Upside Down

In September of 1971, when I got the news that my maternal grandmother Leona had died, I was very sad. It was a Friday afternoon and Bill and I arranged for his parents, Bill and Mary, to watch our kids while we flew down to Burbank. Leona had been hanging laundry on the line in the midafternoon sun and had collapsed and died from a heart attack. She had been found by May, the neighbor from across the street who had noticed that Leona’s dining room window shade had not been raised by the time May had come home from work. May was sweet that way. She always would look in on Leona for a few minutes every day, not outstay her welcome, but she was a dependable and reliable companion. She called the ambulance, and called my mother Joan and took care of her dog, Cinder.

It was early September, I swiftly packed a suitcase for Bill and I, and when we got to Oakland airport for our flight we were chagrined to see that my mother and sister Cindy were on the same flight.

At this time I was still not talking to my mother. Most messages flowed through my older sister Judy, who delighted in the drama of being the go-between. I was being bombared by my mother-in-law Mary with four to six telephone calls a day always with precise instructions on minutae of details that flittered through her mind. She drove me nuts, but I was always polite and as agreeable as I could be.

My mother had backed herself up the emotional tree of --- “don’t come to me if you need anything” as her final parting shot when I departed with Bill that fatal June in 1963. On the other hand, I was up the emotional tree of --- “come hell or high water, I ain’t asking for ANYTHING”. And eight years later, I was proud to say I had not made any contact since it would have been construed as ‘she won’.

Needless to say, that flight was an awkward situation. We kept to the back of the plane, stayed back while my mother got her luggage and a cab. We waited a few minutes and got our own cab to my grandmother’s nearby house. Bill and I got out of the cab and knocked on May’s door, not wanting to intrude at my grandmother’s house and disturb my mother. May put us up on her couch and then brokered the meeting between my mother and Bill and I. Bill and I stood around, quietly, and my mother finally acknowledged that we were there and that my most favorite person in the world had died. My mother acknowledged that she and I shared that bond of having been loved totally and unconditionally by Leona and that we each would have enormous holes in our hearts from missing her.

Harvey, Judy, Jack and Jan arrived on the next flight down from the Bay Area and my grandmother’s house filled up.

Neighbors, seeing all the cabs arriving, started coming up to the front porch and standing around quietly talking. Cindy and Jan started pouring drinks for everyone and Jack got into my grandfather’s car and went to the store for supplies. It was going to be a long sad night -- a sort of traditional irish-style wake.

This is the only funeral tradition my family has. We have the body cremated economically with no church or graveside doings. Then we gather up our photographs, get together and drink and talk about our sadness and share our memories with our family and friends.

We stayed the weekend in Burbank. I gave our address and phone number to my mother and we departed. The bridge was starting to be rebuild between us. My mother would call periodically and Bill and I brought the kids over to my mother’s house on Harvey’s birthday in mid-October. We celebrated my mother’s birthday in mid-November and we had a hugh Thanksgiving buffet and Christmas day gift exchange.

I think that Bill and Mary were miffed that Bill and I were back in contact with my side of the family. Mary started putting pressure on in her usual petty, envious and emotional way, trying to reassure herself that she had not lost something valuable.

Her fear was very apparent. I think her fear was – if I could last eight years before talking to my own mother, how long could I last if I got mad at HER? She was afraid that I could successfully keep my kids and my husband away from her in the same way. And she was right. I could have, but just wouldn’t. So I put up with her constant nagging and prodding and emotional outbursts.

That weekend at my grandmother’s in Burbank, I unexpectedly got pregnant with Janel. I was upset and definitely did not want to be having a third baby. Diana was going to be starting school the next year and I thought I could see the light at the end of the tunnel that would allow me to go back to college and get my degree. Bill had been going to college at night and was almost finished and it was supposed to be my turn next. With another child on the way, college receded five more years away from me.

Now I can laugh and call Janel our Aspirin Baby. I had a IUD as a contraceptive device and when you take a lot of aspirin, as I did from the headaches of crying over my grandmother’s death, it neutralizes the effect of the IUD. And thus, I was pregnant.

