Dad Gets Hitched (Part 3)

The day came of Dad's wedding came. It was scheduled to take place at 6pm in Taos, NM. Dad and Gred were going to get up there early so they could get a marriage license that day. They were going to eat dinner with the wedding party and have the ceremony at the time-share they had bought into with a group of other people. Afterward, they were going to have a Crazy Cajan feast for the reception.

Loyd and I had to drive Gred's car up to Taos. We were going to stop at Grandma Bend's along the way. I originally wanted to go to Portales to see Dr. R from the ENMU Theatre Department. Dad didn't want me to do that, saying it would take us two hours out of the way and make us late for the wedding. I argued that it was only 20 minutes out of the way. Dad started getting angry. At any rate, I decided to go along with Dad's wishes since it was his wedding day.

Loyd and I saw Grandma Bend in Ft. Sumner. She didn't say anything about the wedding. As it turned out, she was very angry at Dad for leaving Mom and declared that the only way she could deal with it was by considering him dead. Even though Mom figured out how to continue with life after being abandoned, Grandma Bend never did. In fact, Grandma Bend didn't see my father again until 2007 when they were at my wedding. My understanding was that they were civil toward each other, but she didn't talk much to him. They never saw each other again after that.

We didn't have any real problems the rest of the way to Taos, but we realized when we were on a state highway that we had forgotten to fill up with gas in Ft. Sumner and we were running VERY low. Fortunately, we came across a gas station just in time.

We showed up in plenty of time and checked into the motel. We then went over to the time-share. The wedding was held outdoors and was rather informal. Several of the other people on the time-share had gathered. I remember seeing some others just arriving a little bit after the wedding had started. The ceremony was rather brief. At the time, I had a slight case of the sniffles that I was dealing with. After it was over, everyone went over to the kitchen to eat.

Loyd and I talked to several of the other people in the time-share during dinner. One of them asked me why I was getting all emotional during the ceremony. I had to explain that I had a slight cold. That was embarrassing. I wondered how many other people thought I was getting a little choked up when my Dad was getting married. I mean, I wasn't that happy for him, but I had nothing against Gred. They seemed to truly love each other and belonged together. I guess the thing that bothered me was that, in college, I had anticipated that I would get married by the time I was 25 years old and it didn't happen. It seemed like Dad didn't have to try real hard to find someone to marry him.

One thing I should point out was that Gred's son Tad was not at the wedding. At first, he didn't care much for Dad, but Dad had tried to treat him like a son. (He was sort of the ideal son he never had. Tad was a football player in high school and went on to have a very successful career, two things I never accomplished.) Gred said she didn't have a problem with Tad not attending the wedding and never held it against him. However, years later, Tad got married in a destination wedding and Gred was unable to attend, simply because she and Dad could not afford it, which he knew. (Gred got to come to my wedding.)

Loyd and I slept at the motel. I don't remember going out and doing anything that night. I do remember that Taos' art house movie theatre was showing "The Icicle Thief," which we had shown several months earlier at the Mayan Theatre, but we didn't go see a movie.

The next morning, I got on the Greyhound bus from Taos to Denver. The bus was probably about 50% full when I got on. There was this bald-headed woman about my age sitting in the seats behind me. The bus stopped in Pueblo to pick up more passengers. I left my jacket in my seat and went to the bathroom on the bus. When I got back. A woman and her child were sitting in my seat. I told her that I had been sitting there, but she said there were no more seats together. I asked the bald woman if I could sit next to her. She didn't mind. We talked for a little bit, but my internal awkwardness took over and I couldn't think of anything else to converse with her (without asking her about her bald head). We stopped in Colorado Springs. The bus driver came back to the middle of the bus and opened up the hatch in the ceiling. I commented that I thought he was going to make us leave through the hatch. The bald woman said the same though occurred to her as well.

We made it back to Denver. It was still daylight outside, so I didn't have to worry much about waiting for a bus to take me home. Compared to my last few trips on Greyhound, it was pretty uneventful.

Meanwhile, Dad is still married to Gred. That was more than 24 years ago. Three more years, and he'll have been married to her longer than he was to my Mom.

