Nine Months - 1963

By my job-related way of reckoning time, this was the year I worked for my father and went to work for Celanese in Charlotte. By Brenda's more personal way (if she had a way) this was the year we moved to Sunrise Circle, she got her own car, her father died, and we moved back to Blanton Street.

By any reckoning, it was the year of a Fall.

The year started for me when, arm still in cast from the arm wrestling accident that happened in my last months at Fort Polk, I went to work for my father's construction business. I found that I could hold a paint bucket with my right hand sticking out from the cast and wield a paint brush with my left hand. I could also drive the Corvair and scared everybody but Brenda when I grasped the steering wheel with my right hand while reaching across with my left hand to manipulate the floor mounted gear shift. I continued working for my father after the cast came off - now driving nails as well as painting.

(My father also gave my Uncle Bob Weathers, who was going through a rough period, a painting job. He was a home spun raconteur and I enjoyed working with him. Over the years my father gave many people - including me - jobs when we most needed them. Though the inscription "A Generous Man" that my sister and I had inscribed on my father's grave marker was half ironic it was also more than half true. )

I don't remember what was going on with Brenda during this period. She went to work, came home. I think she kept the car during the day, dropping me off at the job site in the morning, picking me up in the afternoon, sometimes stopping by at lunch. Seeing her smiling shyly in her neat office attire in contrast to my rough construction clothes made feel especially virile and in love with her.

I also don't remember how things were on Blanton St with Brenda's parents. Maybe it wasn't so bad.

In April somebody recommended me for a job with the Celanese application development labs in Charlotte. Possibly because I said something unexpectedly intelligent during the interview I got a job as a technician. Which meant that I would be assigned to an engineer to assist in whatever development he was doing. I went to work in May - maybe May 1st, Brenda's birthday. Again since this is mostly her story, I will not go into what happened to me at Celanese. However, I will note that everyone was pleased that I got the job. Curtis, who took a sad sort of pride in knowing Charlotte, showed me the best way to get across town to the Celanese labs and main office building (located near where South Park would be 10 years later). I will also note that it was at Celanese where my grandiosity bloomed.

Although I don't remember the exact timing it wasn't long after I started doing the nearly 90 mile round trip commute to Charlotte that Brenda and I moved from Blanton Street to a little rental house on Sunrise Circle. The house was owned by her mother's brothers. These brothers, who operated Lackey Buick/Pontiac/Cadillac where Curtis worked also sold us a second car for Brenda to drive to work. It was a hulking black 1948 Plymouth sedan. The car was clean and shiny but left behind billowing black clouds of burned oil.

I don't remember many details from that six month period on Sunrise Circle - before tragedy happened and we moved back to Blanton Street.

Somebody, maybe Bill and Loretta went with us in the Plymouth to the drive-in movie and were nearly asphyxiated by the odors coming from the rear of the vehicle.

I stopped at Joy Creme doughnuts on the way home from work and would eat three doughnuts in the car on the way to the house.

We met our neighbors; some people might have actually entered our house.

A stray dog, whom we named "Purp" took up with us and unless confined would race down highway 150 behind our cars.

Sometimes Brenda and I ate supper at a place (Lingren's?) where Brenda's humble style of placing an order got to be a joke "Please let me have filet of flounder, cole slaw, potato salad - please." Once when eating there with her parent's I, in response to a perceived slight, stuffed my roll in my water glass. I was told later that Curtis had to restrain his natural impulse to hit me. He had a similar impulse the night we were eating with them on Blanton Street and I made a crack about Brenda being my wife now and not his daughter.

I don't know what was going on with Brenda. There was her job, her family, and me - maybe in that order. (It was about this time that I learned Brenda had been giving part of her salary to her parents to help them get by.)

We looked at houses in Charlotte. (A 90 mile commute seemed impossible then although now in retrospect it wasn't so bad - there was very little traffic.) Her mother and father went with us to examine one funky old house (which came known in the mythology of our lives as the "Thrower House").

I don't know how serious the house hunting actually was, whether it was just another fantasy, whether Brenda would have actually left her parents. It seemed that we were growing apart. If my memory (not really a memory, just an impression) is correct Brenda was becoming indifferent - almost hostile. Perhaps I was that way with her. I might have even consciously wondered at the time if somehow - in some odd way, Blanton Street had held us together.

But another way of looking at it was that we might have actually been growing up in this time. Perhaps the perceived hostility and indifference was just us trying to find our way as separate individuals. That is what I like to think. I like to think that we would have moved to Charlotte, made it past that period, reconnected, become a sane and healthy couple. That is what did happen - at least in part - 13 years later when Yancie was born.

But in the meantime Curtis died and we moved back to Blanton Street.