I had a long conversation with my mother on the phone, listing all the pro’s and con’s of having another baby. At the end of the conversion, my mother said, “If you keep this baby, I promise you, they will be a special gift to you.” Boy, was she right! I dithered for another week about the decision to terminate.

One Friday afternoon in early October, I was driving our Datsun sedan to the grocery store when it stopped dead in the street (blown breaker on the fuse for the gas pump?). I got out and pushed the car out of traffic and over to the side of the road. A cop stopped and figured out that tripping the breaker in the fuse box would fix it. I started the car up and drove home.

That night, I started bleeding. I thought I was having a miscarriage. Bill took me to St. Mary’s Hospital in Hayward. We had just restarted our Kaiser insurance, but my ob/gyn doctor practiced at St. Mary’s and was not a Kaiser doctor. He was away that weekend so we had to rely on the emergency crew at the hospital. It was a Catholic hospital. I was possibly ‘spontaneously aborting’, so the two doctors on call took one look at me, said, “We can’t help you. Just lay here on this gurney and we will see what happens. We can’t give you anything. Not even a blood transfusion. We don’t know what is happening.” Bill and I put up with this for about 6 hours. Then I got up and walked out. The next day I called Kaiser, got a same day appointment and went and met Dr. Ted Miller.

After my experience delivering Michael with having had 18 different doctors examine me over the long weekend of my labor and none take charge of my situation until it became critical, I just could not face the low quality of care at Kaiser again. I opted out of Kaiser for Diana's delivery and it had cost us a second mortgage on the house, but she had received high quality care when she was delivered a month early.

Dr. Miller was a treasure for a Kaiser doctor. He lived in Livermore and we lived in Dublin. He swore he would always be there for me and even beat me to the hospital in Hayward if I needed him. He guessed that my IUD had punctured my uterus when I pushed the car.

He asked me if I wanted to have this baby. I thought about it, and faced with the thought of losing the baby, I just knew I did want it. So, he started progesterin shots to keep things going and to get the bleeding to stop and allow me to heal up. He watched me closely and I had to carefully walk, and then rest, with the emphasis on rest, down on my back, a lot.

At seven months I had false labor, he beat us to the hospital and did something unusual. He started an alcohol IV. He wanted me to get slightly high and get very relaxed. It stopped the labor. I went home with an offical prescription for 3 oz shots of 180 proof full, strong unmixed bourbon, whiskey, or vodka every 3 hours for 3 days.

I was slightly woozy for those three days and the final night was a parent-teacher evening for Michael at school. He had worked very hard making a tall building structure out of blocks and so wanted me to come down to the school that night and see what he had done. Good judgement had flown with the umpteenth shot of vodka that day, so I got in the car, camera in hand and drove the kids to school. I managed to park the car, walk with dignity to Michael’s classroom, oooh’d and aahh’d over his building, take 3 pictures and then get the kids back home safely.

It was only then when I realized what a fool I had been. I took some aspirin for the hangover and stopped taking my ‘shots of booze’. I continued to have bouts of false labor from the seventh month, so I spent more and more time in bed sleeping and reading. Janel was born in May of 1972. Michael was seven and Diana was five.

I had had nightmares that Janel would be born with that IUD embedded somewhere on her body, but she was perfect and because it was a C-section, Dr. Miller spent another 90 minutes after the birth reconstructing from my other two C-sections, doing removal of the IUD, and doing a tubal ligation as a permanent contraception solution for me.

Bill and I had Janel baptized at St. Raymond’s in Dublin and we started participating in parish community life. My mother continued to call periodially and we often went to see her in San Leandro with our kids for family get togethers. We had to work out a visiting schedule between Bill’s and my family to share our participation of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

I would dread the Christmasses with Bill’s family. Generally, it meant going to his sister’s house in San Francisco. That part was not so bad. It was the car drive home afterwards that was bad. It would start with a fight over the car keys. Bill would be so drunk I would be furious and want to drive us home. Bill saw this as the ultimate public emasculation. He drove home, with his chin hitting his chest as he passed out and me screaming and poking him trying to keep him awake with the car careening at 65 mph down the freeway. I was always so scared. We never had an accident, but the potential was hugh.