Tad got divorced from his wife a year ago. Theirs lasted about 15 years.

Holidays aren't always fun and games

There are varying degrees to which I look forward to Christmas.



I should add that I'm referring to the family with my parents and my brother in this video. I'm not referring to my wife and child.

A few things to be thankful for

I'm known for not being a willing participant in the Thanksgiving dinner game "What are you thankful for?" I tend to be kind of cynical this time of year and just enjoy the food and time spent with family and friends.

I thought I should buck that trend on this blog. Most of the items that appear below are the result of conscious decisions on my part.

1. I am thankful that I have never been thrown in jail. I've done a lot of stupid things in my life, and some of it can be considered illegal. Even though I was taken into police custody for shoplifting when I was 15 years old, the officer did not have me placed in juvenile detention until my parents showed up.

2. I am thankful that my parents waited until my brother and I were out of the house before they divorced. I mentioned before that my father tried to leave us when I was around 17 years old. It probably wouldn't have had much impact on me since I was about to graduate high school, but it probably would have caused Loyd to create even more problems if he had been left alone with her.

3. I am thankful that I was able to wait until I was 42 years old to get married. One of the common problems I faced with the women I dated until I was 30 years old was that I tended to view them as potential wives. Getting married or having children with any of them would have caused consequences that I would be dealing with to this day. In fact, if I had been married before, the woman I eventually tied the knot with says she wouldn't have wanted to get involved with me.

4. I'm thankful I've never broken any bones in my body (excluding teeth). I've had a few close calls and even one time when I thought I cracked a rib. (That's WAY down the line.) But I've never had to wear as much as a sling around my neck in order to recover from an injury. I'm also glad that the only times I've ever had to be a patient at a hospital were when I was born and when I had to have a kidney biopsy. I actually wouldn't mind hospital stays so much if I wasn't forced to be tethered to an IV.

5. I am thankful to have been gainfully employed most of my life. I've only had one three month period in which I was utterly unemployed. (That's also coming up.) Even though I had lots of free time, it wasn't much fun without money.

6. I am thankful that I pursued my goal of attempting to make a living off my creativity. I did succeed a couple of times. I was a radio DJ when I graduated from college and worked as a reporter/announcer for a newsradio station in San Jose (coming up). Several of the people I went to college with had the same dream, but only a few of them were able to continue following that dream long after college. None of them became famous, even though they all thought they were going to. Even though chasing that dream meant that I would never end up wealthy, I feel like I am richer for giving it a try.

7. I am thankful Dad taught me how to drive a car with a standard transmission.. I enjoy lording this over my brother-in-law, who drives a delivery truck for a living, but doesn't know how to drive a stick. However, I regret that I haven't gotten another chance to learn how to drive a column shift. (I've only had to do that once and I was not able to get it out of first gear.)

8. I'm thankful to the dysfunction that surrounded me while I was growing up. This allowed me to deal with my personal stuff on my own terms. Most other people who have endured lives similar to mine likely had to have therapy for the rest of their lives.

9. I'm thankful for all the joy, sadness, fear and anger that I've experienced my entire life and my ability to hold on to it for so long. They actually make for the best blog I could possibly come up with. (However, I never really endured much disgust. Maybe that emotion just didn't want to take the wheel.)

10. And finally, I'm thankful that I have a wife and child whom I love very much and realize how empty my world would be without them. I don't need to add anything to this.

And this will cover me for the next ten years. (Although, I will probably do another article just like this a year from now.)

Dad Gets Hitched (Part 2)

A couple of days after I had arrived in Artesia so I could go to my father's wedding in Taos, NM, I made a trip to Alamogordo to see my old college friend Kird. We hadn't seen each other since before I graduated from college. In that time, he had joined the Air Force, gotten married and had a child who was now three years old.

But something happened before I got to see him. He and his wife had split up, and she was planning to move to Virginia with their daughter. However, she hadn't left town yet. I didn't know whether or not I was going to meet them. Kird told me to come see him at his parents' house.

