Not long after, Knod and Sheld had a falling out and weren't speaking to each other. Knod still wanted to be friends with me. I had some music she wanted to hear, so she invited me over to her house one afternoon. Her mother was there. We went into Knod's room and she shut the door. I asked her if her mother was okay with us hanging out. She said her mom didn't have a problem with it as long as I didn't mess with her head. While we were listening to the music, she showed me a scrapbook of photos taken in the last year.
During this time, Knod became friends with another girl her age named Deld. The three of us hung around quite frequently and went to the movies several times. (It was nice that I could get in just about any movie theatre for free.)
In the meantime, Sheld got pregnant by this jerk named Lard. (I've been dying to use that as a name for someone. I'm glad it's this guy!) Before I left Denver to move to San Diego, Sheld held a Halloween party a few days before I left. Knod was also going to be there. (Deld was not there.) Sheld was pregnant at the time and allowed me to take photographs of her. Knod showed up wearing a cat suit.
After I left for San Diego, Knod and I wrote each other frequently. When I had planned a trip back to Denver for my vacation, Knod said she wanted to come out and hang around in San Diego. She had a friend named Cald that she had invited along. This outing will be the topic of another post way in the future. (I'm just providing a summary of our friendship here.)
Sheld had her baby boy, but got involved in an ugly custody battle with Lard. In the meantime, Knod became romantically involved with Lard and thus became a bitter enemy of Sheld. Knod moved in with Lard and help to raise his son. They planned to get married. However, it was clear that Lard was very jealous of Knod's friendship with me. She sent me this letter:
It reads, "To my understanding, (Lard) says that you have called at least 10 - 15 times a day. He knows this because of Caller ID. I want to ask you to please not do this. With the phone ringing off the hook, it's hard for them to care for S_____ and keep S__ on his routine with this annoyance."
WHAT? I wasn't doing that. One thing I know for certain was that my phone number wasn't showing up on their Caller ID because numbers in California wouldn't appear at the time. California was the last state to get the Caller ID feature. Until then, all California numbers were displayed as "Unknown Caller." The best I can figure is that a fax machine from California was calling their number by mistake and would keep calling them back because the fax didn't go through. I'll bet he even answered it once and knew it was a fax machine. He likely just let the thing keep calling so he could blame me for harassing them. The nice thing was that even though Knod thought I was responsible, she still wanted to be friends with me. I decided not to address the issue and hoped that she would find out on her own that he was a twerp.
She did find that out, after she got pregnant. He left her for someone else and didn't want to have anything to do with Knod or their baby. I got to see Knod just a couple of months before she gave birth. Her daughter was born on my birthday. Not long after she was born, Knod came out to California with her older sister and her kids for a trip to Disneyland. I got to see Knod and her baby. I also got to know her sister a lot better. Way back in Denver, anytime her sister was at Knod's house, she acted like a stuck-up little princess and never talked to me (even though she had two kids). It was nice to see that she matured into a responsible young mother.
The next time I went to Denver, I got to hang out with Knod and her daughter. We went out to get something to eat. Sheld joined us. She and Knod had become friends again. I hadn't seen her in more than six years, but she didn't act like she had changed much since I used to know her. About a year after that, I had planned a trip to Denver. Knod asked me if I could take Sheld and S_____ to San Diego with me. They would stay with me temporarily. I guess she wanted to get back at Lard. I agreed, because I wanted to get back at him, too. A few minutes after getting off the phone, I knew I would ultimately regret doing that and really started to dread going to Denver. However, Knod never mentioned it again before my trip. I asked her about it, but she said it wasn't going to happen. WHEW!
Not long after that, Knod met another guy and got pregnant. They planned to get married in 1999 after the baby girl was born. I was invited to the wedding and actually made the trip out. I did not know anything about her fiance, whose name was Sond. The day before the wedding, I came over to Knod's house. I got to see their baby for the first time. I was holding her when Sond came home from work. He was tall and very muscular. I could see rage starting to build in his eyes. I introduced myself and said, "Well, I guess I need to hand your daughter over to you." I have a feeling he did not like the idea that Knod had a male friend who was coming to the wedding. He was probably successful in keeping all of her other male friends away, but not me. She was likely able to use the argument "He's like a brother to me!" in order to get him to allow me to be there. I think he was afraid I was going to make some kind of scene. But that didn't mean he had to be nice to me. I'm certain that was the worst first impression with him seeing me hold his little girl. I didn't know what to make of this. I didn't know if he was another jerk like Lard.
But I found out quickly that he wasn't. After the wedding, he was really nice and very pleasant toward me. I guess that was because I didn't set fire to the chapel or do anything else to disrupt the proceedings. I definitely approved of him. (And I'll add that he adopted Knod's oldest daughter. Yes, he's a good guy.)
I came back and saw Knod and Sond a couple of years later. They were still living at her mom's house. I didn't get to go back to Denver until December of 2009. My cousin Jend had passed away and I came for the funeral. I was able to see Knod the day I was going to fly back home to San Jose. My brother Loyd also got to meet her. He had actually gotten to meet her before, in December of 1990, but neither one of them remembered that. We also got to see her youngest daughter, who was home sick that day. Loyd, as usual, pulled his old stunt of trying to get my friends to like him better than me. He pulled out all the stops on this one. He brought his guitar and played a couple of children's songs he'd written for his elementary school students. Afterward, he said, "Nope, that didn't work."
Knod and Sond have both been through a lot of different jobs and they've managed to stick together as a family. She has since gotten involved in burlesque performances and has quite a following. I'm Facebook friends with her, Sond and her mother.
I have no idea what happened to Sheld or Lard. I found S______ on Facebook. He became a father in January of 2014. He's also Facebook friends with his half-sister (but does not list her as a family member). He's a shift manager at a Carl's Jr. Deld still lives in Arvada. She had a daughter and is Facebook friends with Knod.
It's hard to believe that I've continued to be friends with Knod after more than 25 years. I never saw that coming, especially considering she got hauled away by police because she was riding in my car. But when friends are meant to be friends, they don't let incarceration stand in the way.
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