Surprise ! (or not)- Now

I am not sure how the hat fits into my growing suspicion that there is a surprise party planned for my next birthday. Maybe it is just a classic use of misdirection on her part. Or maybe it is a poltergeist. Maybe I am just crazy. And it could be a combination of the three.  How does a hat I have not worn in ten years or touched in, I don’t know how long, have anything to do with a surprise party? I will get back to the hat later.

I have mentioned before that I have a birthday coming up soon. And I am fine with that. I am also fine with the fact that most of the time nobody remembers it or acknowledges it with more than the occasional card or phone call.  Over my lifetime, I have had plenty of time to get used to missed birthdays.

Ten years ago my significant other planned a surprise party for my fiftieth. And it worked. I did not suspect a thing. Well maybe at the last minute or so I started suspecting when I recognized a couple of cars in the parking lot of a restaurant where we were to have a quiet dinner together.

It could have been an episode of the old television show, “This Is Your Life,” or maybe the Dean Martin Roasts of the 70’s but without the insulting comments.  She had found people I have known from every part of my life; both major and minor players from my past and up to the present. Somehow she had found them and gotten them all together in one place at the same time. Surprise!!!! It was perfect. Then.

It was perfect to have that one-time event, however often I saw any of the party-goers after.  And truthfully it was the last time I have seen or even heard from some of those people. Why try to duplicate perfection? You do not do an updated version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That is one argument I could have given her when she mentioned a month or so ago that she wanted to do a surprise party for my sixtieth. You realize of course, if I know about it, it sort of ruins the surprise? She did, but she also said she needed my help to pull it off at all, surprise or not.

She promised it would be a small number of our closest friends.  By then, she had come up with a list of 15. I tried to talk her out of it. I am not sure I can handle the stress of a large group at this point, friends or not. She assured me it would be fine and I should not decide yet. She said to “Sleep on it and tell me tomorrow.”

Well, by “tomorrow” I was even surer I did not want to do it, no matter how few people were on the list, or how they fit in the continuum of friends of mine.  I had decided to tell her to stop planning for the party at any size when she brought up the subject again. By then the number of invitees had jumped to more than 30.  “I thought of a few more people to invite,” she said. I said that I really did not feel up to 15, and now at 30 or more it really was not any better for me. After a long talk, I thought I had gotten through to her that I was not the same person I used to be.  I thought the surprise party idea had died.  And, it still may be dead.

But I have noticed a few things that made me wonder. For one thing, she has not mentioned the idea again, and it is unlike her to give up on something like this. There are phone calls she is hiding from me. I have walked in on conversations she has had where all participants have quickly stopped talking and looked up at me like they had been caught stealing cookies from a cookie jar.  I have overheard phone calls where ice cream and restaurants are being discussed.  The list goes on.

Then there is the hat.  I promised I would get back to the hat. Like I said earlier, I have this hat I have not touched in a number of years.  I do blow the dust off when I think of it, but I stopped wearing it long ago. It wan never the right size, and wearing it felt funny.

I had been out on a weird Sunday errand which also had made me suspicious since it is a day that I usually stick around the home unless we both go out for some reason.  When I returned, I went in to change back to my lounging around the house clothes.  I picked up a T-shirt to wear, and the hatband of the hat in question fell on the floor at my feet.  It seemed so out of context, I did not recognize it at first. The hat usually stays on the top of a hat rack next to the bed. It would be virtually impossible for it to jump off of the hat, and over to the floor on its own. Yet, there it was at my feet.

I looked at the hat and noticed that it did not seem exactly in the same spot it had been.  I know, how can I be sure it had been moved if I have not touched it recently? I am not sure I have a good answer.  It just looked wrong. It was turned slightly from how it had been.  You notice small things like that when an item has not moved in a long time.

I have to guess that the hat was removed, turned upside down over my clothes, and that the hatband fell off onto my T-shirt, unnoticed by whoever flipped it.  Replacing the hat, they also did not notice the missing hatband or the fact that the hat, when replaced, was rotated just a bit from its usual placement.

I know who did it. I just do not know why, or how it relates to the possibility there is a party planned. But I have to conclude that the hat means something.

Yep, I go for the “crazy” conclusion too.

Birthdays- Now

Most people who know me, even my friends, have no idea what day my birthday is.  It is not like I have not told them before.  They just have other things on their minds when I tell them.  Or other things on their minds on the day. To be fair, I rarely do much, if anything, for them on their birthdays either. Some of this is conditioned response.  Odds are if someone forgets my birthday, I will also forget theirs eventually. That can be the start of a short but vicious circle.

Part of my forgetfulness probably is due to the fact that birthdays seemed to be only of minor importance to my parents as I was growing up.  At least, my birthday seemed of lesser importance compared to others in the family. Maybe that was because of the day on which it falls.  Or the fact that much of that day they may have been hungover.

