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Married Life
 
In the summer of 1972, I attended a church that my family had attended when we first moved to Sunnyside, Washington. It was the Church of God located on Scoon and Woodin Roads, there in that community. I had been away from that church for a while and it must have been God just leading me back there for a purpose. Playing the piano at the church was a girl that I had graduated high school with, her name was Sandee Sue Scott. I had a crush on her when we had attended 7th grade band together at Sunnyside Junior High School. She was gorgeous … long curly brown hair, hazel green eyes and a figure that made my heart leap a few extra beats. My mom and her mother had grown to be pretty good friends so I naturally got some very pertinent (and useful) information regarding the fact that she had broken up with her previous beau and was a “free agent” as it were. With that tidbit in tow, I proceeded to wander closer. We talked about music and music lessons, as it was that she was giving guitar, voice and piano lessons to aid in financing her college tuition. We went out on a date at a recently opened pizza establishment known as Chatterbox Pizza. It was love at first site for me … but I was scared to death to do anything about it at first. At this time I was studying for the ministry and planned to be a pastor. So I prayed and asked God what I should do. I said, “God, I am falling in love with this woman. Please guide me and direct my life. If it is your will, then fine let this relationship grow … otherwise, if not break it off. Not my will but yours be done”. Needless to say, God put such a love in my heart for this precious woman, that I could not contain myself. On February 14, 1973 I proposed to her and we set a wedding date for August 31, 1973.
 
I was so terribly in love, that I stated to her that I did not want to wait until August to have her as my wife, and persuaded her to move the wedding date up to June 8, 1973, which she consented and yada, yada, yada, we both said “I do”.
 
Our first home together as man and wife was a little two bedroom house located at 1320 Gregory Avenue in Sunnyside, Washington. We lived there nearly a year. At the time that we were married, I took a job indoors, working for Bonanza 88 (referred to back then as a glorified “five and dime”, today we would basically call it a “Dollar Store”).
 
I think that every man has made regretful statements or comments to his wife. Statements that were not very well thought out before the words rolled off the tongue and over the lips to the ears of our beloved. Well, I have said my share (and probably enough for others, too). My new bride had prepared a meal that was now waiting for me upon my arrival home from work. She prepared some sort of dish that had a pork chop in it. This pork chop was not fried, which I was most accustomed of having it prepared, but boiled. Needless to say it did not look palatable at all. It was pale as can be and stupid me, I made a comment about it and did not eat the meal: bad move on my part. Looking back I regretted that and it has been one moment that I had wished I could have taken and redone in order to fix the wrong I had done. I did not mean to hurt her feelings after her labor of love over that meal, but I screwed up.
Years later, after being married to my second wife Carol (I don’t think my comments caused the break up of my first marriage, but obviously they didn’t help the matter), I remember Carol had injured her back (recurring thing mostly caused by job related stress). I made another one of those remarks (speaking without thinking first), and I said, “You know that if you lost some weight your back would not go out on you so easily”. Aauggh, the words came out and I realized after the period was added to the sentence that it was the wrong thing to have said, so I tried to recover, “I know that when I put on weight my back seemed to always go out more”. Oh gees, I was now digging myself deeper into the hole, and I tried to salvage the moment if at all possible, “I think that we both need to lose some weight”. Oh my god, I screwed things royally now, just shut up and say no more (I was thinking) but my mouth kept going, “Maybe we can do some bike riding or walking together to help lose some weight”. No, it was done, just walk away now (my brain said to me) before anything else is said. “I really need to see if I can get those bike tires fixed”. Could I BE anymore stupid? No, so I left the room.
 
In the early part of 1974, we were able to find a repossessed home (located at 340 N. Tenth Street) that the FHA planned to sell for no money down. We had to pay closing costs only on the loan, so we borrowed some money from Beneficial Finance to pay the closing. Man, oh man what a mistake that was. It was like 52% interest rate or something like that maybe 58%, but gosh it was ridiculously high. It reminded me of the loan sharks you hear about in movies and gangster books (if there is such a thing as gangster books). The main thing was that we wanted to do this without having to borrow from family. My parents gave us an old bedroom set and we used a recently-applied-for-credit card from Sears, Roebuck & Company (now just commonly known as Sears), to furnish our living room with a sofa, coffee table lamp and lamp table. We used Montgomery Wards credit card to purchase a washer and drier (avocado green was the popular color back then), and then later that year a portable dishwasher (it basically pushed out of the way when not being used … in use it was hooked temporarily to the kitchen faucet and drained into the sink … hopefully you remembered to remove sink drain stopper before starting the washer … otherwise the sink would overflow onto the kitchen floor).
 
 
 
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