THANKSGIVING 1984
Part 2
It took us a week to drive across to California and it was a fun, exciting week.
I told my girls we were pioneers and that their new best friends were waiting to meet them.
I knew one day a California NATIVE would be born and that would be my height, I’d have a native…proof that we made it!
We were a caravan of four cars; oldest daughter, her girlfriend, our family car and “Lucy,” the tank.
Lucy was a solid, heavy, old Oldsmobile that once belonged to my girls grandparents. Lucy was good for the learners, she could withstand bumps, she was un-dentable, scrapes didn’t stop her and little incidentals that happened while they were learning to drive? Well, it all just rolled off of Lucy. We felt safe with them driving Lucy, she was tough.
An adventurous EMT, a friend from the ER volunteered to drive Lucy to California.
Three cars stayed close together, following each other.
The EMT? A crazy young guy. He kinda went on his own exploring but we DID catch up with him now and then and it always made us laugh.
One night we even ended up at the same restaurant somewhere I think in Utah. We shared lots of laughs exchanging stories with him from along the way.
I’d flown to California two weeks before our move and rented a house. Mississippi Bar Drive in Orangeville, California was our destination.
We arrived on September 1st.
Anyone who’s ever moved knows the work involved; unpacking, making it feel like home, notifying every business, every friend, new banks, new grocery stores, new doctors, dentists, new everything and jobs, we needed jobs.
I found a nursing job quickly in a nearby community hospital.
Husband found an exciting opportunity with the owner of a company dealing in the automotive industry. His starting date was the first week of November. Oldest daughter and girlfriend stayed with us for 2 weeks; both found jobs right away and then moved to a nearby apartment complex.
Registered my three girls in their school district and we were all good to go. In the house straight across the street lived a family with four BOYS…all the ages of my girls!!!!!!
Word traveled fast of new girls in the neighborhood.
Within days boys on their bikes were out front like a band of Indians getting ready to attack the circled wagon trains.
Did my girls mind?
REALLY?
Needless to say, my girls had no problem meeting new kids.
They adapted quickly and were happy with all the changes.
The first month flew, it still didn’t feel like home but I knew that was a time-thing.
It WOULD be home one day.
We’d found a contractor and put a down payment on a brand new house up on a hill overlooking a lake.
Everything good was happening so fast, so perfect and so exciting.

It was November.

And then…
I was sleeping.
He shook me.
“Something’s wrong” he said.
I jumped up.
He was holding his chest.
I didn’t call 911.
I knew I could be to the ER quicker if I didn’t wait for them, we were there within minutes.
I had no one to call for support.
I sat at the Nurses station staring at the closed door too emotionally traumatized to even try to think.
Within minutes I was told he was having a heart attack.
One of the nurses who I was becoming friends with, did come down from the ICU and tried to comfort me a bit.
The rest of the night was kind of a blur, actually the rest of the month, the year, and into the next was a blur.
Everything that had just been so perfect was now gone.
The excitement was replaced with fear, sadness, bewilderment and some more fear.
Choices came at me with immediate decisions needed.
Paperwork needed to be read, understood and signed.
I was lost.
He was transferred to a bigger hospital downtown where they specialized in cardiac surgery.
He had a five-vessel surgical repair on his heart.
I learned how to work all night, get two hours sleep, and spend the daytime with him.
I had a horrible fear of getting lost and driving downtown every day began a series of anxiety attacks that took over my life.
My younger three girls, they got lost and almost forgotten in all that was happening.
I put way too much responsibility on the shoulders of the older of the three, I shouldn’t have done that. I regret that to this day.
She was still driving only on her permit.
The permit that stated she must drive with a licensed driver.
Well, she didn’t.
She drove her sisters to and from school, she brought them to the hospital and she pretty much took over the household.
I was either working at my hospital or downtown at his.
I took time one day to take my “Lucy” driver to the DMV for her California permit.
She failed the driving portion of the test!
HOW?
She’d recently helped drive half-way across the country, did a great job and she failed?
