You Call That Romantic?
I Thought So — Either Way, We Made It Official
I wrapped up my work at the machine shop that final week, and got ready to move out of my parents’ house for the final time. I had moved back in with them when I first got out of the Navy, for about a year, and I had most recently been there for close to ten months.
This time, it was hard for me to leave. Living there, and working at Precision Automation, had been one of the most stable periods I’d had in the four years since I’d gotten clean. I’d really gotten to like the balance between that and spending long weekends with Kathy in Philly. I had just gotten back to work after my six week stint on worker’s compensation, the time needed for my severed right ring finger to heal up enough to go back to work.
I will admit that, while on the one hand, I hated leaving that job, on the other, the injury had left me feeling a little wary about the safety of working there. I could have lost my finger, or worse, my whole hand, if that pipe had fallen just a little differently. It would take many more months, and a lot of physical rehab, until it was fully healed and functional again. It was still very uncomfortable and somewhat painful. It would be the first job, my 17th in 4 years, that I would be leaving on relatively good terms. That was something!
Now, I was moving into the city with my fiancé. We were now officially engaged, as I had gone to our friend Teddy’s jewelry shop on Jeweler’s Row in Center City and found a ring I could afford. We were taking a New Jersey Transit Bus from the city down to her parents’ place in North Wildwood one day that summer, when I pulled the ring box out and started doing the official engagement thing.
You see, I grew up in the 60’s, and remembered the final scene in the movie “The Graduate”, where the guy and the girl, she in a wedding dress, ride off into an uncertain sunset in the back of a Municipal Bus. That was my idea of romantic. (It was the 60’s, what can I say)?
But, now it was the 80’s and Kathy, 8 years younger than me, was not attuned to the same cultural vibes as I in that romantic moment. She looked at me in horror, shook her head vigorously and said, in no uncertain terms, “Not here!!! Not now!!!” I sheepishly put the ring box away. I waited until we were walking from the bus stop to her parents’ place at the shore, figuring “well, it’s not the bus, but romantic enough!” I just didn’t want to wait any longer. That ring was burning a hole in my pocket!
It was quite an adjustment for me, moving in with her. I had gotten so used to the calm four days I had each week, living at my parents’ house, working evenings at the machine shop. It was always a welcome respite from the non-stop activity that seemed to swirl around Kathy. She was a real ball of energy, and just had a lot of interesting things going on in her life. I found it amazing and exciting — on the weekends.
But now, I was living with her full-time. The excitement was more non-stop. I had to try to figure out when, and how, I was going to catch my breath, and replace the peace and calm I’d grown accustomed to, living at my parents’. Add to that the stress of being in a brand new job, one with the government, no less. It was definitely an adjustment.
I discovered a great park a couple of blocks from her (our) apartment where I could go running, which I got into the habit of doing regularly. That helped a lot. I liked our apartment, but it was tiny. We started talking about getting a bigger place, and since we spent so much of our time with our home group down in South Philly, we decided to get a larger place down there.
Our friends Breen and Sherri were planning to move back up to South Philly from Maryland, and we agreed to let them stay with us until they found a place of their own, provided we found a place big enough for all four of us.
The new job was interesting. The guy who had hired me had left for a job with another agency by the time I reported to work, so I was pretty much on my own to try to figure out what the job entailed. There was a lady who knew a little bit about it to help me — she knew where my desk was, where the important phone numbers I’d need were, and the regulations, directives and notices I needed to know to do my job. There were a lot of them.
She had previously worked in the unit I was going into, but was now the new computer person. The office had a grand total of two computers, in their own little computer room, a couple of HP-125’s, with big, long monitors that had a bunch of tubes and what-not that made them run. This was 1984.
My desk had an IBM correcting selectric II, a telephone, a rolodex, and the aforementioned regs, notices and directives in binders, lined up nice and neat to one side. My job was to order all the supplies needed to fill orders from a thousand food inspectors in the region, that came in every day in the mail. There were two Supply Clerks back in the stock room who filled all those orders. I would submit purchase order requests to an office in Minneapolis to buy all the supplies.
There were six area offices, in Laconia, New Hampshire, Harrisburg, Pa, Fort Washington, Pa, New York City, Hyattsville, Maryland, and Boston, Ma, that I also supported, purchasing supplies and handling any of their space needs. I had a ton of things to learn, since I was essentially my own boss, and the acting boss of the Supply Clerks, until they hired a new boss. It seemed overwhelming at first, but everyone seemed glad that I was there, and were all very helpful and supportive. But I was pretty much on my own to figure out what I needed to do, and how I needed to do it. I would find myself in a similar situation in many new positions I would move into, as I moved up throughout my federal career. I just did the best I could with what I had, asked a lot of questions, and figured it out.
It was the start of a great career — and a great relationship!