You all know this day and love it.  This is because most workers get this day off every year.  A good number get it off with pay.  If you must work on this day, you may well get a pay differential of some type.  My mom used to tell me that no matter what else, I would always get a paid day off on my birthday.  I guess she probably had some way of knowing that I would not be in a profession requiring me to work that day.  At the time though, she may have only been trying to make me feel better, particularly for the times they seemed to forget to do much of anything for my special day.  No present? Not a problem.  No cake? Hmm, maybe that is a problem.  “Oh, did I tell you that you will always get a paid day off on your birthday?”

She ended up being right about my being paid to be off, on all but one occasion. There was one time in my working career that I had to work on my birthday. This one time I was required to work to verify that things were really OK following the click over of the computerized clocks into the year 2000.  OK, I guess that gave it away.  The fixes for the now-infamous “Y2K computer bug” had to be checked and verified to have worked prior to running jobs for real in the first work week of the new millennium. Not only did I get paid, but I got paid double-time for less than a full day’s work. My mom would have been proud of me.

I mention all of this now because this particular approaching birthday is a milestone birthday of a sort.  In fact it is a major milestone. I must be old if I am talking “major milestones.”  This one is my 60th.  I am just letting you all know far enough in advance to be able to get your shopping for my presents done before all of the lesser upcoming holidays push my birthday out of your awareness and yes, even your memory.  What’s that? You did not plan to get me anything for my birthday?  Not even a card?  That’s OK, really.  You are in good company.  As I said earlier, very few of the people I know plan to do anything either.

11/22/63- Now and Then

11/22/1963

I can’t believe we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  Well, maybe I believe that much. I just find it difficult to believe that I am old enough to remember this date.

As a class, we had all gathered with everyone else in front of our school’s only television to watch his inauguration a few years before.  My classes followed things in the news. We may have known in advance that Kennedy would be on a trip to Dallas on this day.

I had had a dream the night before.  In the dream, I found myself standing in an office in front of a vacant wooden desk. There are various framed family photos on the desk, and one of them is face down on the desk. In the background, I hear a woman sobbing. I look to my left, and see an empty wooden rocking chair.  I wake up.

The morning of the twenty-second, school goes on normally, at least at first. We are in our separate reading groups.  At some point, I remember our school principal coming to the door of my classroom and motioning to my teacher to come out.  When she comes back, she is visibly shaken.  She calls us out of our groups to return to our usual seats.

She tells us that something terrible has happened.  I know right away that this must involve President Kennedy.

She goes on to say that this thing that has happened is maybe the worst thing that could have happened.  I know then that he is dead.

She tells us the news, and there is a gasp from the class. One girl screams. Another starts to cry. We are released to go home, having been told that details are still sketchy as to how this happened.

I wonder how it is that I knew right before my teacher told us, that she would give us this particular earth-shattering news, and I remember the dream I had. I have had other precognitive dreams since, but nothing of this noteworthy historic nature.

And fifty years later people are still wondering if what we know about this event is really how it happened.

Goodbye old friends- Now

You were right.  The chain saws have not stopped yet.

I am sorry to have to be the one to tell you.

They are taking down the pecan now. At least you are not here to see it go, but you will no doubt see the end of it.

It was the poplar they destroyed earlier. Now the hawks will have no home to come back to.

My tears are for our old friends, and how their loss will impact you.  And for the hawks who have lost their home today.  

And for everything else.

Back to Kindergarten and later to High School- Then

One day while in Kindergarten in Santa Venetia, during show-and-tell time, Jan, the girl who sat across from me at my table, brought in a souvenir from Disneyland- one of those caps with the huge feather that stuck out of it.  She loved that thing and was happy to share it with us.  She had brought it back from a family trip. It was special for her.  The only time I had been to Disneyland was at a time I was too young to have any real memory of it.  I was still in a stroller.  I do think I remember eating this sweet watery stuff. I think it was one of the first times eating watermelon.  Anyway, here was a person who had just been there.  I sort of liked that feather cap too. Maybe I could get one if I ever got back to Disneyland again. After show-and-tell, a guy named Robert took a pair of scissors that we must have been using for some arts and crafts project, and he cut that feather into shreds.  This upset Jan greatly, which upset me too.

The teacher must not have thought it was such a big deal. I do not remember her asking who had done it. It was just a bit more of a disruption that she did not want to deal with.  Or, maybe she saw who had done it, and had decided to not press it just now.  Well, I decided to do something about it.  I kicked at him under the table. He made a big commotion about being attacked.  No one else said a word.  We were all sitting there like angels.  The teacher evidently had had enough of this Robert causing trouble for that day, so she took him away to the principal’s office.

Ten years in the future, Jan’s memory of this event would be the key to her knowing I was not just another high school jerk trying to pick her up.  But that is another story.  There is another girl who had my interest at that time. Gale.  There were always girls I had little crushes on over the years, but she was the first, until much later, that had a pet-name for me. It was “Boo Boo.” OK, no need to laugh. We were only 5. I think I had it bad for her. What did age matter?  I knew when I was hung up on someone. I did not know why I was interested, just that I was.

