42
With the move to Colorado, the question was: What was my mother's
ultimate goal?
My mother used a moving company for our belongings in part because
there would be a week long gap between the time we left New England
and the time we were in the apartment. With the moving company, she
could have them place our stuff into holding for two weeks, then
finish delivering it to us in July. The problem was, once in
holding, there was a strike and we were just a pair of a vast group
of people who suddenly discovered they would have to make do with
what they'd taken with them. For us, it was a small black &
white television, two sleeping bags and what we fit into our luggage
to last two weeks.
It was kind of odd to have a bedroom all to oneself and you're to one
side with your sleeping bag looking over the far reach of the carpet
at floor level. Needless to say, our laundry went into a frequent
washing rotation. Unlike the old complex, this apartment complex had
roughly three times the number of buildings and each building had
three times the number of apartments. For 'entertainment' I would
roam the complex and get the lay of the land. It had a pool, but it
was always busy so my using it was out of the question. Next to the
pool, though, was a club house with a coin operated pool table and
pinball machine. Having never played pinball, only hearing about it
in one of my brother's 'The Who' albums, I asked mother for some
quarters, she gave me two. When I returned, it was in use and I
watched the teenager play it for a bit. When his friend arrived,
they left and I gave it a try. The two quarters went fast and when I
returned to mother for more, I was told there weren't going to be any
more and to find something else to do with my time.
After a couple of days of sitting on the floor, my mother got sick of
it and came up with a clever idea: Rather than buy indoor
furniture as ours would eventually arrive, we would buy lawn
furniture! It was cheap, and we could use it indoors for the
next few weeks, then move it to the little balcony once our stuff
arrived. During one of our exploring car trips around our
neighborhood we found a drug store, but again with the change in
scale, it was at least four times the size of the largest pharmacy
I'd ever been to and had some grocery aisles, electronics room, and
more importantly the lawn furniture set out for sale in the entry.
We picked-out two pieces, a short upright chair and a lower lounging
chair. Now we had the chance to watch the black & white while
sitting in the otherwise empty living room area in lawn chairs.
Everything seemed so novel to me at this time.
The antenna on the T.V. didn't pick up the stations very well, but
the apartment came with free 'cable', whatever that was.
In rural New England, I had never heard of cable and we all just had
roof mounted antennas, so this idea of a 'cable' which held all the
signals that would normally be out in the air was a new concept for
me. The small T.V. didn't have a cable inlet in back so my mother
found out there was a Radio Shack a little ways from the apartment.
On the drive I realized it was within walking distance and once there
the manager, 'Ralph', helped us find the necessary adapter to attach
the cable to the television. As we checked out I noticed they had
two TRS-80 display computers, the typical one on a mid-chest
high pillar placing the screen and keyboard at standing level for
customers milling in and out. But they also had one in the display
model integrated desk, with chair, looking very lonely by the window.
On the way out I asked Ralph if I could come back sometime and use
the computer, he said I could.
This town had five malls at the time, mind boggling as in rural New
England malls were few and far between and only near the capital
cities. We visited three of the malls in this new town regularly, at
first so we could buy some additional clothes, but to also give us a
break from the heat. Air conditioning was something only the rich
people had in their cars and houses when I grew up, so there was no
surprise that our first apartment, nor our Colorado one, didn't have
any. To console me over not being able to play the pinball machine
given its thirst for quarters, mother found me an electronic 'Master
Mind' game which worked for a single player. This kept me busy for a
few hours.
The next time at the drug store, I asked mother to buy me a notebook
and pencils and I started to write code. Except I didn't know what I
wanted the code to do. Unlike the past year taking programs out of
magazines, I was starting with a blank page. Then it occurred to me
to write a program that worked the same way as the mastermind game.
Given the slow pace of my hand writing, it gave me plenty of time to
reconsider any change my code might need as I scribed. Once done, I
took the fifteen minute walk to Radio Shack and confirmed with Ralph
that I could still use the computer on the desk. I could and
typed in the program. To my surprise, with only one quick to find
and fix bug, it worked! As the computer had a cassette recorder
attached, I bought the cheapest tape they had and saved the game. I
then spent the majority of my time at the apartment writing code into
the notebook and then visiting the store to try it out. After a
couple days in a row, Ralph encouraged me to come less often and so I
made it a Monday-Wednesday-Friday afternoon trip with code writing at
the apartment to tide me over between visits.
At first, to fill our time waiting for the furniture to arrive, we
went to all the tourist traps in the area. On the drive into town on
the interstate highway our first time, the 'Chamber of Commerce' had
a stand on either side of the highway in the dirt shoulder where
people could pull off and look through the fliers. We had collected
quite a few then and, now these weeks later, had been going through
them one by one until we ran out.
There was also another problem which horrified mom. In rural New
England, where we knew everyone and everyone knew us, as puberty
dawned I was still me and everyone knew it. Sure, I
was a little awkward given my 'situation', but we had all been told
that puberty was an awkward time and none of my friends or classmates
seemed to take any particular notice. But in Colorado, where
everyone was a stranger, they took me as they saw me and
occasionally referred to me as my mother's daughter. This was
despite the fact that my breasts continued to be strapped down with
the ACE bandage. After a couple times of this, mother's solution was
to have my head shaved to a military cut. This horrified me as, in
the nineteen seventies, guys didn't have short hair like that
anymore. Still, the times people assumed I was mom's daughter
decreased, so it made her happy.
There was a problem with the new apartment, the neighbor above us
owned a dog and had him use the balcony above us to 'do his
business'. Urine would come down to our balcony at random times of
the day, and rain storms would break-up and wash down the feces.
Complaints to the neighbor or landlord didn't help. Eventually, as
we still didn't have any furniture, the complex offered to let us
move into a different apartment at the start of August. Mother took
up that offer and soon, before my birthday, the strike had ended and
our stuff was finally delivered. Well most of it, they
told us that the storage warehouse had been robbed during the strike
and some of our belongings stolen, like my bunk beds and gaming
console. As I had long since become bored with Pong, it was no great
loss for me, but mother was very upset, I don't remember what stuff
of hers had gone missing.
Once the phone was installed and activated, mother quickly called Joe
to let him know of her number. This lead to the once a week Friday
evening phone call where Joe would be working at one of the stores
late and give mother a call. On these nights, mother would make sure
to be at the apartment and pensively wait near the phone for the call
that eventually came. Between the first few of these calls, she
explained to me her plan: The whole move to Colorado was to let Joe
realize how much he missed her and needed her in his life. He would
thus finally divorce his wife Dorcus and come to Colorado and sweep
mom off her feet and take us back to New England!
This would happen any day, now...
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