At first, every social occasion seemed to be a license for Bill to get staggering drunk. He was not a beer drinker. He was a Scotch drinker. Then, daily, year after year, he managed to sip, sip, sip and melt his brain and lose all realistic decision-making skills.

In an effort to work on our deteriorating relationship, Bill and I started to go to charismatic prayer meetings and to get involved with this local parish prayer community. I hoped it would help Bill with his drinking. It seemed to. Over time we made many close friends. Some of the drinking slowed up, but never did stop completely.

One of the people in the prayer community was breaking up from her own drinking husband. She was looking for someone to buy her house so she could move away from him. Bill and I were thinking about it, but were short the money needed for the down payment.

One day, Bill’s mother called me and berated me going on and on about something or other. Finally, I exploded and hungup on her. Just then, my mother called and I ended up telling her about what Mary was doing to me. I felt like I had somebody on my side, rooting for me for a change.

I told my mother about the house deal and my mother had an idea. My sister Jan’s marriage was breaking up, too. My mother offered to buy my house and move Jan and her baby Brett into it. She offered to make monthly payments for 3 years for our equity and we made up an informal agreement with her. We then went to our friend and offered her monthly payments for her equity in her house. She liked the idea.

Thus, we sold our little 3-bedroom, 2 bath starter house and moved into a 5 bedroom 3 bath top-of-the-line house. We rented out our one downstairs bedroom to a boy whose family was moving away, but who wanted to finish his last year of high school in Dublin.

We had Bill’s salary, the payments from my mother, and the payments from the rental. We just made enough to make our monthly payments on the mortgage and the monthly payments to our friend. The financial pressure was pretty high. Bill graduated from college. He got a pretty good salary raise and a promotion, but we were still scraping by. Our personal relationship was suffering both from my long standing and severe post-partum depression and from Bill’s escapist drinking.

Bill and I seemed to be on a treadmill. I was taking one college class a quarter. At that rate, it would take me a lifetime to graduate and get a good enough job to significantly help out the family financially. The ultimate emotional card Bill felt he held in our relationship was being the financial provider. We all depended on him and he liked the power and sense of control that gave him.

Finally, in May of 1976, Bill got a job offer for a high-level management job for the Bently Nevada Corp in Carson City, Nevada. They were offering to pay us a hugh salary increase, pay for our move from the Bay Area, and to pay to find us a house to rent in Nevada. In early July, we sold our house to a friend in the prayer community, packed up our stuff and moved to Minden-Gardnerville, Nevada.

I thought that the break in routine would help Bill with the drinking. We said tearful farewells to our prayer community friends and drove off.

Well.

We were just settling in when our first ‘guests’ appeared. Something we hadn't realized was that had we moved to a tourist destination. All our friends from the Bay Area began to schedule their visits to sleep on our sofa-bed and spend the weekend gambling and seeing the casino shows.

The kids were sort of lost in the isolation of a country club housing development of 4 acre lots and no kids to play with. Michael rode his bike around. Diana moped and just watched TV and Janel could not go outside much since we were in the neighborhood of cow herds and sheep flocks and their accompanying swarms of large biting flies.

We enrolled the kids in the closest parochial school, St. Therese's in Carson City and I commuted with them all through September. We then just decided to move up to Carson City, close to the school. It was good going back into a suburban neighborhood and letting Bill do the 30 minute commute each day. We found a great house, packed up a U-haul and moved.

In August we had found out that Mary was ill with well-developed pancreatic cancer. By early October she was dead and my father-in-law came and stayed with us in Carson City for several months.

Halloween was interesting. Our children trick-or-treated at the governor’s mansion that was just around the corner from us. Diana’s eyes were wide open when she saw the governor answer his door in a real pirate’s costume with a peg leg. He had lost a leg in real life and he delighted in showing off his fancy dress peg leg in costume. Michael was a silver-boxed robot and Diana and Janel were two little dutch girls in their white winged paper hats and blue Holly Hobby full-length old fashioned dresses. I stayed home and answered the door with candy for our visitors. The kids came home and chattered excitedly about their adventures with the governor.

