H-Town, Part One

The Next Great Adventure: A True Story

H-Town, Part One 

My math could be wrong, maybe off by a year, but I think this is right. We lived in Victoria for seven years so that means we moved to Houston, Missouri City specifically, around June, 1991. Cindy's job was relocated to Houston, but in practical terms she was already working regularly at the Greenway Plaza offices near The Summit, which became The Compaq Center and is now Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church. During the week she stayed at the adjacent Stouffer Hotel and drove home to Victoria on weekends.

One night Cindy called as she was going to bed, as she always did to say goodnight and chat a bit, and after I said hello she immediately asked "Who is Bill Laimbeer?" I explained that he was a professional basketball player for the Detroit Pistons and then followed up with a question of my own, "Why do you ask?" She replied, "I thought he might be a basketball player. I was on the elevator with him and some other really tall guys."

"How did you know it was Bill Laimbeer if you didn't recognize him?"

"He introduced himself."

"To you, or to everyone?"

"Just to me. I was the only person in the elevator who didn't know him."

"Why did he introduce himself?"

"He invited me to a party upstairs."

"Oh. Did you go?"

"Of course not."

Not long after that I thought it would be a good idea to maybe spend a few of my days off in Houston at the hotel with Cindy, so we did that a few times, too.

We knew we would be moving and so Grandy's got a two month notice, and we proceeded to learn about selling a house and corporate relocation programs. Oxy sent an appraiser who made us an offer for the house, which we could take at any time, however, if we sold it ourselves they would pay us a bonus. We ended up selling it for just about the same price that we paid for it and with the bonus we did okay. The relocation program was pretty generous and included money to hire movers for packing and loading. I was amazed. It was magical. Men in trucks just showed up and before you knew it the house was packed, loaded, moved and stored. I swore I'd never move myself again.

We bought a slightly larger house than the one we had in Victoria, maybe 1800 square feet. It was in Quail Valley, a planned community in Missouri City on the southwest side of Houston, which was the easiest commute to Greenway. We lived in the Residence Inn on the Southwest Freeway (US Hwy 59) through June and July, also funded by Oxy, while we looked for a house. We closed and moved into the house in late July/early August.

The transition from Victoria to Houston was hard for me work-wise. Initially I went to work for Grandy's Corporation. My job was to be an evaluator/trainer ... to work a week or two at all the corporate stores in and around Houston, make recommendations, train the staff, generally improve operations. I lasted one night. It the only job I ever walked out on. That first night the restaurant was just so poorly run I made the manager close early, around 8PM, and set the staff to cleaning. The manager got mad and went out in the parking lot to drink in his car. Finally, around midnight I cut the staff loose, woke the manager up in his car, drove home to the Residence Inn and called my boss to leave a voice mail and tell him I quit. I never heard back from them and began looking for a new job the next day.

Cindy, meanwhile, was steady working at Oxy. She fretted over me searching through the help-wanted ads in the daily paper. I was looking for anything that paid; she thought I should find something that I would "enjoy," which was another fundamental difference between us, "enjoy work" was an oxymoron to me. I got a job offer from Pappasito's to be a kitchen manager, but I knew it would be 60 hours a week, and I didn't want to commit to a restaurant career. After a week or two of job searching, I took Cindy's previous path and signed up with Adia, a temp agency. I got a gig doing telemarketing for IBM which lasted several weeks and paid terribly, but it was income. Finally, shortly after we moved to the house, I interviewed and was hired by Granada Foods to be the Office Manager of their meat plant. It leveraged both my restaurant and accounting office experience, and I was excited for the opportunity.

In December we went to the Occidental Petroleum Christmas party, which was held at a nice hotel in the Post Oak area of Houston, a pretty swanky part of town. It was a dress up affair and I was on my best behavior, meeting a lot of Cindy's co-workers and bosses for the first time, including the guy with the inappropriate question. At one point some muckety-muck got up to give a speech and said something along the lines of "I know there have been a lot of rumors about another relocation coming up, but they're just rumors. Those of you who have relocated to Houston, you might as well settle in."

In early spring we heard that Cindy's job, which was with OxyChem, not Occidental Petroleum, would be relocating to the Oxy Tower near the Galleria, LBJ & Dallas North Tollway, in Dallas. Cindy was tickled. We would be close to her family and she would theoretically be traveling less. We already knew the ropes of relocation and were looking forward to lower humidity, familiar territory, and no MUDs. There was talk of truly settling down, and maybe even trying to have kids. I would be closer to my sister's in the Ft. Worth area, and the drive to Pampa was easy enough from the Metroplex. We were happy to be getting back "home."

The biggest concern was my job, but it turned out that I was able to transfer to the Dallas plant with my employer. By the time we moved I was no longer working for Granada Foods. The company got into what some described as "financial shenanigans" and was eventually purchased by Freedman Foods, a local company in Houston, that bought the Dallas plant as well. I could tell a lot of stories about the last days of Granada; it was quite the experience. I remember my boss, Dennis Stiffler, calling me in to his office and explaining the plan to keep the plant running until they could finalize a deal to sell it. At the end of the explanation he laughed and said, "You ready to rodeo?" It was the perfect thing to say because the only proper response to that question is, "Hell yeah!" and that's just the approach we took.

