I’m sitting in the Southwest Airlines terminal in Baltimore-Washington airport after a long week. What I’m doing here and why it was long and stressful don’t matter now. All that matters is that I’m sitting here, and its been a pretty successful week, and its a nice space, and the weather has been fine, but I’m kind of barely holding it together.
I remember many years ago, I traveled up here to interview with a professor at Johns Hopkins for their phd program in what was then called applied math. That particular program was focused on computational geometry, an area I was familiar with from my work at GSI. You’ve probably never heard of them, and they don’t exist anymore, assimilated in the long list of mergers and acquisitions across the landscape of American business over the last thirty years. Yes, I said thirty years, that’s how long ago it was.
I can recall another trip, not that much further back when I was about to graduate from UT, with Harris Corp., in of all places, Rochester N.Y. There was no way I was going to live there, though they did make me an offer. But I remember the nice hotel they put me up in, and imagining how in my career I would become an important man and an experienced traveler. That sort of happened, but its not like what I imagined. I also talked with DEC in Boston. Yet another company that doesn’t exist anymore. I remember wearing a hand me down suit that didn’t fit, and that they were all casual and working in overflow space that appeared to have been an old supermarket. I would have been happy to work there, if they’d have had me. But they were working on compilers, and other crap that really wasn’t in my area. I had a greater interest in graphics, and GSI had needs along those lines, and so it seemed more of a match.
So that’s where I went: Geophysical Services Inc., the parent company of Texas Instruments, believe it or not.
It was a different time, when I hooked up with them. They sent a recruiter to campus to hunt for “june brides” as they called us. Getting that job was like falling off a log. And I didn’t even bother looking farther once they made me an offer. And when I look back on it now, oh, hell, I knew then there were different interpretations you could put on it. But anyway, that’s how I came to be living in Dallas of all places. Kind of random and haphazard. Whatever. That was me all over.
Working at GSI and being in the oil industry during that time was a trip. But after just two years I got the bug to go on to graduate school. It took a while to make the preparations, take my GREs, and so on, and then I threw some applications around, figuring what the hell? I sent one to Harvard, which has a more modest computer science department than you might think, and some other places like that, including Johns Hopkins. They responded to some of my relevant interests and experience , and so I came up here to Baltimore for the interview. The campus was in a segment of downtown that in those days was kind of a hell hole. It looked like it might have been in the beginnings of a renewal, but it was ringed by pretty desperate ghettos. The interview with a prof, whose name I unfortunately forget, went pretty well. I do remember we got along. But I had basically no money, and I told him so, that I really wanted to be a part of their program, but I just couldn’t do it unless they gave me some financial help.
That night I called Anita from the hotel room, and I remember feeling at the time like she was a little needy and maybe even controlling. We were living together, we weren’t married yet, but she insisted I call her every night when I was away.
I was happy to hear her voice, but I was a little bothered at the guilt trip.
One time years later, I was in graduate school down in San Marcos. I was going to night school, and one time stayed late after class drinking with a buddy of mine. It got too late for the long drive home and I crashed at his place. I knew she would want me to check in, but I said fuck it she don’t own me. And I just didn’t do it.
The next day she railed over me how she thought I was dead and she was about to call the police.
And I thought it was kind of nice that someone cared about me that much, and that maybe it was one thing to forget, but another for me to willfully neglect her feelings and cause her pain.
You could say it was a training exercise and I caved, but you would be wrong. What happened was that I became more keenly aware of how much I loved her and that I didn’t want her to be unhappy.
So it was thoughts similar to these, though much more nascent that passed through my mind when Anita and I talked on the land line from my hotel room that night many years ago in Baltimore.
…
Ok, so the thought I had was that at first I was a little bit annoyed that Anita made me call her whenever I traveled, and there I was, dutifully checking in, though I knew Anita didn’t want me to leave Dallas, and we even briefly discussed how she could come with me or what we would do if I got in. Or what it would be like to be apart, since we both got so sad when I was gone even for just a few days. How was I going to make this happen? I thought to myself. But I was still kind of a kid myself, and I even remember that I wanted to watch this TV show that was on at the time, called ‘V’.
Not the superior Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, and not the remake of the series they made decades later, and not anything important either. It’s just the kind of thing you remember. This was some miniseries about aliens — I was always a sucker for science fiction on TV — but Anita kept going on and on, it seemed to me, and I was listening to her out of one ear, and watching the show with one eye, and not really getting much out of either.
But then over the course of the next few months, and through an unlikely series of events, I was eventually accepted to the program but was not able to go.
Anita had already been sick, and was beginning to get better. Just at that time she started looking around for a house. I’m not really sure, but I think the way that happened was this: we had this nice little apartment overlooking a greenbelt in Dallas in a place called Bridge on the Creek.
It was our first shack, a great spot, and we enjoyed it a lot. That was where we lived while Anita got her fateful radiation therapy. She lost her hair, not all of it, but a good swath down around the back of the neck. It was enough to shake you up. She also lost a lot of weight. And just like more recently, I even felt a little guilty about thinking, you know, she was looking pretty good. Some kind of diet. And so all that was going on. But then one day, we came home from work to discover we had been robbed.
They just took my musical equipment, and not anything else. Our electronics, Anita’s jewelry, other valuable stuff like that was out and visible. What they did take included a moog synth (the only one that had not actually been designed by Bob Moog), and a pair of Roland Cube amps. I suspect it was this dude who jammed with me and Larry and JB that one time, some loser friend of Larry’s I had never met before, and he seemed kind of strung out. I don’t know, whoever it was, they robbed us, but only took my musical equipment. Weird. I have to tell the rest of that story someday.
But after that Anita was never comfortable in the apartment and really wanted to move. I was fine, as I recall, but if she wanted to go and spend her time looking for some other place to live, whatever, so be it. Who knew she’d come back with a house?.
It was one in a long series of accommodations, acquiescences I made to her over the years, and I knew what was happening, but it all seemed to be happening in slow motion, like it wasn’t really happening to me. I was kind of like an addict. I knew it, but I kept on doing it, because I loved her so much and I wanted her to be happy. Loving someone is like a kind of surrender.
But for some reason, we took just that moment — between the time I had been accepted to Johns Hopkins, but without financial aid, and the time when I got the call that the fellow in line ahead of me declined and the grant they were going to award to him was now available for me — this was a period of about a month or so. This happened to be the time when we decided to buy this little house out in Garland.
Looking back, it was a super dumb move. That house was never worth shit. One time I went back and looked, and found out its not worth much more now than what we paid for it then, thirty years ago now. We had an FHA loan, one of the last as it turns out — but it was what is called a negative amortization loan.
Who in their right mind would do such a thing? To take out a loan that just goes backwards like that? And to do so just at that time? We were complete idiots. Both of us. But I was the bigger idiot, because it was my paycheck that was at the center of everything, and made it possible for us to do more and stupider things, and someone on the outside might say that she was just using me. Hell, you might just as easily say that I was using her too. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.
But that’s like seeing a beautiful flower sport up in your vegetable garden, and calling it a weed. And I won’t deny I had thoughts like these at the time, and people said things like this to me, and all I could say was “if it feels this good getting used, then you just keep on using me, until you use me up.”
We talked about it from time to time over the years, and she might spin the story a little differently. If you want her point of view, just go ask her. Oh, too late for that, I guess. Go read her journal, then. No luck there either, I’m afraid. Though I begged her many times, she never wrote one, so my version of this story is the only one there is any more, to the extent anyone cares, which is to say, not much. I guess that makes this perspective about as true as any other history.
What I’m saying is that I knew all of this at the time, as it was happening, and I didn’t care, because I loved her, and I wanted her to be happy. If a shitty little starter house out in the cotton fields of Garland Texas is what would make her happy, then that’s what we’d get her. I’m not ashamed, and I’m not making any excuses. This is just what happened.
But I thanked my lucky stars that we were able to get out of it — when I took that job down in Austin with Schlumberger. A mere nine months later. The main attraction was not the house itself, but the loan — we were able ot get someone to assume the loan. It was a non-qualifying assumable FHA loan. Another real dinosaur that doesn’t exist any more. It was a negative-am loan at 12%, something that in any sane world should be illegal. But they weren’t and furthermore there were boneheads out there dumb enough to take them.
So some ne’r do-wells who couldn’t qualify for a proper mortgage were eager to buy us out. I remember sitting in our little kitchen with the shark who found them for us. He was an older gent with a big gold nugget ring on his finger. He was some sort of associate of Larry Clodfelder, the recruiter who hooked me up with Schlumberger. Larry was a real character, a boozehound too. He made us some tall drinks over at his place to celebrate me taking that job — he loved me — and I remember him calling after us, as we went to leave — a little uncomfortable about his drinking — and him offering us a couple of “roadies” tall mixed drinks in plastic tumblers for the road. Who does a thing like that?
But as I focus on that period of time during which we bought that house. Was it a month? Or three? What was I thinking?
I feel now like a man waking up after a long period of unconsciousness — like a shipwreck survivor coming to on a desert island, thinking “what the…?”
But its not like I was really unconscious, I knew what I was doing the whole time, or rather I became aware shortly after this episode I’m writing about — what was going on, but I kept going anyway — it became a habit, then I became committed to it, and now that she’s gone, and I travel on business, I sit on my bed in the hotel room at night and think, “this is the time when I’d call Anita.”
And over the years, she changed. She was different. I mean she changed and then changed again, as I had.
At first, as I recall, she seemed a little clingy. She was always kind of childlike. That’s one of the many things I found attractive about her. Like her good friend Debbie wrote recently, she had a lot of “emotional energy.” From a guy’s point of view, she was the kind of person you just wanted to take care of and protect. I know I’m not the only one who felt that way about her.
She was open, trusting, naive perhaps. Many of the things I was not — or thought I was not — but especially after we left Dallas, and were basically alone in Austin, she was pretty attached to me, and didn’t like me to travel.
But the first set of changes came with the kids. She changed physically and emotionally. And I know its a regular pattern, they came to replace me as the center of her life. At first I was a little jealous of them, especially when Monica first came along. She was the whole universe to Anita. Monica’s birth was a watershed event. She represented hope for a future and something resembling a normal life. We had been advised we might have difficulty having children, and had had a miscarriage previously. That was hard. Like I said, Anita was very open and accessible, but she still had a private side, and we were as close to one another as two people can be. Deep down she had dark thoughts, and desperate days, and questions about where it all was going. I mean back there when we were going through all these life changes, which can be challenging enough under normal circumstances. But when you’ve had a life threatening experience with cancer, or some similar sort of issue, it just messes with your head. And then Monica came along, and we thought, “hey, you know, there might be a life ahead for us after all.” I was an immature young man, and like many others, I was unreasonably optimistic, or even cavalier about life, and looking back I was like, “duh.” But you know, for her it was different. Oh, its a beautiful, eternal cosmic dance. And anyone who thinks that women can live without men or vice versa, is like a baby splashing water, and calling it rain.
But then Anita started putting on weight and little by little her behavior was changing. She still hated seeing me leave. Years later, I was working for PSW, and I remember my boss Brian Baisley telling me the story of how he ran into Anita and the kids in the airport shortly after we had made a tearful goodbye, as I went on up to Seattle. And I remember I have a journal entry from around that time, when I was sitting in an airport just like I was today, watching the rain on the darkened window of the terminal, listening to “Angel of Montgomery” on the PA. And its hard leaving your little family. And later on over drinks, Brian said he envied me. He told me how he was divorced and his second wife pretty much just waved him off goodbye, and he said as many others have, “she really loves you.” And I knew it, and it made me proud, and it made me love her back all the more.
But then as time went on, Anita’s behavior started becoming more and more whacky, and someday I’ll have to go back to cite you chapter and verse on it, but I remember she was kind of fierce and angry all the time, and a little bull-headed and had a bit of a temper. And I remember the kids were still little but I could always talk with them almost as if they were young adults even then, and we would talk about it, after an argument, say, of which there were many, and I would ask them “is it me?” and they would say “no dad, mom was acting funny again” and this went on for some years before we figured out it was her thyroid. And it was my idea she have it checked, thank you very much, and it turned out to be cancer, and they took it out. Actually that was a stressful experience in itself — she had to ingest some radioactive crap and spend the night alone in a lead lined room — but that’s another whole story.
And it took a couple more years of bouncing around with the synthetic thyroid medication before they finally got her balanced more or less, and this was a long process, including the time I advised her to see a shrink, after a long series of silliness and nonsense. He listened to her story, and the way I understand it, his jaw dropped about halfway through. Remember like all these docs, he’s just a kid compared to us. So Anita begins to tell her story, and halfway through he jumps up and says “no wonder you have anxiety! You’d be crazy if you didn’t!” and hands her a paper bag full of pills right there on the spot. The way I imagine it, he took a handful himself before falling back in his chair, nearly fainting.
He put her on this drug called wellbutrin, which is an anti-anxiety medication, and it seemed to me that between the synthroid bouncing around and the wellbutrin, Anita was really much more stable, but a little of the fire was suppressed. She wasn’t as passionate as I remembered her being years before, for better or worse. Its hard to put your finger on it, exactly. Just a little less color, and more shades of grey, I guess.
I don’t know if it was just my imagination or what, but the change, though subtle, was definite and it just kind of took a little bit of her edge off. It’s hard to describe. She just kind of cooled off.
And sometimes I would call her when I was traveling and maybe she was tutoring or in the middle of something and I was laying there lonely in my hotel room, but she was sort of just distracted, and it felt like maybe just tolerating me, or something like that. Which I knew wasn’t really true. I knew she loved me, but that’s how it felt, and so it was true in a way, if you know what I mean.
So its been a long road from that hotel room in Baltimore in ’82 to the last few nights, also in Baltimore in ’11. And I don’t know what I feel, but part of it is a terrible sense of loss and emptiness. But the more I think about it, the more I realize its alright, and its like I’ve lived a whole life in that time, beginning, middle and end. And now I’m outside that life, taking its lessons with me into another, riding the crest of the wave of the eternal now, onward into the unknown future.