As soon as Bill had found out his mother was sick, he had started driving down on the weekends to the Bay Area to see her. Sometimes we took the kids, sometimes he went alone. We wore out a complete set of tires on our Volvo sedan. In a fit of brilliance, we bought snow tires as replacements, thus eliminating the need to have to put on chains during every snow fall in the Sierras that winter.

Bill tried to completely stop drinking. He was so worried about his mother and about his father. After her funeral (full blown church services, procession and interring in a stone wall), Bill started drinking again at every opportunity. He had been leading the charasmatic prayer group at the parish in Carson City and I could not watch him do that and then come home and drink himself into a stupor every night in his chair in front of the TV, dropping lit cigarrettes onto the carpeting.

In November, I called my mother for her birthday on the 15th. She told me she had news. She, too, had cancer. She had colon cancer. I was stunned. The rubberbands kept pulling us back down to the Bay Area. I knew we could not survive any longer with weekly round trips back and forth.

We had a large pot-luck Thanksgiving and many in the prayer community came for the day. All the children wore themselves out running up and down the large "C" hill at the end of our street playing in the fresh air and sliding down on pieces of cardboard over the dried grass.

Early in December, I sent Bill forth and he came back with a great job offer from Qume, Inc. (daisy-wheel printer manfacturing). In early January, we loaded up the U-haul yet again. Bill had thrown his back out and was in bad pain. Michael, me and the 11-year old boy from across the street loaded our truck up. Bill was able to drive the truck (when couldn’t he?) and I followed him in the fog in the Volvo.

Our friend Richard Vivrette had found a double bed, set it up for us and met us at the new house we were renting on Serra Court. He had hot coffee and chocolate for the kids. That midnight we felt welcomed and loved and glad to be back ‘home’ in Dublin.

We had sold our house on Betlin Drive for $29,000 in June of 1976. Inflation ran rampant through all of 1976 and the gas shortages. In January 1977 we could not have bought that same house back for $60,000. The cost of housing had doubled.

Our life in Dublin continued on and we both rented and owned. Mostly we rented. We eventually rented 6 different houses.

However, the house on Serra Court was always our favorite. Here we felt we were home. The neighbors were friendly. There were many children to play with and the school was good.

I went back to school driving an old car that my sister Jan loaned me the money for. I repayed her in full. It only took me twenty years to do it, but in 1981 I graduated from college. I worked full time for Kelly Girl, Inc as a temporary office assisant and lab technician at Clorox and Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and then I worked for Ecological Analysts as a lab technician at PG&E's Science Center in San Ramon. I went to college classes in the late afternoons and early evenings, four days a week taking 12 units per quarter. I changed majors and had to redo preliminary science requirements for the BS in Health Sciences (pre-med).

The kids grew, playing, going to school, faring ill or fair as the seasons turned. Bill injured his elbow and was disabled for a year or so. He liked staying home being a house dad, still heavily drinking. Our relationship continued on in its normal rocky way.

The Serra Court families, the Bugna’s, the Wagonhoffers, the Wilsons, the Bozacs, the Bells, and all the others would meet in the cul-de-sac on weekend nights after days of gardening and putzing around. We would bring out our folding chairs, set up a bar-b-que grill, pop open a beer and talk long into the night. And the children played together.

We knew who shot JR, we watched comets in telescopes laying in the back of the old Chevy truck. We were given show tickets by the guy across the street who owned a radio station in Livermore. The kids saw theater for the first time (P.T. Barnum) in San Francisco.

And now, it is 2008. Little Tony Bugna grew up. The other day he looked up Michael on the internet and found him here in Atlanta. He sent him an email and filled him in on the news of all the kids from Serra Court. Tony also wrote how grateful he was to Michael for giving him the happiest memories of his childhood -- Michael leading the pack and making up games and playing with all the kids on Serra Court.