I have struggled with writing this Houston segment because try as I might, I can't recall any stories about Cindy or about things we did together while we lived there. The day the pipe burst in the ceiling (pressurized plumbing in the attic ... "it doesn't freeze in Houston" ... yeah right) and flooded the kitchen I was out playing golf and came home to a disaster. Cindy was traveling. I told her about it that night when she called. I was still squeegeeing out water. I dealt with all the cleanup and contractors and insurance agents on my own, too.

At the time I was still getting check-ups for melanonma at the dermatologist. Rather than find a new local dermatologist I drove myself to Victoria to see Dr. Cox. At one check up he removed a mole from a rather sensitive area. The local anesthesia wore off somewhere around Wharton on the drive back. I didn't mention it to Cindy and when she came home a few days later she was hopping mad to learn I'd done that without telling her. I thought I was sparing her the worry. She thought I was keeping secrets.

A few nights she stayed at the Stouffer because she worked late, was too tired to drive home, and had an early start the next day. I would mow the lawn on Thursday night, when the sun was going down, because it was cooler and because I didn't want to do it on Saturday when we were both off. She continued to make plans for our weekends, but they were often interrupted or postponed because of work. At one point she came home with a company supplied mobile phone, one of those bag phones. We never left home without it. I didn't like having it as a constant tether to work. Still don't.

Cindy wasn't the only one away and working. Between Houston traffic and trying to figure out the meat business I was rarely home before 7PM. One Saturday a month was devoted to doing inventory at the plant. It was not unusual for me to drive down to the plant late at night and help with computer stuff or fill in doing order entry. We both spent a lot of time at work, hers just involved more travel. We used to joke that all the time we spent apart helped to extend our marriage. We had a lot of 'welcome home' reunions and we learned to see our time together as precious, something to safeguard.

I made friends at work, with only a little help from Cindy. Most were younger. They were mostly Aggies, too and they all knew more about the meat business than me. There was Tammy and Delann, who went skiing with us in Ruidoso when Dennis hooked us up with a condo, and Linlea and Grady and Jeannie. There was also Joanna and Helen and Minnie, who had to put up with me as their manager, though the truth was they were probably managing me. I only worked at that plant for a year, but it was an intense one and a great experience. It really prepared me for the ups and downs of the software business that I would experience later, but that's a few stories down the road.

Recently, I mentioned to friends on Facebook that I didn't know if I could continue writing this series. The problem with trying to write a "true" story is that you can't just put in the good things, you have to be honest and that's difficult, especially when only one side of the story is being told. I can't speak for Cindy, I can only speculate. As well I knew her, I never knew her true, deep motivations for many important things. Maybe I just feel guilty about being the one still alive, but it's more like wishing I had taken the necessary time to truly understand her. Knowing is more comforting than speculating.

And then there's the part where I honestly don't remember any Dexter and Cindy stories from that year. Does that mean I'm already losing my memories of her? Or worse, does that mean I didn't make any memories with her when I had the chance? I don't want to say that I have regrets, because that implies intention, that I made selfish choices, that I wasn't being honest. That's a hard thing to confront and, since being honest here is the goal, I need to admit a big regret from this time.

I don't regret the hours we both spent at work. I think we were doing what we thought was best, the responsible thing to do. I missed her a lot, and I'm sure she missed me, too. I think we got a little too comfortable being apart, and over time the 'welcome home' reunions lost their urgency. We had been married for 9 years at this point and things became routine. That's normal, right? It helped us develop independence within the partnership, which made our relationship stronger in the long run, less susceptible to dependency and trust issues. In regard to jobs and finances and family, some of the big stressors, I think we did our best and for the most part, we did well.

My big regret was telling Cindy that I wasn't ready to have children.

When we were first married the logic was quite simple. We couldn't afford children and growing up in a house where money was always an argument there was no way I wanted kids until I was sure we could afford it. By our last few years in Victoria, I couldn't use that as an excuse any longer. We were paying our bills and saving a little and it wouldn't have been too much of a financial stretch. But I told Cindy I wasn't ready to have children, that I was concerned about what kind of parent I would be, that I had a lot of things I needed to sort out before signing up to be a father. That was partially true, and that partial truth became very evident not long after Griffin was born, but it was not the complete truth.

A big part of me didn't want to have kids because I knew where Cindy's priorities would shift. I didn't want to share any more of her. I was being selfish. She never questioned my reasons. She went along with me, putting it off for my sake, but in the end, as often happens when someone is selfish, neither of us got what we wanted. Cindy had her reasons for postponing children, too. I'm sure she did. She could have insisted, and I would have agreed, if only to make her happy. My true regret, however, is not with the decision. It is with the excuses I made. I wish I had been honest instead of selfish.

I am also sure that Cindy would not have my same regrets. She was never one to dwell on the past, to over-analyze history. She was, however, always ready for the next adventure and so we kept moving forward, doing our best. Dallas, specifically Plano, would be our next, and quite long, stop.