The Fire Burns Out

Every time I listen to my iPod, I wish I'd gotten one of these things a long time ago. I had a 64Mb MP3 player that I'd gotten from the Queen's parents for Christmas back in 2001 (I think), but having 80Gb is so much better. I'd kept filling up and switching out 32kbps songs, so it didn't hold but 60-odd songs at that bit rate, and they weren't stereo. I've got 5500 songs on this thing and nary a 32kbps one in the bunch. If I'd gone that small, I'd never fill it up.

Anyway, back to Sawmill, which is the name of the complex we lived in when we were first married. It's in Tulsa, and it's a little lower end, so we weren't spending much on housing, to be sure. When we moved across the complex to an apartment on the first floor with two bedrooms, it felt like a palace compared to the dinky little one bedroom we started in.

Another significant development happened in this October of moving. As I've said, I worked for a fireplace company, while the Queen worked for a bank in their counting dungeon. Well, she'd heard from a relative who worked at a school that there was an opening as a library assistant, and this position might provide a bit of a better 'in' to her being a teacher (which she has a degree for) than working at the bank. We talked about it, and although it was a pay cut to work at the school for 10+ hours less a week and $2 less an hour, it would be better in the long run.

So she quit the bank and went to work as a library assistant, and this experience really changed her for the better. I don't know how interested she was in working a school library before this, but after doing this, she now prefers it to teaching (which is why I'm going to encourage her to get the 30-hour master's for school librarian so she can do this eventually). It also helped that the librarian there became a good friend to her and a real source of encouragement for her to move on to the teaching position.

As for me, I was working toward something a bit different. I was getting frustrated with no one in Tulsa wanting to do anything original when it comes to stage productions, particularly the musical(s) I'd written. I'd gotten some feedback from a playwrights' group I was a part of and refined one show rather well, so I was looking forward to seeing if anyone would be willing...no one was. They were more interested in "butts in the seat" than taking any kind of chance on something new (never mind the novelty of a locally written work). So I was going to attempt to produce it myself.

I'd already impressed a small group of people with this show a year before when I played through and sang the entire show to demonstrate it in full to them. This is where the comments I used to rewrite it came from, but since they'd seen it already and enjoyed it, they were interested in helping however they could.

It was also during the rehearsals for this that Rock Girl did her infamous spit-up in The Engineer's hair. This has never been forgotten.

Well, there was one thing I failed to anticipate having trouble with. There was potential I could lose my shirt, sure, but there was another, far bigger, issue. You see, a show needs a cast. I held an audition every week for three months (had it advertised in the local paper with all the other audition info), and out of three months, I only managed to get a cast of 5...and none of them came from the ad in the paper.

As a result, my rehearsals were a joke. My show never got off the ground. No one ever saw it. I had booked the theatre, so I had to call them about a month before the performance and cancel it. I had scheduled it in the Chapman Music Hall of the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, and I still have the Intermission magazine that shows it on their schedule for January (which also contains in the magazine's introduction a curious note that they don't produce shows, but that they're done by outside people). I also asked for one single ticket to the show so I could have some kind of memento from the production that never happened.

I attempted over the following months to do something else, but nothing ever panned out, and I disbanded everyone. I hadn't written anything else really to show for myself, so I didn't have anything else to produce. Nothing, at least, for a small cast. I have some stuff now that would work fine, but back then, I just hadn't done enough to have anything worth doing.

It wasn't much after all this that The Queen and Rock Girl met some friends at the apartment complex. For some time, we'd heard a child screaming bloody murder on a regular basis from the apartment above ours. We weren't sure why a kid would scream like that, but it was very loud. We learned we just screamed to hear his head rattle after we met the parents. The wife, Wendy, became good friends with the Queen, and they had a son who we'll call Noah that befriended Rock Girl.

Noah is a year older, but they got along really well. And while Wendy is younger than the Queen, she and her husband were at a similar stage of life to us, so they related very well to each other. Granted, that's where most of the similarities end, but we all got along really well. Her husband, Kristoff, doesn't play into this too much, since we didn't see him as often, but they were a solid couple as the Queen and I are.

This served to give someone for Rock Girl to play with, as the apartment complex wasn't exactly teeming with youngsters, nor did it have any kind of real play area for kids to congregate. Well, not a playground anyway. Outside our apartment, on the other hand, was a huge open area, that occasionally served as a commons where kids did play, and that is where the Queen and Wendy got acquainted during the summer months as the kids played together out in the field.

This part of the story ends at the end of the school year and the end of a job for me. At the fireplace company, I was treated most of the time like an errant child, and when you're treated a certain way, you can choose to blow it off or be a self-fulfilling prophecy and act accordingly. At the time, I was acting exactly as they wished, mainly because the way they treated me irritated the fire out of me. I was accused of wasting all kinds of time, and although I didn't exactly do everything as fast as they might want, there also wasn't an enormous amount of work to fill eight hours, so I wasn't going as fast as I could.

I would say there were two events that did me in. The first occurred right after some tornado weather when I pulled up to a house and it threatened to pour down rain on me. The house was for a builder that I respected at the time because they always had the fireplace perfect for the log installation. It showed some quality. Well, on this day, I thought it would be a swell idea to pull into the garage, so I went into the house, opened the garage door and proceeded on in. Well, apparently, the construct for the ladder on the top of the van I drove was too tall for the garage, and I heard it hit. Not wanting to damage the house, I pulled the van back out...and took the garage door with me.

I got out and surveyed the damage. Oh, crap, says I. I'd worked a number on that garage door, and although I was completely alone, there was no way I was going to be able to just leave and come back, acting all innocent. I just don't have it in me -- too afraid of being found out, which is worse than just telling the truth. It wasn't 5 minutes later that the superintendent for the builder came driving up, as if he'd heard the thing break. He asked what happened, and I came clean. He suggested I tell my boss before he did because it would reflect better on me.

I did, and my employment continued.

The one that did me in I maintain to this day didn't happen. I mean, I'm on a blog now where it doesn't matter at all whether I did it or not, but I am certain the story was constructed by them to be rid of me. It could have been a story by the builder, too, to blame someone for what they said happened.

The claim was that the builder for the house I'd been in that morning said I'd tracked mud all over the house, ruined the carpet which will force them to re-carpet THE ENTIRE HOUSE! Whoa... the entire house? I didn't go into the entire house. In fact, I came in through a bedroom window, crawled through the house on my hands and knees to keep my feet off the carpet and wiped the mud off my shoes on the carpet scraps laid for that very purpose. I urged them to go look at it to see if it was true, but like an idiot, I didn't go with them. They probably went for coffee, and just came back to accuse me of lying before firing me.

But they were quite tired of me. After all, we were coming into the summer months where my services were not really needed for several months, and I guess the previous summer they felt it was all pointless. The only thing for me to do over the summer are new construction installations, where over the winter, we were swamped with the new construction and people buying the logs for heat. One person can do the summer, so I was out.

So began a trend, almost, where I would meet the end of a job at the beginning of a summer. It happens far too often for me to think about, really. It happened in 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2007 -- sacked in May or June. If I can survive May or June at a job, I'm good to go for another year, it seems. The funny thing is that every time I've lost one job, I end up with one that is better with the opportunity to be much, much better.

But like so many things, you only get one shot at that open door before it closes and God has to turn you life upside to try and get you to the next available opportunity.