Kird looked pretty much the same as when I last saw him, except that he had gained a little weight. We started talking and he told me about how he had entered an Air Force talent contest and won. He showed me a videotape of the performance. He did a monologue by Christopher Durang. He was up against an actor who performed Salieri's "mediocrity" speech from "Amadeus" (wearing full make-up). Kird told me he was advised to perform that monologue because if he didn't win, he could blame it on the material. Because he won, he got to take a 'round-the-world tour of Air Force bases for an entire year. He also said he was approached by several casting agents. The only problem was that he was pretty much stuck doing the Air Force thing for a few more years.

One of the surprising things Kird told me was that he remembered very little of his college experience, especially with regards to the Theatre Department. He said he could recall being in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" because he was in it with an actor he was roommates with. I told him he played a fairy and asked if he remembered those big clunky masks that everyone complained about. He said he didn't. I asked him if he remembered being in "The King & I," in which he delivered the first spoken lines in the production. He said he didn't. I told him I felt like I was carrying his memories around for him. He laughed about that.

(The strange thing was that he seemed to have no problem remembering every woman he slept with. I guess that mattered more to him than being an actor. However, I'm aware of just how selective memory can be. My Mom doesn't remember the week Kird spent a week with us in the summer of 1984, but she still remembers that time I came home from college with stinky feet.)

I told him about my parents splitting up, how my Dad was getting remarried in a few days and that I was going to go to the wedding in Taos. He told me I was doing a terrible thing by going to the wedding. "If my dad did that to my mom, I'd tell dad, 'Dad, I can't go to the wedding. I need to stay here with Mom and help her get through this.'" This actually took me by surprise. I hadn't even thought about how this was impacting Mom, the same as how I didn't take her feelings into consideration during Christmas. This emotionally stunned me to the point that I didn't even bother to point out that Dad had paid for me to come down, paid for the hotel room in Taos, etc., so I was pretty much obligated to go to the wedding. Maybe he would have toned down the harshness once I told him, but I don't know.

That still didn't affect us having a good time. We went over the house of a friend of his whom he did musical collaborations with. We were goofing around with his four-track recorder and I laid down a keyboard track on one of their songs. They were rather impressed with what I was able to improvise on the spot. (Later in life, I would meet musicians who really knew what they were doing, but they were not in any way impressed by me.)

Then we went over to see his wife and daughter. They were staying in a mobile home. (It may have been the one they had been living at.) His daughter was sleeping, but he was able to talk his wife into bringing her out. His daughter wasn't wearing any clothes. Kird held her and rubbed his forehead against hers. He was obviously hurting from not getting to see her so much. I realized that when he was criticizing me, he wasn't really talking about me, he was talking about how much he would hurt if his wife married someone else and his daughter decided to attend that wedding.

I don't exactly recall this (talking about memory problems), but I must have spent the night in Alamogordo. And I probably slept on his parents' couch. I know it was the next day that we went looking at a house he wanted to rent. As I had mentioned before, he really liked the house, but was nervous about having to commit to a one-year lease. As it turned out, the woman decided to rent it out to someone else.

And then I came back home. Kird and I would continue to see each other when I drove through town on my way to Artesia from San Diego. Every time, his situation changed. He kept reconciling and separating from his wife until he eventually gave up and married someone else.

When I had previously written about Kird, I mentioned how I was planning to try to get in contact with him. In July, I found his e-mail address. He started working for another law firm in Hobbs as a defense attorney. I told him about the blog and sent a link to the first part of the profile that focused on him. I also included a photo of my son. He sent back a response that said, "I have finally figured out who your music sounds like: The Sparks." That was all he wrote in the message. I sent a reply, mentioning how I missed cult bands from the 70s and 80s who would put out a new album every year. But he never wrote back. The best I can figure out, he looked at the blog post about him, but didn't look at Part 2. That he didn't want to communicate further with me was very disappointing. I had planned to go to Artesia with my family the next month and I was sort of hoping he would want to come out to Artesia to visit.

But anyway, in Monday's post, my Dad gets married. I will be posting articles on Thursday and Friday. One will be special. The other won't.

