My husband (#2) and I moved to Newton, MA, from Austin, TX in mid 1986. His family is from MA and the Texas economy was crumbling. My husband had a concrete company and contractors stopped paying for the slabs he had poured. Warning to some people in one ritzy section of North West Austin: We own the slabs your houses are sitting on! We filed liens, but found out that people could still buy the houses without clearing the liens if they "bonded around the lien". This is not the strange part.
Story #1:
In the middle of the night in Massachusetts, (insomnia) I was flipping channels on the TV. When I got to the PBS station, there on the screen, smiling out to all the world, is my mother and her husband! I freaked!
It was an episode of "Austin City Limits". The explanation for their close up is that one of my younger sisters, M., was working as an intern on the show for her degree in RTF: Radio, Television and Film. Later, M. got parts for various family members, who lived in Austin, as extras in the films she worked on. When she decided to become a single Mom, she got calls from a film crew, wanting to know when her baby was due. They needed a newborn for a TV mini-series. So they slathered her new daughter in the secret recipe for birth goo, most of it is fruit jelly, and a star was born. The actress that played her mother, Angelina something, became really famous a few years later. My sister got a job with a computer giant after that, so she would have the steady income a parent needs.
Next Story:
After my divorce from husband #1, I was in Austin waiting tables and taking classes at the community college; waiting for a year to pass, so that I could go to U.T. as an in-state student. My son stayed at a daycare that was near my apartment. I was parking my dad's car at the daycare to pick up my son, and looked over at the car parked next to me. It belonged to a girl who had a son in the same group my son was in. Her kid bit my kid a lot. Sitting in her passenger seat was a guy that hit all my desire buttons. I remember thinking, "where did she find a guy like that?", I wanted one. I couldn't picture them as a couple, because she was a very: the shoes match the bag, perfect makeup, jewelry, hair type; and he looked like a hot lumberjack's dream with a beard and ponytail. (late 1970's)
Skip forward a year or so. I begin waiting tables at a different restaurant, one that is very near my apartment. She was a regular customer, mostly in the bar part of the restaurant. Waiters and Bartenders come and go all the time. A guy who worked there and quit, before I began working there, got rehired. He became a full time bartender. I found out that he had been a teacher in Mass. and was divorced with no kids. We eventually became romantic. I was living in U.T. Family Housing with my son. It was a great, affordable little 2 bedroom apartment that backed up to the Colorado River. My boyfriend began telling me that his former girlfriend had lived across the street in the older group of Married Student Apartments even though she was not a student. Her, then, X-husband was the student, but she and her son continued to live there after the split. When he told me her son's name, the light bulb went on! He was the kid who used to bite my son. That day in the parking lot flashed back into my memory. He was the guy I had lusted after!
I've joked over the years that it was really my Dad's cars that caught his attention. My Dad and Mom were divorced and I rented an apartment in the same complex where my Dad lived so I could borrow one of his cars until I could buy my own. He had a purple Jaguar XKE and at least one Triumph, maybe 2, so I think they attracted attention first, and then you would notice the slim, buxom girl with the blue eyes and the long blond hair. (My present description would be a bit more bulky than the one from back then. Picture Benjamin Franklin in drag.)
Story 3:
After husband #2 and I were married and had a kid or two. He bought an older Jaguar and worked on the engine in his spare time. One day on the highway, I put the petal to the metal to pass someone, and the gas pedal became locked in the "down to the floor " position. I tried shoving my foot under it and pulling up, but it wouldn't budge! The car is flying and I'm panicked! I was standing on the break to no avail. I down shifted my way to neutral and turned off the key and pulled up on the emergency break. When I finally got it to stop, I was off the road in a parking lot of some sort, freaked out but unhurt.
I found a phone and called my husband. He drove out to investigate. It turns out that there is a thingy, that has to do with the accelerator linkage, that if it goes beyond a certain angle, picture 12:00 on a clock, if it goes past that even a little bit, the angle is too wide for it to return in the direction it came from and it gets STUCK in rocket mode! When my husband turned the key, the engine began to roar at full tilt again. He fixed it, but I was still afraid of that car.
When I see people on TV, trying to tell an investigative reporter that this has happened to them, sometimes with horrific results, I BELIEVE! The automobile companies always say it is impossible, and that the people were mistakenly flooring the gas pedal when they thought they had their foot on the break. BULL!
Story #4:
When Savant was in High School here in Tennessee, his best friend was a boy who had been raised in Saudi Arabia by an American father and a Syrian mother. I spent some time talking to them when I was picking my son up from their house one evening. During the course of the conversation, we realized that we had lived in Austin at the same time. We were all students at the University at the same time, and we had lived across the street from each other in the University Family Housing. We rode the same bus to and from classes. Small world, huh?
Story #5:
I was in the check out line at the grocery store near the U. of Texas Apartments, and up ahead of me, in line was a friend of mine from Tennessee! Jack, of the crackers and spam, in a previous entry. I was blown away to see him there. He visited us a few times before he moved on to parts unknown.
Story #6:
Husband #1 and I were in a park in Ashland, Oregon during a short stay there. We were talking about a yogi from India that we knew when we lived in Indiana, Yatishvarananda, and how he would always mispronounce the name of one of our friends. Less than a minute later we see this same fellow sitting on a bench in the park!
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