Eight Months - 1962

A time-related aside.

I don't know how Brenda figured time - what memory markers she used to distinguish old years as new years went by, to divide her life into manageable segments.

For me, it was mostly jobs (after the first couple of years of marriage and except for a few really memorable dates - like 1976 the year Yancie was born). I worked for Celanese from 1963 to 1968, Croyac from 1968 to 1970, Cardinal from 1971 to 1973/74, etc. If asked about 1962 my first answer might have been that it was the year I quit Fiber, worked for my father, spent six months in the Army. (Of course my second answer would have been more complicated.)

For Brenda the the job - or at least the place of employment never changed. New people came to work in her office, some left, some died - but Brenda stayed until she could not stay any longer.

Maybe in her mind those changes were enough to make a year memorable. She must have remembered the year Marget Bowen joined her as the other secretary, or when Genie Moss came. I am sure she knew when her original boss, Hilton Eades left, when Carl Acker became her supervisor, when Vernon - her friend until the end came, when Dean Bridges took over the office. Probably she remembered the slow year when Steve was furloughed and she and Margaret spent most of their time working jigsaw puzzles. And of course the year that they moved to the big open area at the other end of the building and the year the Right-of-Way branch moved into separate quarters in downtown Shelby would have been memorable.

But I'd guess that her memory markers were more personal, less professional.

If Brenda had been asked about 1962, she might have cited something that happened at the office. But more likely she would have said that 1962 was the year she moved back home from the Lafayette apartments. To herself she might have added that 1962 was the year she ended her brief affair with Hal Gardner. (I don't know how she regarded that. Maybe as a lifeboat to which she clung, until it sunk. She might have asked herself why she ended the affair and not the marriage - why, when I said I was going, she stopped me. She might have answered love, might have told herself what she told me, that poor old Hal was not her type anyway, not a flawed "silly shit" like me. I know that he was not the lost love of her life. She even mentioned him casually from time to time over the years - and there was never regret in her voice.)

Also she would have probably mentioned the death of her cat Tom (variously known as Tom-Tom and Tom-Rat). Tom had been her companion through the bad years. When she was alone in the house at 3:00 AM he was the one she held. When Tom died I tried to comfort her, not knowing what to say or even feel. But she wanted nothing to do with me.

Enough of time.

It was probably late winter - February or March when we returned to Blanton Street.

We stayed in her old bedroom. We brought the little rabbit-ear TV from the Lafayette apartment, stored most everything else. (I think we stuffed it all in the living room of the old house that Frank Hamrick owned in downtown Shelby.)

During this period, her parents continued to get drunk. Her father brought home revelers who cavorted in the bedroom next to ours where we stayed with the door shut and the TV turned up as loud as it would go. I learned to sleep when there wasn't anything else to do. I would have left but by this time I was convinced that Brenda would not survive without me (and maybe I suspected that I would not survive without her). I suppose it also occurred to me that it was my fault - at least partly - that we were here.

It was during this period that we got into the habit of going out at night. We went to drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants, anywhere to get away from the house.

Although I had no steady job my father had by this time started to build houses. I worked for him, doing whatever manual unskilled labor there was to do. Using a pick and shovel I dug the foundation footing by hand on the first house. It was maybe 150 feet of ditch one foot wide and in some places several feet deep. I hated it. This physical work might have been the reason I lost weight dropping from 165 to 138 pounds. Depression might have also been a factor.

To avoid the draft I joined the Gastonia unit of the Army Reserves. (I toyed with the idea of joining the Coast Guard - the man at the employment office offered to put in a word. But I toyed with a lot of ideas.) I went in for six month of active duty in July of 1962. Since this is mostly Brenda's biography, not my autobiography, I will not go into great detail about my military experiences. I will note that the first week at the induction center was one of the most miserable times of my life. But on the last morning there, sitting propped up against the side of a truck, waiting to be hauled to our basic training unit I had an epiphany. I discovered that I was not worried about anything that had ever happened to me before. I wasn't worried about Brenda because there was nothing I could do for her. I wasn't worried about anything that might happen later because there was nothing I could do about that. I was content to be sitting half asleep against that truck.

I had a few more such epiphanies while I was in Fort Jackson SC and then at Fort Polk Louisiana. Although I hated the Army, it was a good experience. I gained weight returning to 165 pounds. I learned to care but not care. The trick stuck with me for the next five years or so. I even had one more epiphany.

I also think Brenda was OK during this period. For some reason her parents didn't drink as much. She drove the little red Corvair ("Little Lulu") and made the monthly payments from her own meager salary, squirreling away the cash in reserved sections of her pocket book. I assume that Jerry Carpenter and Hal Gardner might have called, even shown up. I didn't ask. And if they did come by, they didn't stay.

I think we saw each other three times in this period. I had one weekend pass, riding the bus from Columbia to Charlotte and then in my uniform easily thumbing a ride to Shelby. I remember lying beside Brenda under the open window, not sleeping, knowing where I was going the next day, feeling the cooling breeze over our exposed touching skin, marveling at how smooth she was. I almost didn't make it back to the base in time. With Brenda and my sister Michal along to keep Brenda company on the return trip I drove to Columbia as fast as the Corvair would go.

Brenda visited me on post two other times. Once she rode down with my parents in their new 1963 Chevrolet (my father's building business was beginning to pay off). Another time she rode down with my sister. Fixing my sister up with a date (a boy named Noble Slaughter - improbably the son of a general) Brenda and I went somewhere on post. But there was always somebody in sight and she refused to let me touch her.

Despite breaking my arm in a half drunken arm wrestling contest with Gerald Tucker, a big boy from near Plains Georgia, I finished active duty as scheduled not long before Christmas, 1962. My arm still in a cast and sling I rode the bus for 24 hours from Alexandria La to Gaffney SC, where I got a cab for the last 18 miles back to 722 Blanton Street in Shelby.