Dad Gets Hitched (Part 1)

My father had been divorced from my mother for less than a year before he decided to get married again. This took me by surprise because he had been very critical of his marriage to Mom. I didn't expect him to want to go through all that again so quickly, especially since he had somewhat rushed into marriage with Mom. (He was 20 and she was 19. There was no romantic proposal. They simply discussed it and decided marriage was a good idea. As bad as Dad said it was, he stuck with it for 27 years.)

He told me that he and Gred were going to get married in Taos, NM on Friday, May 10th, 1991. He wanted me and Loyd to be there. He said he would pay our way.

I planned to take a week off of work, so I could spend time with both Mom and Dad in Artesia. I also had recently gotten in contact with my old college friend Kird and made plans to drive to Alamogordo to see him. (I was going to borrow one of my Mom's cars.)

I was still dealing with the car from hell, so I was going to have to take Greyhound again to get to Roswell. Seriously, there was no other time other than 3:30pm to leave Denver and arrive in Roswell less than 15 hours later. All the other routes took at least 24 hours.

It was less hectic at the bus station this time. They only had one bus running the route, but it was almost fully packed. I remember this one guy about my age who looked like "Weird Al" Yankovic. He wore purple clothes and had an obvious Texas accent. There was another man around 40 years old who had dark hair and a mustache. This odd pair became bus buddies. They sat across the aisle from me. From time to time, the seat next to me would be vacant. This one Hispanic man sat next to me. He was carrying on a conversation with the other two. At one point, the 40-year-old man showed the Hispanic man a prescription bottle and talked about how much the pills cost.

There were no incidents that caused a delay in the bus' traveling time during the first leg of the route. We stopped at McDonald's like we had last time. Everybody reboarded the bus. For some reason, "Weird Al" and the 40-year-old guy sat separately. We were waiting for what seemed a longer than expected time. A police car pulled up next to the bus. Two officers came on board and went up to "Weird Al" One of them told him to get off the bus. "Why?" "The bus driver doesn't want you on here." "Weird Al" grabbed his stuff and walked out. Then the officer turned to the 40-year-old guy. "You, too!" He calmly replied, "I didn't do anything." The Hispanic guy said, "Yes, you did! You had drugs! You showed me!" The 40-year-old guy stood up and walked outside.

At this point, I was afraid that the Hispanic guy was going to start pointing his finger at me. I had long hair and looked like someone who would have been doing drugs. But the Hispanic guy left the bus and the officers followed. WHEW!

The bus stayed in place while "Weird Al" and the 40-year-old man talked to the police. After a few minutes, the two were able to come back on board. One of the officers apologized to the two and left the bus. As we were leaving, I could see the Hispanic guy with the officers. They looked like they were going to beat him up. "Weird Al" and the 40-year-old man shook hands.

Now, if I had been asked to leave the bus, I'm pretty certain I would have been freaking out. I probably would have told the cops that I saw the drugs the 40-year-old man had in hopes of getting out of that mess. I don't know about "Weird Al," but I'm pretty certain the 40-year-old man had experienced run-ins with the law before. After he got off the bus, the probably told "Weird Al" to keep his mouth shut and let him do all the talking. If I was there, he probably would have told me the same thing, too. I probably would have complied, unless things looked like they were going to get hairy with the cops. I'm glad I didn't have to go through that.

Despite that delay, we made it to Amarillo in plenty of time to catch the connection to Roswell. Again, Dad and Loyd picked me up and drove me over to Mom's house to sleep. After I woke up, I just tooled around Artesia for the day. Nothing of note happened, except that Mom was not very happy about Dad getting married and I was a bad son, because I didn't do anything to acknowledge her concerns. Even worse was that I was reminded of that before going to the wedding and I still said nothing.

As for tomorrow's post, I'll detail my reunion with Kird.

The Fayd and Rid Show

I had appeared in an episode of the Community Access program "Denver Diner" in 1990. Ruad, the producer/writer/director told me she might ask me to appear in a future episode. That happened in 1991.