Before I get too far along, nothing ever came of this other than being a playground “romance.” She may not have been as aware of the impact she had on me as I was of her impact on me, but we never will know what may have been.  After that school year ended, my family moved to San Rafael.  Currently, Santa Venetia is a part of San Rafael, and students can be bused from one place to another. Back then, we might as well have been moving to another country.  I never saw her again, or Jan for that matter.  Of course, sometimes you can never say “never.”  In high school, I met up again with Jan. And a bit after that, I found out what had happened to Gale.

In my freshman math class, I sat behind a girl I met originally when I moved to San Rafael in the first grade.  Her initial claim to fame to put her in this writing is that I got in trouble once helping her cheat on a make-up test of some kind.  Laurie was nice, but not the best of students- in the third grade anyway.  She had been out sick, and had missed a test.  She was scared that she was not ready, and for some reason, I agreed to show her my already graded test paper so she could check her answers.  Yea, right. Suddenly, she was a lot smarter than usual, and I was the one on the hook.

She was not quite devious enough to miss her usual amount on the test- so she would not raise suspicion. Plus, she was done way too fast.  Needless to say, she was caught, and she quickly pointed out her accomplice.  My teacher was shocked that I would do something like this. I promised to never do it again. It was the first time, and would not be the last that I went out on a limb to help a lady in trouble. I never helped her again though.

Back to high school math. Sitting across from Laurie, was a girl named Jan.  They seemed to be friends. People made friends quickly back then.  All it took was seeing the same face a few times in different classes, and you had a friend for life.  So, Laurie and Jan were friends, at least since two classes earlier.  Of course, I had known Laurie long enough to have a history with her, and I knew that Jan was from somewhere else. She had not been in my school before- not Junior High anyway, but I knew there was something about her that seemed familiar.  Then, she gave me the clue.  Or maybe Laurie did, I do not remember.  The clue was that she lived in Santa Venetia. The school district had just decided to allow Santa Venetia kids to go to San Rafael schools if they wanted to.  Could there be another Jan my age from there?

That night, I went to my collection of school class pictures, and found my kindergarten class.  There she was.  The next day, I mentioned to her that I thought she seemed familiar. I think she must have heard that one before. She thought I was trying a line on her. (Even back then, I could have done better than that.) No, I mean it, were you in John MacPhail School in 1959?  She said she had been, but she still did not remember me. Next day, I brought in the class picture, and pointed her out. She then recognized my picture, and realized I was not just a bad pick-up artist. We really had gone to a different school together.  In our remembering things about “then,” we remembered the feather incident.  We have been friends ever since.

Catching up with Gale was not such a happy experience.  In our reminiscences, I had asked Jan if she knew what had happened to a girl named Gale from our class. Jan told me that Gale was in an accident around the second grade, and had a pretty tough time of it for a while. She did not know anything currently about where she was. I was to find out more about her when I was a junior.

I was a photographer for the school, and in demand from time to time to take pictures at non-school events. One of those events was the installation of a new “Faith” in the Rainbow Girls.  I had no idea then, and still do not know anything about any of that, but not knowing the event you are taking pictures of, does not stop you from taking the pictures.  Of course, as I found out, I could not view or take pictures of the event itself, but I could take pictures in the lobby of those involved before the event.

The “Faith” of this ceremony was that same Gale from kindergarten, who had called me by a pet name, and made me hate my parents for a short time for moving me away from her.  She was almost as I remembered, just older. But there was something that I could tell was still not right about her, although it was hard to pinpoint. And she had no idea who I was.  I think she briefly thought I was trying to pick her up, just as Jan had initially.  But, once I mentioned having been in her kindergarten class, she smiled at me and said she was very sorry, but she could not remember anything back that far. Her accident had been severe enough that she had never regained her memory of anything that preceded it.  I told her I was sorry that had happened to her, and I was glad she was OK now and took the pictures of her and her other Rainbow Girls.  This time at least I was able to say goodbye, and as it has turned out, I never saw her again after that.  On the bright side, I was paid to take the pictures- and I did not even have to process them.  They were in color anyway, and I only knew how to do black and white.  I wish I had a copy of one though. It would allow her to have aged in my memory.  To me, she will always be that 5-year-old girl in kindergarten who I chased on the playground and jungle-gym, and who called me Boo Boo.

Walking to school with bullies- Then

For my first through 12th-grade school career we lived in a fairly nice area of San Rafael, on the edge of the Dominican area, but not really in it.  The Dominican area refers to the neighborhoods roughly surrounding the Dominican Convent, back then anyway. I am not sure the convent is still active, but there is a college there now. This was a desirable area, but we were not quite in the nicer part of it. We were a bit on the edge, down over a ridge from the hill that was on the border. If we had been a bit further up the hill, or anywhere in the sight of the convent area, it would have been obvious we were in the Dominican neighborhood. But we were too close to the commercial area of town. This was a plus for my mother, who had to walk where she had to go during the week when my father was not around to help with errands. And, that was most of the time.

It was good for us too.  Elementary school was only a 10-15 minute walk; depending on how slow you took it, or how many people tagged along in groups slowing each other down.  Most of them did not take the last little dip out of the hills like I did.  Not that this was a real big deal. I knew some kids came from more financially stable families than I did.  And I knew there were a few who were in far worse conditions.

There were those on bikes. Sometimes they would walk the bikes along with those of us who did not have them.  Then there were car people.  I could see the use of cars in bad weather, but these guys always were dropped off. Come to think of it, I do not remember getting rides even in bad weather.  It must have happened at some point.  But walking was what I did.  No rides in the car for me. No bike for me. I did not even learn to ride a bike until 6th grade or so.  And I did not have my own until I was old enough to get a job to buy one used, which I still have.

Junior High was about 2.4 miles away.  If it had been 2.5 miles, I would have been able to ride the bus. The cut-off point was about two houses further towards the end of my street.   Because of that, I had to either walk or walk. At the time, my father worked about a half-mile from the school, so I rode with him to work in the mornings, and then walked the rest of the way.  I got to walk the entire distance home.

High School was easier since it was only two blocks away.

Walking to Elementary School was not always without incident.  Some kids just would not adjust well to anyone else that was not in their group, or who was not quite like them in some way.  For a while, it seemed I had a small group of hill kids after me.  It was like they did not want me to be on their hill, not even to get to school and back. I could handle them just fine, but it did get old.  Name-calling, pushing, and the typical things kids do to assert the feeling that they are better than someone else.  Of course this was much more mild bullying than anything suffered by today’s kids.

At a certain point, this taunting spilled over to the playground during recess.  At this point, it had become a bit more physical.  They would actually grab me from behind, and while one held my arms, the others would poke at me from the front, threatening to grab parts of me that I knew would hurt if grabbed. Of course, with odds like that, I was always going to lose.  Except for this one time. One time when one of them came up behind me and grabbed my arms, I fought back.  It must have been before he got both arms, because I had a free arm, and caught the guy by surprise when I quickly jabbed my elbow down into his stomach.  This must have been a total shock to him.  

They never bothered me again.  

A dream of a deceased friend- Then

Cecilia was one of the first friends I made on my own when I moved here. 

I met her at a local bagel shop where she worked. After a few days, I got up the nerve to ask her out. She already had plans to marry. This news was a bit of a disappointment, but at the same time, I knew her, and that was just fine with me.

I had not really known her long when she invited me to her wedding. The night before the wedding, I had a dream that I had gotten to Napa a bit early and had gone into a cafe near the church to kill some time.  She came in, and sat across from me.  We had coffee, and talked about the wedding.  She started crying because as she told me, her time here was to be so short. Then, I figured she just meant that she had to go get dressed for the ceremony.

The next day when I arrived in Napa, I saw a couple of restaurants in sight of the church. I am not sure I found the one that might have matched the dream, but I thought about that dream as I sipped a cup of coffee waiting until it was time to go to the wedding.  Unlike the dream, Cecilia did not come in to visit with me. I am sure she had other things to worry about.

In the receiving line after the ceremony, she introduced me to her friends as her soul mate, or the one she would have had one last fling with before getting married, or the one she would have married if she had not met her husband first.  I am not sure I would have been satisfied to be just a last fling.

This is getting way too sad to write about now.  Even after more than 30 years.

Cecilia and her husband were building a life together.  Part of it included me, for a while.  I helped them put in their kiwi orchard. They invited me to dinners on many special occasions, and sometimes just because I was a friend.  We went to Halloween celebrations downtown when it was still just a local party.  We went tubing and on bike rides. We watched football. We talked.

She was beyond happy when I had found someone who she could tell, made me happy. She did not know my entire story, but she knew that I had been hurt by things in my past, and she could see that I was truly happy now. But now that I was in a new relationship, we went through a time we did not see each other as frequently as before.

Cecilia was teaching horse riding, and trying to finish school so she could become a veterinarian. And she had a part-time job at a local tack and western wear shop.  Judy and I ran into her near that shop downtown one afternoon. Cecilia told us she planned to get together with us soon, just in case something happened and we never saw each other again.  As it turned out, we never did see her again.

Cecilia was killed by a drunk driver a short time later. Up to that point, I had never bothered with my seat belts in any vehicle I was in.  That changed after what happened to Cecilia. She had been transporting two students home after a horse riding lesson and had made sure they both had their seat belts fastened.  A vehicle driven by a drunk driver went into her car, head-on. She had not bothered to secure her own seat belt, even though it was a rule with her that her passengers were belted in. There is no guarantee that she would have made it if she had worn her seat belt, but she would have at least had a chance.  Her two passengers got out with only minor cuts and bruises.  

Thinking about the dream, and her feeling that something might happen before we saw each other again, well, what can I say? Sometimes life is very sad.  And sometimes it almost seems that we know in advance that certain things might happen. Like my feeling that I had to get past that car going to Big Bear.  Now the dream about Cecilia’s time here being short, and her own feeling that something might happen before we saw her again.  Like so many other things.

Hello Cecilia.  I will always remember you.

I have very odd dreams at times.  After Cecilia died, I had a few dreams that involved her. I would dream I was visiting her house.  Her husband would be there, but not Cecilia. I had no sense in those dreams that she had died. She just was not around.

Then, one time she interrupted a dream I had been having of my days back in college.  I was about to leave Mulford Hall, the main Forestry building at U.C. Berkeley, and there she was walking towards me, coming up the stairs, opening the main doors as I was headed out.  I did a double-take in the dream.  Suddenly I was very aware of things; where I was, who she was. None of it jived in my head, since I knew two things. If I was really in Berkeley, she should not be there because I did not know her back then.  And the big kicker; that I knew she had died.

Sometimes things in dreams do not jive, and you just go on knowing that it is only a dream, if you even know that. This time, it occurred to me that this must be a dream.  When I realized that, the building, the outside world- it all faded into nothingness.  But, Cecilia was still there and still coming towards me.

There I was, stammering, ‘why are you here, how are you here, are you really here?’  She came up face to face with me, grabbed my arms just below my shoulders, and said forcefully, ‘I want you to know that am OK. There is something I have wanted to do for you.’ And then, without saying anything else that I remember anyway, she pulled me towards her.  We were already about as close as we could be, but she pulled me closer, and then we merged together.  What followed was warmth, tingling, swirling flashes of light, a feeling of floating, of being- me, of being her, of being us together.  Then it was over.

Whether there is anything to the belief some have in an afterlife, who knows? If there is no afterlife, then this was just a very beautiful dream about a deceased friend.  If there is an afterlife, maybe she really came to me to tell me things were OK.  One thing though, before this I had been having trouble dealing with her loss. And dealing with her loss became easier after this experience, dream or otherwise. I have had no further dreams of her of any kind.

Assuming there is no afterlife, maybe the way this works is that at some point, your subconscious mind literally merges the known memories and feelings for a deceased person into your own mind.  Maybe this dream was a representation of that merger.  I can accept that from a scientific viewpoint. But part of me still wants to believe that it was really Cecilia who visited me that night.

And that she is OK.

First parking ticket, and a new car- Now

A few weeks ago I got my first ever parking ticket. It was actually the first ticket of any kind I have gotten the entire time I have been driving.  This was traumatic to some extent.  My perfect record was gone.

This includes a couple of years when I was driving professionally, first as a messenger/delivery driver in San Francisco where all the other drivers had speeding and parking tickets eating into their profits.  I took it slow and was careful where I parked. I made decent money and did not have to pay any back in fines or higher insurance premiums.  This job was followed by brief stints as a cab driver and a blood lab courier.  All with no tickets.

The closest I ever got to a ticket was down around Monterey as I was heading to a delivery.  I had miss judged a “dip” at the end of a driveway and was going a bit too fast. Hitting the dip must have cracked one of my headlights.  It was not quite dark yet but my lights were on.  I had not really noticed the problem yet.

I saw a police vehicle approaching in the oncoming traffic.  He did a U-turn after passing by and pulled me over to inform me I had a bad headlight.  He must have been able to tell it had just happened, and clearly I had not intended to disregard vehicle codes even though my truck was in pretty rough shape otherwise.  He gave me a fix-it ticket. Those don’t count unless you ignore them. And I did not ignore this one.

I could not ignore the parking ticket either.

I really had thought I had plenty of time on my meter.  Some of these LCD display meters are a bit touchy evidently.  Although it looked like I had 42 minutes on the meter, it turned out to be closer to around 12 minutes.  I will never actually know though.  What I do know is that I took my time in Peet’s that day, never thinking that I would be in any way late getting back to my car.

When I left to continue my errands, there it was under my wiper to greet me.

I am not saying that this ticket in any way informed my desire to get rid of this car.  That was totally a coincidence. It just worked out that way.

My car had been a near ten-year-old Prius.  It was doing fine as far as anything I knew anyway.  But with a hybrid and its multitude of electronics and computers, how would I really know?  The truth is, it was starting to make me nervous.

You always hate to hear noises you cannot understand.  Some of the noises, I had even asked about.  I was told to ignore it, it is nothing important.  I could still hear this noise though.  It can’t be good if you still hear the noise, whether or not you are told to ignore it. 

A Prius makes some noises that are totally different than any other car, and that much is normal.  It is the additional ones or the lack of the normal ones that you have to worry about.  It was not just about the noises though.

At ten years old, things start needing replacement that can add up to a bit of money.  This is a bit more disconcerting when you are dealing with a car that is more complicated in its basic engineering than normal non-hybrid cars.  Plus they have all the other stuff to worry about that a normal car has.  It is a double whammy. No way to win, especially when mechanics tell you that that noise you wanted him to check is nothing to worry about.  Does he know any more than I do? Really? It is not his car. He will not have to pay for the repair no matter what that noise turns into.

The tires were pretty near done also. And I never liked them, so anything I found to replace them with would have been even more expensive than they had been.  And with my luck, a few months after buying a new set of tires, that noise I was trying to ignore would turn into something catastrophic. Or I would just decide to buy a new car anyway. Then the new owner of my trade-in would have a tired older hybrid with great low mileage tires and a few other fixes. But it would still be making that noise no one else cared about.

You can see the dilemma I faced.  I had to replace it before it got beyond repair.

I bought the new Prius on Saturday.  I drove by the dealer’s used car lot the following Monday morning, and there was my old Prius right out in the most prominent spot in the lot.  I have to say, it looked pretty good.  It was clean and polished.  The murky headlight covers had been cleaned up. I could not tell if they had replaced the cracked fog light. Both the cracked fog light and the foggy headlight lens were known defects in some 2004 Prius cars. The problem with mine was that they did not go bad when the dealer would still have had to fix them. I wondered about the various noises if the mechanics had realized that they really could easily make them go away so the new owner would not ask about them.  Maybe it was not really such a tired old Prius after all.  I was tempted to stop in to visit, at least to see the asking price.  But I had already passed the entrance.  On the way back would be better. Maybe I could find the entrance in time going the other way.

I guess there must be quite a market for used hybrids.  A few hours after seeing it on the lot, on the return trip, it was already gone.

If the new owner of my old car is out there, I hope that your new/used Prius serves you as well as it did me. And I hope that noise I was worried about was as minor as they told me it was.  

It was really not such a bad car.

One summer later, and the end of my forestry career- Then

I was divorced, no job, and living on fumes of my new bank account.  One more forestry job was in my future.  This one was in Placerville. Scott would be my crew chief again.  I was not really into any of this anymore.  But, I had to work.  I had to do something to get my mind off of what had become my life. Instead of determining what had killed trees as we had done the previous summer, this job was all about finding out why in some areas trees do better than in other similar spots. The part of this I never liked was that it involved selecting the healthiest tree in the area to cut down for closer study.

The competition to get forestry jobs must have been stiffer than I knew about. We had an OK crew. We worked pretty well with each other as a rule. But, when my Forest Service boss came up to see us in the field in action, suddenly no one would do what I suggested.  Nothing says trouble to your supervisor faster than if people you are in charge of refuse to do what you request in this sort of fieldwork.  They had never had trouble when I was doing this before. And when they did my part of it, I never questioned their decisions.

This I would find out much later, was a calculated attack on me, designed to ensure that they would get a job next year, at my expense. It worked. The next year, I re-applied for this job, and was turned down.  Scott thought it seemed fishy to him that I would not be re-hired. He spoke to the other crew members and they admitted setting me up to look bad in front of my boss. My old boss reconsidered when Scott went to talk to him about it and they later called to offer me the job if I still wanted it. I turned him down. My forestry career was done.  But, it was good to know that Scott, who had left me to almost die on a hillside in San Bernardino, had gone to bat for me.

Part of the reason I gave up on forestry was that I had had it with the lifestyle, and job uncertainty.  I would spend all “off-season” trying to convince a potential employer that I was done with forestry, so please hire me. Then I would have to dump that and go to a forestry job if they called me. I also disliked the politics of the job having such an impact on whether you worked or not. Add in the remote areas you would have to work, being near people who seem friendly until they are up against you for the same limited job opportunities. It just stopped being fun, if it ever had been fun.

My last summer forestry job in Placerville was about healing myself.  I took a step towards that by telling myself I was not to blame for what happened to my marriage.  I took a giant leap backward by agreeing to go on a date with a friend of a friend of a co-worker.  I had been told this friend was not involved with anyone.  This turned out to be false.  I was told she was looking for a nice guy. Evidently, that was also not true.  

I asked her out to dinner.  She accepted the invitation.  We talked. We ate. We laughed.  I felt better after my past few months in which I felt I was slowly dying inside.  Back at her place to say goodnight, she moved in to kiss me.  And it was not just a friendly kiss on the cheek. Not that it was an all-out passionate lip lock, but I do not kiss like that unless it has the potential to be serious.  Putting it with what we had said about spending more time together, I got the idea she wanted to spend more time with me.

Evidently, that was the last thing on her mind.  After a week of not returning my calls, the mutual friend filled me in. She was just using me to make her boyfriend pay more attention to her, She had not really wanted to go out with me but did so in order to not disappoint me. That is always a real boost there. Just what I needed to hear after my marriage and how it had died. 

