CHAPTER 96: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET -- BOOK TWO: ADULTHOOD BEGINS

 BOOK TWO

ADULTHOOD

SUBURBIATERREANEAN LIFE

CHAPTER 96.  NEW HOME. 1961

 

Two young people, both the only offspring of Blue-Collar Workers, now joined in wedlock, returned from our Honeymoon to take up residence together. I was 20 years old and Lois was 19; neither one of us were of legal age as adulthood came officially at age 21, not 18 back in those dark ages. Yet, we seemed to be highly blessed when you thought about it.

We had a new car and a new home, a
house, a four-bedroom Cape Cod high on a hilltop. We had bought the car and house ourselves. My parents did give us a living room suite as a  wedding gift and while we were driving through the northern states and Canada, my mother and grandmother were in that house painting the walls and making it nice. They also brought my bureau and desk down. Of course they had their setbacks. The walls in the living room were blue and they painted over them with yellow in order to brighten the place and ended up with green. It took them a few coats to correct the color.

 

We arrived back from the Honeymoon at 6:00 PM on September 26. Over that 10-day period we had crossed New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Ontario and Pennsylvania.  I have no idea how many miles, but we stayed in decent motels and hotels and dined in upscale restaurants, plus we hit about every tourist attraction known to man in that territory.  I started out on the trip with $500 in my wallet, I came home with half that amount left. I spent the equivalent of $2,177 in today’s dollars, or just over $218 a day if we went now, and that is probably still not a bad amount.

The next day we slept to noon before I drove into town and left my
film for developing.  We ate supper at my parents, something that was to become a bad habit as we were about to turn into world champion freeloaders over the next couple years just like these goats.

We then brought some of my stuff home from my parents to our new home, you know loot from the wedding; not just from my parents either, for we drove up to the Heaney House and did the same; not eat another dinner, just collect booty. On the next day we transported two more loads of gifts from my parents as well as stopped at Wright’s Furniture and bought a rug, which my dad hauled down to our house in his pickup truck.

On the 29^th we went to the Heaney House and hauled back Lois’s bedroom furniture.

Pretty mundane stuff, not very exciting. To some extent you could almost sum up the next two years the same way, mundane and unexciting. We looked like the poster couple for the times,  our tidy little home in suburbia and our decent paying jobs in the big city. It seemed to defy expectation, really. I had not distinguished myself in high school and it was not a very prestigious school to begin with, just a small country high. Lois at least graduated from a large high schoolon the edge of Philadelphia (Upper Darby). I didn’t think we had any skills and I certainly didn’t when I was handed my diploma. My only ambition was to be a pulp fiction writer.

 But let’s take an inventory because maybe I had more in my
backpack than I thought. Besides a high school education, I had two years of commercial art study. Although, I never pursued a career in the field or as a cartoonist, over the decades to come I did use the training and apply it in other ways. I also had a diploma from Florence Utt IBM school. Again, although at first I went after a technical career I didn’t land one, but eventually the technical jobs came after me.  Those were two good starts, art and technology. I was also being courted by one of the biggest literary agents of the day and that must have said something about my writing skills as rough as they were.

My wife, besides her high school diploma, had an Associate’s Degree from Peirce College (then called Peirce Business School), had been a model and had some intriguing  interests. She told me not long after we first met that she was very interested in auto mechanics.and jazz not to mention she was a very alluring lady.

I was very drawn to that idea of being a mechanic who loved jazz,
because I knew really nothing about either. I liked the idea of a strong, independent woman who had interests normally associated with guys. She did have a few Jazz albums in her collection, mostly Dave Brubeck. She  had his Dave Digs Disney album, so even though I knew little about Dave Brubeck beyond his name, Walt Disney had been another of those childhood heroes of mine, so I could dig Dave digging Disney.  However, it turned out she had little interest in either; that is, auto mechanics or jazz (nor Disney for that matter). She confessed after we wed that she had claimed such things because her father had told her that was what boys were into and saying of she was into those things it would bring guys her way.

 
That aside, she was still a very alluring and foxy lady with other attraction for the boys.

 Meanwhile, as much as I bragged I was such an independent type, who needed no one, we were sponging more and more off my parents. My mother and grandmother, especially my grandmother, were down to our house many times while we were at work doing our cleaning and our
wash.  They were fixing things for us, such as our curtains and also coming regularly to teach Lois how to cook. Several times over the next two years my mom or dad would pick up and bring back my car after taking it to garage for regular maintenance or to have something repaired. It might have been every week my grandmother did our ironing. When we bought the house we felt the distance between families was such it would limit our folks from popping in to visit, but it didn’t seem to slow our constantly popping in on my parents, probably at least once a week if not more in those first two years we were married. Coincidently, our pop-ins often corresponded to meal times, especially dinners.

Discovering how often we did this embarrasses me now; yet Lois

complains that my parents never did anything for us. This complaint, as untrue as it was, happened quite often, although both my parents are dead and what they did or didn’t do doesn’t matter anymore. Her complaints about my parents easily slid over into a rage against her father, who is also deceased or for that matter even her late mother. What can start as a remembered complaint can lead to long rambling rages against old friends and how they insulted us or betrayed us. This side of Lois is something almost no one else has seen. 

Such behavior is called “ruminations”, a word with a genesis in the eating habits of the bovine; that is, chewing the cud. You know, a constant gnawing things over and over. But these ruminations are not the docile kind that relaxes and keep cows contented or where we mull over in our mind what we might have done or what we should have done. These are an obsessive, repeating, torturous remembrances of things past, but always focusing only on the negative. What can trigger these bouts, I couldn’t tell you, only that they can be frequent and they are mixed with a painful reliving of some long ago perceived slight.

Yes, writing my autobiography can bring accusations of living in the past, but I am not. I am not grieving for the past nor am I blaming the past for my present situation in life. I am simply remembering and relating it and trying to be humorous about much of it, because a lot is funny on reflection. My “ruminations” are like a cows, they relax me. But Lois’ “ruminations” are not that. They are not reflective. They are very much reliving the past, and not always correctly. They are dark and destructive. They are rehashing things where someone hurt her and she is allowing the hurt to be repeated and repeated instead of letting it go.