My wife and I have always named our cars. My first car, a white 60 Chevy BelAir—one of those with tail fins—was named Whiskey, and her first car, a giant burgundy Olds 88 was named Gypsy. We were both poor in those days, and when our old cars died one after the other, my father hooked us up with a mechanic he knew who was selling an old VW bug that he had refurbished. As part of the sale, he offered to paint it the color of our choosing. So, we spent a long afternoon in a repair shop going over every color of paint available for cars. When Sharon came across the deep pink paint called fuchsia, she fell in love with it. As a chemist, who spent more time around men than women, she was not exactly a girly-girl in most ways, but she was certainly capable of showing her feminine side and her love for vibrant colors.
When the painter started mixing the paint, he called, asking, “Are you sure this is the color you want?” and we reassured him. Sharon named our new little bug Melissa. Melissa was certainly unique. When we were driving her down the freeway, we had to get used to little kids in the back of passing cars jumping up and down and pointing. One friend nicknamed her The Jellybean.
Once I pulled up to the drive-thru window of a fried chicken place, and the young lady at the counter, startled herself to attention, yelling, “It’s you!” then to her fellow employees, “It’s him! I told you I’d seen that car!” At the time I was a Teaching Assistant, teaching beginning statistics and computer usage, and one morning one of my students came up to me and said, “I’ve seen that VW bug in the staff parking lot, and I wondered who drove it. Today I was able to pull up next to it in the left turn lane, thinking I finally get to see who drives such a car. And it’s my teacher!”
Sharon was teaching at two different, well-separated community colleges as an adjunct professor (a fancy title for slave labor) while I was a full-time grad student and TA at San Diego State as well as an intern at an early Geographic Information Systems start-up on Saturdays, and we had only the one car. Sharon had bugged me to get a pocket calendar book, and now I really needed one to remind myself where I was supposed to be at any moment during the day. Planning our schedules each semester was quite the chore in logistics. We must have put several hundred miles on the car each week.
I knew I needed a full-time job soon to stop the madness, and, because of a program I wrote as a student, an employer had called me for an interview about 70 miles north in San Bernardino. We went to the interview, and I calculated that I would need to be offered $20k/year to take it, considering the expense of moving, etc. Salaries in the early 80’s sound quaint now, but I knew that my boss at my internship was making $16k/year, and he had assured me that they’d hire me full time, so that was my calculation. When I went to get Sharon after the interview, I said,
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
“Give me the bad news first.”
“I have to wear a tie.”
“What’s the good news?”
“They offered me $22k/year.”
Sharon found out that one of the local Community Colleges in the new area had an open position for a full-time Chemistry Professor the next fall, so we agreed to try it.
It was early May, and when I called my future boss to accept the job, he wanted me to start right away. I asked him if I could wait until the end of my semester, which was in a few weeks. He replied that he really wanted me to start right away. I explained that my wife and I each had 2 jobs, and I was currently a full-time student. There was a long exhale on the other end of the phone, “You both have 2 jobs, and you’re going to school?” We may have been poor, but it wasn’t from lack of effort.
So, he relented as long as I promised to come in at least one day a week until my semester was over in 3 weeks. I did that thing, and we moved up to Redlands, a few miles east of San Bernardino. Driving west to work on Interstate 10 in a VW Bug proved interesting. There was a constant 20-30 mph wind that blew from the north across the road, and I had to be constantly steering to the right (into the wind) to keep the high profile beetle out of the median. Fortunately I apparently weighed the car down enough so that it didn’t tip over.
Sharon got down-selected to one of two finalists for the teaching position, but then California pulled one of its typical dysfunctional tricks and couldn’t pass a budget, so the school canceled the position. Meanwhile she was able to borrow my grandmother’s old car, nicknamed The Green Monster by my dad, to drive down on Tuesday afternoon for the Tuesday and Thursday evening class she taught at City College in downtown San Diego. She would sleep at my parents’ place in Escondido and drive back on Thursday night. Meanwhile, to keep herself busy, she took to being a docent at the nearby San Bernardino County Museum. She wasn’t thrilled with the history exhibits but took readily to their huge bird collection, thrilling young kids with her imitations of Empire Penguins, and explanations of vultures and their odd gait, and long unfeathered necks that kept infection risk low as they tore at the innards of dead animals. Also, she took a local class on evaluation of antiques and a playwriting class from our old alma mater UC Riverside via their extension. We also made good use of the local cherry farms, self-harvesting a dozen pounds of cherries which she turned into pies and used to sweeten various stews she concocted. Did I mention what a whirlwind Sharon was?
Meanwhile she taught me an important lesson about work. As a young, enthusiastic programmer, I started staying late at work to finish whatever puzzle I was working on, until she told me point blank, that we were married, and I wasn’t allowed to spend all my time working. I never forgot that lesson, and it served me well.
When prospects for the company I was working for started to dim, we moved back to San Diego for greener pastures, and if you want to know more about that, you can read my work biography, A Geek’s Progress.
Musings of a Restless Mind 