It was the last week in August 1984.

I’d been waiting for that day forever.

We were moving…..far away.

We were leaving our home, our friends, our family everyone and everything we knew to make a dream come true.

CALIFORNIA!

It was a bittersweet good-bye, filled with hugs, kisses, promises and tears yet there was excitement and curiosity at the same time.

My girls were my pioneers heading west and  I promised their new best friends were waiting to meet them. 

And so was my very first little California native who would come one day.

They’d been to California enough times to fall in love with it just as I had when I was twenty years old.

 

We began as a four car caravan;  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 beginning drivers.

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, Lucy was tough.

An adventurous young, (cute) EMT, a friend from the ER volunteered to drive Lucy to California.  

Three cars stayed close together, following each other. 

Rick, the EMT? 

He kinda went his own way exploring, but a few times we DID catch up with him and it always made us laugh.  

One night we even ended up at the same restaurant somewhere in Utah. 

We shared lots of laughs and exchanged stories with him from along the way.   

I’d flown to California two weeks earlier and rented a house. 

We arrived on Mississippi Bar Drive in Orangevale, 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.

There was a nursing shortage.

I was quickly hired at a nearby community hospital.   

My husband found an exciting opportunity with the owner of a company dealing in the automotive industry. 

His starting date was the first week of October.

My oldest daughter and girlfriend stayed with us for 2 weeks; both found jobs right away and then moved to a nearby apartment complex.

I 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…the ages of my girls!!!!!!  

Word of new girls in the neighborhood traveled fast. 

Within days boys on their bikes were cruising back and forth, as my husband so eloquently put it…..like ”dogs in heat.”

Needless to say, my girls had no problem meeting new kids. 

The first month flew.

It still didn’t feel like home but I knew one day it would.  

We’d found a contractor and put a down payment on a brand new house being built up on a hill overlooking a lake.  

It was November and everything good was happening so fast, so perfect and so exciting.  

And then…

I was sleeping.  

My husband shook me. 

“Something’s wrong” he said.

I jumped up. 

He was holding his chest. 

I didn’t call 911. 

I knew I could make it to the ER quicker if I didn’t wait for the EMT’s.

We were there in minutes. 

I had no one to call for support.  

I sat at the Nurses station staring, not knowing what was going on behind the closed door and too emotionally traumatized to even try to think.  

Within minutes I was told he was having a heart attack.

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 driving downtown and getting lost.

Anxiety attacks took over my life. 

My younger three girls….. they got lost and almost forgotten from all that was happening.  

I put way too much responsibility on the shoulders of sixteen year old Julie, my second oldest.  

I shouldn’t have done that.  

She was still driving on her Michigan permit which stated that she must drive with someone licensed. 

She wasn’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. 

One afteroon Julie and I went to the DMV for her California drivers license.

She did fine with the written test but…..  

She failed the driving 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 license.

It was hard for me the day I called his new employer and explained what had happened. 

He came to the hospital to visit and then took me aside and told me he’d be unable to hold the job. 

I cried.

I even begged.

But, that’s business.

I guess.

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 wanted to close my eyes and make it all go away.     

It was like I’d opened a door and all bad stuff came falling out on top of me. 

It went from one problem on to 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.

My California dream had turned into a nightmare and I was falling apart. 

I became 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 my youngest, Melissa 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.

We were never billed.  

A few days before Thanksgiving, the doorbell rang.

It was the eye doctor. 

She had a smile on her face and 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 remain in your heart forever.   

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 that basket got on our doorstep, 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 and 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 warm coat or the tears in their eyes as they’re allowed to choose two gifts each for their children for Christmas, that’s how we say thank you for what was done for us once upon a time.   

Rick, the crazy young (cute)  EMT?

He must have loved what he saw while driving Lucy because he eventually 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 Julie?  

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.

This is not going to be a HAPPY Thanksgiving for so many of us.

2020 has ravished our brains and stolen from us.

We’re gonna let it pass by this year and just call it Thursday.

Wishing everyone a good Thursday.