Hey, just say no.  The rejection upfront can be tough, but not as much as being rejected after you think there is potential for something in the future.  And knock off the kissing unless you mean it the way it seems.  Was it paying back for the dinner? I would rather not be paid back that way. If payback is needed, I take cash or checks with a photo ID. As you can gather, I never had a chance to tell this woman how I felt about our very brief dating adventure. Anyway, what was I thinking? I clearly could not be ready for anything like this yet. I found out a bit later that she had done a similar thing to Scott. But, Scott, being more the player than I, got a bit more involved than I did. He was just what she was looking for to make her boyfriend jealous.

Overall, it was a calm summer compared to the previous one.  No near-death plane or car trips. No ring losing or wife losing experiences. If you don’t include my co-workers stabbing me in the back, or my brief return to dating, it was pretty boring.

The end of my first forestry job, the end of summer and the end of my marriage- Then

As my summer job as a forest pathologist neared its end, one of our sites required us to go down a loosely packed mix of dirt and rocks on the way to our designated dead tree.  It was the sort of place you cannot really walk down. You just get down on one leg, and put the other out in front of you, and slide.  This was a plot that took a long time to get to.  We all did our individual jobs like the well oiled loosely organized machine we had developed into by then.  Later as we were nearing our base camp at the end of the day, I noticed my wedding ring was gone.  I checked to make sure I had not lost it in the jeep. I checked all my pockets.  I asked if anyone had seen it anywhere.  I then accepted that it had been pulled off my finger as I slid down the hill earlier and it was gone.  There was absolutely no chance of getting it back.  When I called my wife later that night, I told her about the ring.  I thought she would be upset.  She was not.  She said we would talk about it when I got back home.  Not that we would replace it.  We would talk about it. 

Just after that, we had a short holiday.  My in-laws had invited me to a Giant-Dodger baseball game.  It was a nice diversion.  Of course, the Giants lost.  On the way back up to Big Bear, the summer had one more try at killing me. 

I was heading up into the mountains and found myself behind the same slow driver for quite a while.  I decided that if I did not get around him, I would spend the rest of my life looking at his brake lights.  I had a chance to get around him and took it.  Passing was difficult due to heavy traffic coming back to the valley after the holiday.  Within a couple of minutes, after I passed, I rounded a corner, and there was a long straight-away. The downhill lane was moving, but very slowly with rare spaces between.  And, I noticed a car out in my lane, passing a bunch of them on the straight section. 

I slowed down and got as far onto the shoulder as I could, aware of the chance the driver I had passed could plow into me as I attempted to avoid the downhill passer hitting me head-on. 

Somehow, the passing downhill driver managed to force his way into the downhill traffic. He appeared terrified. 

I pulled back into the uphill lane.

A mile or so further up the hill, I realized that car I had passed earlier wasn’t behind me. A bit further up from there, I saw an ambulance responding to a call with lights and siren. The downhill traffic was bumper to bumper, but my lane was clear. He used that. It made me wonder what had happened. 

This return trip after the baseball weekend turned out to be one more close call in a seemingly never-ending list of close calls during this initial forestry job.  A pretty close brush.   

Maybe the summer had been trying to tell me something. 

The drive home at the end of the job was uneventful.

And somehow, it came about that my wife and our friend (her co-worker) and I went to dinner shortly after I got home.  The dinner was fine.  I had stories.  They had stories.  How was it that he was there again (still)?  I was beginning to feel like I should try to call a friend to get a date.  Not for him, but for me.  How is that for foreshadowing?

We were providing transportation that night.  We dropped him off at his apartment.  And, by dropping off, you might get the idea that we drove up, left the motor running as he got out, and we waited just long enough to see him go upstairs before we drove off to our own apartment.  Normally, that might have been the way it should have gone.  But not this time.  He and my wife got out. (Huh?) They both stopped just close enough to the front of our car that I was not able to see higher than their shoulders.  And then they hugged each other. It looked like a very close hug, and it was a long hug. I could only guess as to if there had been more to it.  

She claimed later that it was just a friendly hug thanking him for all the time he had kept her company over the summer when I had been gone.  Well, I had seen my share of friendly hugs, and this was about the friendliest hug I had ever seen her do to anyone other than me.  I tried to let it go.  She was right.  He had helped her through the summer.  I knew how lonely it had been for me.  It had to be worse for her, still being around things that reminded her of me.  I wish I had had someone to keep me from thinking too much about her.  I hope this does not sound too bitter.  At the time, I knew nothing for sure, but I was beginning to wonder how much comfort from a friend might be too much.  

There were other things that seemed to be clues, if I had the eyes to see them, or the heart to accept them. 

At home I noticed that all of the pictures that had me in them were put away.  I asked her about that, and she said the only way to deal with me being gone was for her to convince herself that I was not around anymore, as in dead.  I think she even used those words.  She had to think of it as if I had died. And there had been numerous times I could have died if she really wanted to know those stories. It was just too hard for her to be reminded of me every time she went through the house. 

