appreciate the wonders of the Cool Cushion and we stopped at an auto parts store to get her a new, clean one.

Darvis and Frances came for a visit, I think in the fall, and Frances tolerated me enough to let me

push her up a paved mountain trail. At one point we made an unplanned trip back to Dallas when Cindy's grandmother, Darvis' mother Rosa, died. Road trips to Texas typically involved leaving after work and driving all night, taking turns driving and talking to keep each other awake. One of my favorite things to do was discuss baby names. I'd swear that we would have to name our first son Rufus or some such and she would try to talk me out of it. I told her all my stories and she patiently listened, only occasionally reminding me that she'd heard that one before.

I distinctly remember being in our apartment for our first Christmas together. One of the things I learned that first year was that Christmas was soon to become a big deal - not necessarily for presents, but for all of the social, decorating and entertaining opportunities it offered. That first Christmas she gave me a list of things she would like to get as her present. I wrapped up several things that I had found for her in one big box for Christmas morning. Included in the box was her list. I bought none of those things, but instead wrote a note that said "Don't give me a list. I'm not a shopping service and besides, I might come up with something better!" She never gave me a gift list again, but always requested one from me.

The break-in story explained Cindy's ability to compartmentalize things and not carry things emotionally, which is both a strength and a weakness. It helped her to move forward in the most challenging of times, and to remain calm and confident as she did. She learned how to do that. It also prevented her from digging too deeply into anything, because doing so could make it harder to keep it in its place when necessary.

I learned a lot about and from Cindy in that first year plus in Atlanta. Looking back, living 'on our own' was one of the smarter, or perhaps luckier, things that happened. We built a healthy dependency on each other for managing a home and our lives, and we simply learned about each other directly, without the input of family and well-known friends. I became her confidant and someone she could depend on. She became my voice of reason and my proof and understanding of giving and receiving love.

In a strange way there is a lot of symmetry in how we began our marriage and how it ended. We were 'on our own' in Sugar Land, no friends or family around, for a little over a year. This past year plus has been all about moving forward in challenging times, shifting dependencies, taking time for honest discussions and most of all, continuing to learn about and try to understand each other while incorporating 35 years of shared experience.

It's how I knew not to share the cancer survival statistics when I researched triple negative breast cancer. I knew she wouldn't want to know. It's how she knew that sleeping in the recliner, sleeping separately for the first time in our married lives, would allow me some peace and practice at sleeping alone. When she wouldn't eat grilled cheese and tomato soup, I knew she was beyond miserable and her appetite was gone. When I got silent and sullen she knew when to leave me be, and when to draw me out for a talk.

In a strange way we had been preparing for this end for 35 years. I miss her terribly. I ache for her head on my shoulder, and the simplest peck of her lips. Those are gone, but I take great comfort in knowing that we loved each other and that we did our best. As imperfect as our actions might have been at times, because despite what the grief tells you no relationship is perfect, the love itself was true. What a gift. What a blessing. My prayer for you is that you experience truthful love in some way.