She said she had a role as a police officer for me in her latest production. She said that the part didn't have any lines, but I would appear throughout. She had planned to do the taping on a specific day, which would have been a day that I didn't need to work at the Mayan Theatre. I agreed to do it and was looking forward to being part of another one of her productions.

A few days later, she told me that an actor she cast for one of the small speaking roles had dropped out and asked me to do the role instead. I accepted and went to pick up the script. I was to play the co-worker of the main character at the Post Office. After reading the script, I called Ruad and left a message on her machine. I told her that my friend Rid might be interested in playing the police officer role. She had met Rid at the Mayan Theatre when we held a midnight screening of the film "Cyrano de Bergerac." I gave her his phone number. She called back and left a message on my machine saying that she did remember meeting him and thought he would make a good police officer and had left a message for him.

That day, Rid called and asked about a message that had been left on his machine. He played it for me. It was Ruad's message. "How did she get the idea to cast me in her show? I'm a techie, not a performer." Whatever his reservations, he still wanted to do it so he could play a cop.

I played one of four postal workers who sat around all day playing poker. The concept was that for whatever reason, we would bully the lead character with our indifference. I was in several scenes that were shot in two different locations. One was at the Post Office, the other was in a break room. There were only two scenes in the break room, one of which involved the major players. It was the only time I got to meet the other female lead. We shot those scenes first.

The main thing that was different from the last time was that we didn't get to rehearse beforehand. Ruad had so many scenes to tape on separate dates that there was no time to get us together to run lines. Because I couldn't determine the chemistry of the group I was in, I wasn't able to figure out my character in time for the first scene we shot. As a result, my character speaks a little differently in one scene, although I only had one line.

The other scenes were all shot in one day, like the episode I had done a year earlier. There were a few delays here and there. When we were about to shoot the last scene, I was already an hour late for work. I asked Ruad if, since I didn't have any lines in that final scene, I could go ahead and leave. She said I could, but I felt like I had let her down.

Even though Rid was cast in the same program, we did not share any screen time together. There was a problem shortly before the day he was scheduled to appear. A bunch of guys ganged up and assaulted him. He walked onto the set with a very visible black eye. I can only imagine what Ruad thought when she saw that. But she was used to things going wrong at the last minute and just dealt with it. There was no attempt made to cover up the eye. I always wondered if anyone who watched the program had questions about why this one police officer had a black eye and if they were disappointed that they never found out if it was the lead character who gave it to him.

Even though Ruad told me it was a non-speaking part, there were a couple of scenes in which Rid had been permitted to ad-lib a few lines with the other police officer.

But the black eye was the least of Ruad's troubles. After she had shot the program, someone broke into her car and stole all the videotape. Several weeks later, they found the tapes in a dumpster somewhere. She was able to recover everything she shot, but some of the tapes had been damaged. The scenes were usable, but there was a noticeable loss of video and audio quality. She chose to use what was there instead of re-shooting.

The restoration of the damaged tapes took a lot longer than Ruad anticipated. As a result, she couldn't get the episode on Community Access through her usual avenues. In order for it to air, she had to cut it up into three parts and designate it as a "Denver Diner Holiday Special." While she went along with it, it could have been considered lacking in taste as one of the lead characters commits suicide at the beginning of the program. In addition, there was no reference whatsoever to the holidays. There wasn't even snow on the ground in the outdoor scenes.

When I got to see it, it was clearly her most ambitious project. But I don't know if she tried to do any more episodes after that.

After I had moved to San Diego, we kept in contact. She got married and had sent me a wedding invitation. I was not able to go or contribute to their honeymoon. (I've always felt bad about that.) Unfortunately, I found out from Bez' father that she wound up divorcing him a few years later. After that, she moved to Albuquerque. I got her phone number from directory assistance and left a couple of messages, but she never called back.

Since then, she has moved back to Colorado and lives in La Junta. She has become the Chairman of the Arts Department at Otero Junior College. She has had some of her plays produced there.

I'm glad to see that she's found an outlet for her creativity and she's been getting paid for it. I know all that Community Access stuff came out of her pocket.

Another one of life's quiet moments

This is something I was observing while I was pumping gas earlier this week.



I should note that these birds were actually flying north.