I was completely the opposite.  I wish I had had more pictures of her with me.  Oh well. Everyone deals with stress differently.  Some spend hours gazing longingly at photos.  Some have affairs while the pictures stay in a drawer.  And, I guess she is right.  If I had been having an affair, the last thing I would have wanted to see, or to be seen by my co-affair partner, would be a snapshot or two of my wife.

Of course, this was not as simple as it seemed on the outside.  It never is simple.  I know this caused her a lot of stress in the end because she came down with a case of mono.  All of that is still in the future though.  I was back, and we seemed to be getting along just fine.  I was happy, and I thought she was, too.  She acted happy, anyway. 

Then he invited us to go see a friend of his up east of Sacramento who had been building a log house.  There was also some sort of a site in the area that my wife was interested in related to her masters’ research project.  Her project had to do with the effect of smoke on retarding the growth of certain fungi.  The graduate student she worked with on this project was to become an important figure in her future.  The site was in a recently burned area that she wanted to survey. 

We met her friend up there, and were introduced to the cabin builder.  This turned out to be the most uncomfortable and the worst weekend of my life, up to that point.  Exactly how it all came up, I am not sure I remember exactly.  But early on, I realized my wife knew too much about the house and the area to have just been seeing it for the first time as I was.  And, I was left alone a bit too much.  I think our host must have mentioned something about this to me, like how good a sport I was to come up with them.  Maybe he thought that they had already told me they were together. During this weekend I finally became aware of just how being friendly can become too friendly. 

After we had gone to bed, I mentioned our host’s comments about being surprised to see me along on this trip. That was the start of officially marking the ending of our relationship. 

I remember being up most of the night talking to her about what had gone on over the summer.  It had all started innocently enough, for her anyway.  They had gone to the beach just to do something as friends might do.  I never went to any event anywhere with any woman, or even a friend who was not a woman either of the two summers I was away during my marriage, but that is just me. The only place I went socially that summer just happened to have been a baseball game with her parents. And they had probably known about everything at that point.

But, he and she went quite a few places, it seemed.  Early on, they had talked about couples in general, and us in particular.  And then, one thing led to another, and she suddenly was admitting to him that she had never enjoyed the more physical aspects of marriage- not at all. Not even one time. She did not even know that she was supposed to enjoy it. I guess, one thing led to more things, and suddenly, he was telling, and or showing her how to fix that. How is that for beating around the bush? This is a family-friendly blog after all. 

In theory at this point, she was still intending to be with me.  The problem was that I was not him.  She was not able to put what she now was able to feel with and for him into the context of feeling it with me.  She claimed that she still wanted to try.  I told her the only way it would work was for her to no longer have any sort of physical relationship with him. If she wanted to make it work with me, it would have to mean that I was the only physical contact.  Is that not a totally understanding attitude? I was not even sure it was a good idea for us to remain friends with him at that point, but I never brought that up.    

She claimed she wanted to try to get past this, but she could not do it.  Or she did not want to do it.  ‘Can’t a person love more than one person?’ she would ask me.  Sure you can. Love is limitless.  But the physical expression of it is another thing, at least for me.  That would have to be limited.  This is one part of our relationship that I would not share with someone else.  We spoke of divorce, but it was too soon to decide yet if it would come to that. 

It was decided sooner than I ever would have believed. I think that a quick divorce had always been the plan. She just was giving me time to adjust to the idea. Divorce was the only solution after all. We made the initial arrangements, and started splitting up the household “things.”  We duplicated what we would both needed.  We packed it all up. I got my own apartment, and moved out.  We told our parents.  We told our friends. It was one last project we did together, as flawlessly as all of the others.  

At this point, I started hearing things that friends or family had seen going on, and wondered about.  My old forestry camp roommate had seen my wife on the back of a motorcycle with some guy while I was gone, on more than one occasion.  And, my father had tried to call our apartment to check in with her and to see if she was OK, and not gotten through for a while. Then when he did, he was sure that he heard a guy in the background.  Anyway, no one understood how the perfect couple could break up.  What could I tell them?  I was not really sure at that point myself.  Why hadn’t she told me?  Why was it so easy to tell someone else details of the most private portions of our life and how she felt, when she could not tell me?

We saw each other a few times right after I moved.  It got too hard for both of us though.  There was just too much baggage to act like we could go on as friends, knowing what had happened.  Then she got sick, so I barely saw her after that.

By the following April, actually on April Fool’s Day, I received notice that our divorce was final.  I remember actually getting the humor in that.  Sometime in June, she sent me a copy of the invitation to her wedding, which had already taken place.  I am not sure I really would have wanted to see the invitation if I had had a choice, but that is what she did.  She sent that, with a couple of lines saying that she wanted me to know, but did not want me to find out from anyone else first.  I doubt I even knew anyone else at that point who would have told me if they had known.  

It is funny that one excuse for her having done what she did was that she felt trapped by being married.  I guess marriage itself was not the real problem. It was that her marriage had been to me.