I found her sitting on a bench outside the DMV, her head in her hands sobbing. Nothing was going right for us anymore, nothing. It didn’t take much to make me cry so we sat on that bench together for bit and held each other and cried and…I don’t think we were really crying about the permit.
It was hard for me the day I called his gonna-be boss and told him what had happened. He came to the hospital to visit and then alone he told me he’d be unable to hold the job. I cried, I begged but well, business is business, right?
What was most important of all was for my husband to heal.
He was home in a week.
The weather was beautiful.
I’d help him out to the patio and he’d sit overlooking the greenbelt thinking and I’m sure trying to make some kind of sense of the month of November 1984. Our medical insurance from my husband’s old job had ended five days before this all happened…FIVE DAYS!
We gambled and lost.
Thought we’d be OK for a month with no medical insurance.
Mine from my new job would kick in in 30 days.
It didn’t matter, nothing mattered.
I tried to close my eyes and make it all go away, but it wouldn’t.
It was like I’d opened a door and all bad stuff came falling out on top of me. I went from one problem after another with no break in between;
a flood inside the house,
the refrigerator stopped working,
my car broke down,
older daughter decided she wanted to move back to Michigan,
my best friend’s son was involved in a horrific motor vehicle crash and he was in a coma and I couldn’t leave to be there to support her and
my California dream had turned into a nightmare…
I was falling apart.
I turned into the bread winner.
We had my paychecks and the very small amount of money from the sale of our Michigan house to live on.
We were able to pay our rent and buy groceries.
We lost our new house and the down payment.
Amidst it all, one of my girls developed a nasty eye infection and needed to be seen and treated.
We didn’t have a doctor, we didn’t have insurance and we didn’t have much money.
I don’t remember how we found the eye doctor, maybe divine intervention.
It was after hours when I called but she was still in her office and agreed to see us.
She ended up being a great physician with an amazing huge heart.
After she examined and medicated my little one’s eye, she sat with us and we talked.
We told our story, how our world was crashing down on us.
She saw us 3 days in a row and treated that eye and never billed us.
A few days before Thanksgiving, the doorbell rang, it was the eye doctor.
She had a huge turkey in her arms.
“Happy Thanksgiving” is all she said.
How could a frozen turkey in a woman’s arms make me cry?
Well, it did!
That same day we FOUND a huge basket at our front door.
It was filled to the top with food.
There was a note that it was sent to us by the Chamber of Commerce of the city we had recently moved into.
I’d never been on the receiving end of such kindness.
To see my girls excited at a basket of food, well it was humbling, and we were all filled with gratitude.
Some experiences are forgotten shortly after they happen and some stick with you for life.
The kindness shown to a family of six unknowns when we were strangers to a new town is imprinted upon my heart and it changed my path.
How any of this really happened, I don’t know.
Who turned our names in, I don’t know.
Who sent the newspaper reporter out to our house to interview us for a Thanksgiving story…..I don’t know.
What I do know is there’s kindness everywhere; take it and then give it back. Since that Thanksgiving in 1984, often my family joins together and we give of ourselves;
volunteering at food banks,
filling grocery bags for grateful people who are so appreciative you’d think we gave them an entire grocery store,
helping serve meals to those who are hungry,
Coats for Kids in the winter,
Toys for Tots during the holiday season.
To see thankful people almost caressing bags of food, and mom’s beaming while helping their kids try on a nice warm coat or the tears in their eyes as they’re allowed to choose three gifts each for their children for Christmas, that’s how we say thank you for what was done for us once upon a time.
The crazy young EMT? he must have loved what he saw as he drove Lucy because he also settled in California, not far from us. We met him one day for breakfast, he flew his plane in, says he doesn’t like to drive the California freeways.
Still crazy after all these years!
And my daughter? A few weeks after failing the driving test, she passed.
Lots of Thanksgiving’s have gone and been forgotten but the one that helps guide who I am today is THANKSGIVING 1984.
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone.