Burning Embers
and Other Stories of Marriage, Work, and Family
by
Charlie Close
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY:
Charlie Close on Smashwords
Burning Embers
and Other Stories of Marriage, Work, and Family
Copyright © 2011 by Charlie Close
Cover illustration Copyright © 2008 by Mister Reusch
Cover concept by Kathrine Konetzka-Close
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
Table of Contents
Your Big Ass Clogs My Living Room
Introduction
The stories in this book started with one purpose and ended with another.
I lived in Seattle for most of my adult life and had no reason to think I would live anywhere else. That’s when I met Kathy, my wife-to-be, who was born and raised in Michigan. She moved to Seattle, we got married, and I expected that we would stay together in Washington for a long, long time.
It didn’t work out that way. For reasons I describe later, we moved from Washington back to Michigan.
Let’s just say that the move changed my perspective. Suddenly I was surrounded by new family, new work, and new weather, both literally and metaphorically. Some of it was confusing and upsetting. (Ice storms? In April?? Come on!), while other things expanded my imagination.
One of the ways I dealt with it all was to write about it, starting from the moment Kathy and I landed in Michigan. I wrote long letters to the people I left behind in Seattle, telling them about the struggle just to get to Michigan, find a job, and to keep it once I had it. I wrote about how living with my new family felt like a skipping contest near an open mineshaft.
And I wrote about living in a state where I could expect to live half of every June in our bathroom during a tornado watch.
The people who got the letters thanked me and said what a strange place I had moved to. “Uh-huh,” I said, and kept writing. The first stories in this book, from “Journey to Michigan” to “Halloween Party” all come from those early days.
Then the what-have-I-gotten-myself-into phase passed and the people I worked with in Seattle drifted away and left Kathy and me to ourselves. The letters back home were not needed as much because, little by little, we were making a home right here.
But I did not stop writing. I continued to write even after we were fully settled in, and the audience grew from people I knew to anyone who would listen, and the subjects I wrote about shifted from the new surroundings to anything that interested me at the moment.
What I found was that I kept coming back to the same themes: building a career, both in business and writing, and making a marriage and a life with Kathy. Both themes left me a lot to work with. Witness the fumbling attempts to be romantic (“Flowers”, “My Darling Husband”, “Valentine’s Day Surprise”) and share common interests (“Rush at the DTE”, “Blue is a Boy”), and make me presentable to the world (“Captain Pants”), and even live under the same roof together (“Your Big Ass Clogs My Living Room”, “After You”, “Ladybug Kill, Kill, Kill”).
If being married hasn’t been easy, neither has trying to achieve wealth, fame, or professional respect. Behold the time I submitted a piece of writing once and was rejected twice (“Rejection...again”), the time I was not hired for a job because I could not put names in alphabetical order (“Job Search”), and the time I locked the keys in my car on the first day I was promoted to a new job (“Middling Management”).
Now it is time to widen the circle even further. You have in your hands the written record of one husband and one wife trying to navigate the ups and downs of life. Enjoy.
Charlie and Kathy Close
Grand Blanc, MI, USA
2008
Acknowledgements
As anyone who has ever spent time with someone writing a book understands, no book is ever written without help from others, be it creatively, editorially, genealogically, hygienically,or therapeutically. I am indebted to many people. First and foremost, to my wife Kathy, who supported my writing, improved it, and was the frequent subject of it. None of this work would have been possible, or necessary, without her.
To my parents Susan Huntley and Terry Close, who passed on their love of books, culture, humor, and learning going back as far as I can remember. They taught me that to be alive is to be a student.
To the early readers of these stories: Alan Buck, Kathie Brittain Hawken, Corkey Christensen, Larry Coppenrath, John Creason, Yulu Dai, Rachel Howard, Mara Krieps, Jessica Plesko, Maria Raisys, Marisa Simoni, and Kristi Yankacy.
To the early audiences who listened to my readings and podcasts: Garret Gaw, Sonja Gaw, Mary Kupres, Leslie Owens, Lynette Scaffede, Bonnie Standen, Julie Stott, Melanie Sulfaro, and Gene Varnado II.
To the editors of the text of this book: Bonnie Standen and Karen Mulvihill-Younglove. Their criticism showed me flaws I had missed and let me look at the text with fresh eyes.
To the friends and family I found here in Michigan: Marti Konetzka, Frank Konetzka, Tammy Konetzka, Holly Simoni, and all my new nieces and nephews.
And last, but not least, to Kathy again, who is the alpha and omega of my life.
Note on the EBook Edition
The print version of this book originally published in 2008. Several new stories have been added for this edition.
Girl Names
Bless You
Crème Brulee
Guilty Women
Popular in Britain
Vampire Haiku
Ciao Baby
Not Topless
Burning Embers
Journey to Michigan
This is the story of the move my wife Kathy and I made across the country from Seattle, Washington to eastern Michigan and the hardships we encountered along the way. But that is not the beginning, not really. To tell about the move, I have to start farther back, when Kathy and I first met.
Kathy grew up in Flint, Michigan. We met through Kathy’s Aunt Kim while Kim lived in Seattle. One day when we were eating lunch Kim said to me, “I’ve got someone you should meet.”
Being a young man looking for love, I said, “Great! Where is she?” I looked around. The lunch room was empty.
“Michigan,” said Aunt Kim.
“Michigan?” I said. Michigan, I found out later, was 2,400 miles and three time zones away.
“That’s right,” said Kim. “You should write to her.”
Meanwhile Aunt Kim was working on Kathy, trying hard to get her to answer my letter if I ever wrote one.
I did write to Kathy eventually. In my own mind our first date was on the Saturday night nine years ago when, sitting alone in my apartment, I wrote that first letter.
Letters led to phone calls, and phone bills that exceeded my rent, and phone calls led to visits, and finally, a year after the first letter, Kathy moved out west to live with me.
Kathy had a hard time in Seattle. Even with all the charms of our new life together she still felt a long, long way from home. She did not like living in the middle of a big, loud city.
She felt cramped in the little apartment in the University District with its banging steam pipes, its bathroom without a shower curtain, and the gas stove whose pilot light had not been lit since the 1970s. The city’s natural beauty and its energetic cultural scene did not make up for the loss of family and familiar surroundings.
While Kathy struggled to turn my bachelor home and bachelor life into a homey place for the two of us together, my career as a software consultant began to climb upward. Seattle was a great place for software in the late 1990s. Microsoft was just down the road and it was a hotbed for startup technology companies second only to Silicon Valley. During those years I worked on projects for several companies, large and small, spanning four continents, and I learned the basics of my profession.
The uninterrupted rise continued until I got a job as a consultant for a dot-com whose product saved millions of dollars for Fortune 500 companies. Because I was working for a good company with a good product and good customers, and because the company was a dot-com startup, and because it was the late 1990s, I had the completely reasonable expectation of making millions of dollars in a hurry and retiring before I turned forty. I was, after all, reinventing the nature of business for the twenty-first century. If it didn’t take the whole century to do it, why not cash out my stock options early and buy a yacht?
Then reality took over. The clouds stopped raining gold coins, and the rivers stopped flowing hot chocolate, and gravity began to pull down, not up, once again.
In reality, my company, like many other startups, was a young company in a fledgling market, swimming upstream and trying to sell to much larger, stronger, and slower companies. It was prone to rookie mistakes and it was vulnerable to the economic downturn that started in 2000. Rather than spreading millions to its employees, it began to lay them off by the sackful, until finally the company was bought out by its chief competitor and most of my coworkers were laid off.
And, in reality, I was a competent business consultant and software engineer with excellent experience and prospects, on the cusp of joining junior management. In other words, there was no way I would have ever made millions unless the executives were about to make billions. Which they weren’t.
Now that I might not become a millionaire after all, it was time to rethink what I wanted to do. Kathy had something to say about that. She wanted to return home, and I, no longer held aloft by the dream of creating the future of business technology and reaping the rewards, agreed.
We started boxing up our apartment in early March. Books on bookshelves turned into boxes, forgotten software hiding in drawers turned into boxes, CDs turned into boxes, porcelain decorations turned into boxes, pictures hanging on walls turned into boxes, computer equipment turned into boxes, a kitchen full of dishes turned into boxes, closets full of stuff we never looked at turned into boxes, and by the time we were through, all we owned was boxes.
It seemed fitting and proper that we should return our belongings to boxes, since most of them had started out in a box, having been delivered by UPS or brought home from the store. Think of it as the circle of life: ashes to ashes, box to box. And so our life was surrounded by boxes and our home was filled with the incense of cardboard.
In March we left them behind for a few weeks to drive to Michigan to find a place to live, and when we got back they were still there, self-contained. They looked happy to see us, but not like they missed us very much.
I should clarify something here about our packing. We weren’t totally packed. It wasn’t all done. The thing about packing was that the more of it we did, the more there was to do. There was always one more closet to empty and things that couldn’t be packed until the last day, so that the state of being done was a mirage we could always see but never reach. We spent several weeks like this, picking away at things. We prepared a little more each day, but mostly we waited.
More than once Kathy said to me, “I want to go now,” and I would say we can’t. It wasn’t the plan we had worked out, and it was 8:00 at night, and there was a basketball game on the TV: we weren’t going anywhere.
Finally, when Kathy’s brother Butch arrived from Flint, it was time, at last, to start moving. His job was to add muscle, not a problem at 6’3” and looking like a bald, red-goateed pro wrestler. He also brought experience. He was a diesel mechanic and was used to working with heavy equipment, so driving the moving truck would not be a problem for him. Kathy and I had never driven anything bigger than a station wagon.
Butch was about to spend his first night in Seattle and Kathy and I were about to spend our last. We ordered dinner from the local Thai restaurant and ate it cross-legged on the floor, and then rolled over and went to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.
We rose early the next morning, drank a pot of coffee, and got to work. Butch and I went to get the U-Haul and the car dolly. We planned to load the truck with the contents of our home, pull the car behind, and have the three of us ride in the front seat of the truck. Pursuant to that plan, we started hauling boxes and furniture down the apartment building steps and up the ramp of the U-Haul.
The single hardest part of the day came first, with the moving of our desk. The desk was the heaviest thing we owned and it felt like it was made of cast iron encased in lead.
We heaved it into the U-Haul, and once we set the desk down I told Butch that the worst was over and the day was practically done. Ha-ha, old buddy, high-five!
He didn’t say anything, which made him wiser than I.
We hauled box after box while Kathy stayed in the apartment and helped see that things got emptied in proper order. Butch stayed in the truck and loaded it up so tight that no light could get through the cracks. I worked in between and ferried piles of boxes on a hand truck, and made myself popular with the neighbors next to the stairwell by rolling the hand truck down one banging step at a time.
Optimism reigned supreme for the first few hours. We were still strong and the truck looked as empty as the inside of an old man’s mouth. Then doubt began to find purchase in our sweat and tiring muscles. The question was this: which was greater, the unfillable truck or the unemptiable apartment?
At first the truck seemed to be winning, but as the rooms of the apartment barely began to be emptied, and as Butch filled the truck past the wheel wells, we started to lose confidence.
Kathy was the first to see it. She subtracted the space required from the space remaining and came up with red ink.
Kathy said, “It’s not all going to fit.” Butch, a graduate of the school of you-can’t-stop-me-unless-you-kill-me, said, “Yeah it will. I’ll make it fit.”
I didn’t know the answer, but wanted to be strong for Kathy, so I said, “Hang in there. We’re going to be fine.”
Eventually we all saw that Kathy was right: the apartment would win. The unloaded things took up too much room and each item felt like a blow to the sternum.
...the cushions on the couch – BAM
...all the Christmas decorations in the storage closet – POW
...the guitar amplifier and the file cabinet in the office – WHACK.
So what to do now? We couldn’t get a bigger truck on such short notice, and even if we could we didn’t want to have to unload the old truck into the new truck. Our mime fists went to our eyes in silent sobbing at the thought.
Butch got us unstuck. He said to call U-Haul to reserve a trailer that we could tow behind the truck. Kathy made the call, got the trailer, and so we were saved. Surely we couldn’t fill a truck and a trailer. However, it also meant that we wouldn’t be able to tow the car. We would have to drive it along with the truck.
Now that we had a both a truck and a trailer we were able to conquer the bottomless apartment – barely. We filled the trailer first, and when it was very, very full I watched Butch pull the door down. He pulled, yanked, and sunk his teeth into the door strap for extra leverage.
I looked away. Some things are necessary but should never be witnessed. It was enough to know that Butch won the fight with the trailer door. The truck door came next, and again Butch was the winner.
His head is made for squishing things into a U-Haul. It’s bald and very hard on the inside with a thick soft covering on the outside. He pulled the door down, and when it was a foot away from the latch he jammed his head against the mattress that held the rest of the contents still. He pushed until he could shut the door, just this close to decapitating himself.
The truck and trailer were loaded with no room to spare – a nice day’s work. The problem was, the day’s work was not done. In order to stay on schedule we still had to get to Spokane, where my father and my step mom Barbara had offered to put us up for the night. It was Thursday and Butch had to return to work the following Tuesday. It was already well into the evening by the time we finished loading, and we wouldn’t get to Spokane before midnight even if we drove fast.
Kathy and Butch got in the U-Haul and I drove the car. One blessing of having to drive two vehicles was that we didn’t have to fit all three of us into the cab of the truck. It was a big truck but we were three big people. The “middle” seat was barely a seat at all, and Kathy, the baby of our group, would have had to sit in it for 2,400 miles.
We had wanted to tow the car instead of driving it separately. Driving the car would put mileage on it, make it necessary to communicate and coordinate between the two vehicles, and it would mean that someone would always be driving alone. But the truck was too small, so we had to do it anyway.
It turned out that was one of the luckiest breaks of the whole trip.
The truck was a rolling adventure, a little Six Flags in an orange and white box with wheels. On the one hand it lacked power. Going up the Cascade Mountains it had to pull and strain like The Little U-Haul That Could to make it up to the summit.
Keeping the momentum in the U-Haul was extremely important, because if it wasn’t kept, the truck would have rolled to a stop, then rolled back down I-90 the way it came, picking up speed with Butch steering by the rearview mirror, and it would not have stopped until it flew backwards off a pier into Puget Sound.
Halfway up the mountains Butch and Kathy had to pass me because I was not going fast enough for them. Kathy waved to me as I passed, and I thought she was taunting me: “Keep up, slowpoke!” I thought it was cute and waved back. I didn’t find out until later that she was waving in panic: “Get me out of here, Charlie!” Kathy, it turned out, didn’t like to ride in wobbly trucks at 90 mph.
On the other hand, the truck also lacked good brakes. Butch and Kathy had not noticed while climbing that the brakes were not built to handle such a heavy load. While descending the mountains, however, this weakness stood out like a bowling ball on a water slide. I was fortunate, driving in front, that I didn’t have to watch as they took the turns in the road at rollercoaster high speed. If the truck rocked and heaved airborne a few times, I didn’t notice. It was dark outside and I was paying attention to the road in front of me. Safety first.
The truck also lacked a modern suspension system. There were no shock absorbers, no springs, nothing to keep from feeling every ridge and dent on the highway. I had once ridden in a truck down a “road” that was actually a dry creek bed full of rounded boulders. That was a very bouncy ride, so I could empathize with Butch and Kathy.
The truck would turn out to have additional drawbacks, but more on that later.
We made our first stop after the mountains in Vantage to get gas. I got out of the car and walked over to Kathy while
Butch went into the station to find the restroom. She looked like she was about to cry.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’ve been missing you so much! If we’re going to die I want us to be together.” She told me about almost crashing into me from behind while climbing the mountains.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” And we were fine, but saying so didn’t take the slapped look off her face.
An interesting thing happened to us at Vantage. I tried to pay for gas with my credit card and was declined, which had never happened before. I told Kathy and she got on her cell phone to the credit card company while I went in to pay cash for the gas and get some dinner out of a cold case.
Kathy found out that the card was declined because there was $11,000 of outstanding authorizations from U-Haul on it, taking the card past its credit limit. That didn’t make sense to us, since the U-Haul had cost only $2,600. Kathy put it together when she remembered that the agent behind the UHaul counter had been having trouble with his computer and had swiped the card several times in order to create one charge. Think of them as practice swings before stepping up to the plate. To the card company, however, each swipe was serious and legally binding. So…very sorry, but no more credit. The card company advised us to call U-Haul to get them to call to explain that most of the swipes were do-overs.
We reached Spokane at about 12:30 in the morning and fell into bed without taking showers. We got up slowly the next morning and had breakfast with Dad and Barbara. Kathy asked Butch if he would be offended if she rode with me.
“I can’t get in that truck again,” she said.
Butch said he wouldn’t be offended, and Kathy said, “Thank you!”
From there on Kathy joined me in the car while Butch drove solo. That was our lucky break. In the end only Butch had to drive in the truck, and for that we were thankful.
After breakfast we said goodbye to Dad and Barbara, and headed east.
Our plan was to take I-90 from Spokane to Billings, Montana where we would switch onto I-94. We wanted to get as far as we could, but weren’t sure how far we could go in one day.
Butch was ready to go hard. “Let’s just drive it straight through.”
Kathy and I weren’t as sure. When we had made this drive in March we had only gotten as far as Billings, and we knew that the next big town was Bismarck. We didn’t want to end up in the middle of North Dakota with nowhere to sleep for two hundred miles.
The challenge of crossing Idaho and Montana was the same challenge as crossing the Cascades, only more. The Rocky Mountains form a wall across the Western states. Up 7,000 feet and down 3,000 feet at steep grade along a curvy highway. By this time, Kathy and I were driving behind Butch instead of in front. It seemed better to let the slower vehicle set the pace. When driving uphill the truck pulled the wobbly trailer, but when rolling downhill the trailer pushed the truck. Any bump made them both bounce and twist in opposite directions like a dog shaking off water.
We stopped at a rest area for lunch. Butch stumbled out of the U-Haul looking like he had ridden three hours inside a rattling grain silo, which was pretty much true except for the grain. Kathy made sandwiches using the lid of a can of Vienna sausages to spread the peanut butter and jelly, and Butch told stories about the times he had almost run off the road or crushed another car. Kathy and I chewed our sandwiches, quiet and wide-eyed.
Despite the truck nearly rocking and swaying off the road with all our possessions, we enjoyed the beauty of western Montana. The highway passed alongside Missoula on an adjacent ridge. From there it looked like a city built from a model kit, with tiny, perfect houses and streets. You could see all of it at once, nestled up against a flinty wall of mountains. The view was huge and intimate at the same time. The city seemed to fit tongue-in-groove with the mountains, and fragile enough to disappear completely if they should collapse.
The journey from the Montana state line to Billings was like that the whole way. Olive rolling hills and swaths of grass reached out to the distant mountains tipped with snow. We passed through in the late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and it and cast hard shadows on the lee side of the hills. Bright here, black there. Hazy here, eye-wateringly clear there. We drove through a chiaroscuro of not only light, but also of space. We could see every detail as if it were a few feet away even though most of the surroundings were miles distant, sharp contrasts of near and far and big and small condensed into the same scale.
We decided to spend the night in Billings. We could have gone further, we all agreed, but we had worked very hard the day before and were running low on sleep. Better to pull over for the night, get a good rest, and put in a long day tomorrow.
Billings is 550 miles from Spokane, and I thought we had met our goal by getting this far on the first day. We still weren’t sure how long it was going to take us to get all the way home. At this rate it would take four days, and we wouldn’t find out until tomorrow how hard we were willing to push.
Butch said, “Let’s go for it.”
Kathy said, “Let’s get there in one piece.”
During the day Kathy had called U-Haul to explain the situation with the credit card. The U-Haul person said he would look into it. Kathy called the card company when we reached the motel in Billings and found out that not only were the extra authorizations dropped but so was the correct $2,600 charge. “Good news!” we thought, but cautiously. We were glad to have our card back in service, but if the correct U-Haul charges were missing, some more “activity” was going to happen on the card, and we didn’t know whether it would be usable afterward. But it was usable now, and that was good enough. We put the motel charge on the card as if it were brand new.
We ate dinner at the Cracker Barrel, our favorite Billings restaurant. The Cracker Barrel specializes in serving good food to America’s travelers: hamburgers, pot roast, chicken, and the like. Nothing fancy, just good food for good people. When Kathy and I stopped in Billings in March we weren’t sure what route we were going to take to Michigan. The road forked at Billings. I-90 continued on through South Dakota, and I-94 ran through North Dakota. The roads met up again in Madison, Wisconsin. We didn’t know which way would be better and we were going to flip a coin, but instead we asked the waitress at the Cracker Barrel, who told us to take I-94. We did, and it was good advice.
The next morning at 6:00 AM we ate breakfast again at our favorite Billings restaurant, the Cracker Barrel, where they served six varieties of biscuits and gravy, four varieties of pancakes and French toast, and three types of fruit cup for breakfast, along with all the coffee we could drink.
Butch asked the waitress what kinds of omelets they had.
She told him that they served Cheese, Ham & Cheese, Bacon & Cheese, Sausage & Cheese, and Western.
Butch asked her if the Western omelet came with cheese.
“Yes it does,” she said.
Butch said he’d have the Western and the waitress asked him what he’d like for his side dish: hash browns, toast, or hash brown casserole. Butch asked if the casserole was good.
She said it was, and he said he’d take it. And it was good, too. When the waitress set it on the table in front of Butch we found out that hash brown casserole is hash browns with melted cheese.
It was a good day for driving. The land smoothed out from hilly to flat after Billings. No more mountains for Butch, thank God. The scenery was more sparse and less dramatic, mostly farms and grassland in all directions. All the towns were small. None contained more than a few hundred people, and they looked not like towns as much as camping sites with buildings instead of tents. Kathy and I wondered what people did for work out here. Did Amazon.com deliver here? Where did the kids come from to fill the school? Was there a school at all? Where were the other schools to play football against?
We had purchased a AAA membership before we left so that we would have roadside assistance. Out in eastern Montana roadside assistance felt like a laughably foolish thing to expect. Assistance from where? Cell phone signal to call AAA from where? We could forget about AAA.
You had to buy gas when you could in that part of the country, not when you wanted to, since the next pump might be a hundred miles away. Same for lodging, food, and anything else. Butch didn’t understand at first how far apart everything was. I would ask him how the truck was doing for gas and he’d say, “Great – over a quarter tank.” To me that was trouble waiting to happen and I made sure we pulled over at the next exit.
Our goal was to drive far enough that we could drive the rest of the way home the next day. Par would be Fargo, North Dakota, where we had spent the second night during the March trip. Fargo was just west of the Minnesota border and a bit too far from home to reach it in one day. We wanted to get farther if possible. Early in the morning we were ambitious and thought we could make it to Milwaukee, that is, through the rest of Montana and all of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Milwaukee lay an hour north of Chicago and about eight hours from our new home.
By lunchtime we did not feel as ambitious, for two reasons. First, the next big town after Billings was Bismarck, North Dakota, and Bismarck was half way across the state. Call it human psychology, but when we left Billings we felt like we were just a short hop to the North Dakota border, but it took hours of driving just to get through Montana, longer to get to Bismarck, and Bismarck was only a milestone, not a real destination. By the time we reached it, some of our joie de vivre had dissipated.
Second, time and tedium aside, the drive to Bismarck was harder work than expected. Something to understand about eastern Montana and all of North Dakota: the land there was as flat and wide open as a Cracker Barrel pancake. With nothing to interrupt it, the wind has its way. It blew all day long across eastern Montana and North Dakota, hard, cold, and gusty.
Meanwhile, the only thing flatter and wider than the North Dakota prairie is the side of a 17-foot U-Haul. Not only did the truck drive like a rolling cement mixer, it handled like three sails to the wind. Most of I-94 was two lanes in each direction, one to drive on and one to get blown into. Butch needed four hands to drive it, two for gripping the wheel and two for praying. Kathy and I watched from behind as the truck weaved and twisted. She was torn between closing her eyes so she wouldn’t have to watch Butch crash, and keeping them open to give him strength.
Butch didn’t make it any easier for Kathy. He believed the truck handled the wind better at 80 mph than 60 mph: “It’s a lot better,” he said. “Seriously.” Whether we lived or died we were going to get there fast.
We stopped for gas in Bismarck. Butch got out of the truck, teetered over to me, and looked at me with eyes that had seen the inside of a tornado. “Whooooooo!” he hollered. “That truck is some fun! YEAH!”
Kathy hurried over to Butch, arms outstretched. “Oh, honey, are you all right? Come here…”
“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “No problem.” Of course someone could take a shovel to back of his head and he’d say “No problem.” To Butch, no problem is code for, “It’s a son of a bitch but it hasn’t killed me yet.”
We kept going, and Butch hung in there. We continued through Fargo, still not sure how far we could get. After we reached Minnesota we decided we should spend the night somewhere west of Minneapolis. We could have kept going into Wisconsin but if we had we wouldn’t have been able to get an early start the next day.
The town we settled on was St. Cloud, about an hour outside the Twin Cities. It was nighttime and we were tired and ready to get some sleep. We stopped for gas before looking for a motel. Surprise! Our card was declined again, and so was the alternate card.
Kathy called customer service for each one. The alternate card had been shut off because charges were being made far from home. It looked like someone had stolen the card and started running east. Kathy explained that we were moving, and the card was reactivated. The main card, however, the one with the U-Haul charges, was more difficult. Kathy had to explain to the representative that she had given all our information to another rep in Billings, so they should have it on file already.
She had to explain it four times before the rep would put the card back in service. “I’m in a gas station in St. Cloud, Minnesota and I can’t get gas!” said Kathy. “I already explained all that to so-and-so yesterday and to someone-or-other the night before. This makes three days in a row I’ve had to call you guys!”
Getting a motel room was also more difficult than expected. There was a Holiday Inn right next to the gas station, but I didn’t want to go there because they had been nasty about letting us stay with our dog in March, so we drove halfway across the city to the next nearest motel. No luck there: full up. Then we drove around to another motel: full up there too. By this time Kathy was so tired she could barely stand and just wanted to get into a damn bed. It was not fun to walk out of the second place and tell Kathy we would have to keep looking. No it wasn’t. I put pride aside and we went back to the Holiday Inn.
Full there too! It turned out that six local religious colleges were holding commencement the next day and the whole town was full of proud moms and dads. If someone had wanted to meet all the Lutheran parents over the age of fifty, the place to go was St. Cloud that night.
That’s when we caught a break. The man at the desk at the Holiday Inn made a phone call to the motel across the street and got us a room. Thank you, Holiday Inn. I forgive you for dissing our dog.
We intended to push from St. Cloud all the way home, no matter how long it took. We thought we had seen the worst after driving through the wind of the high plains. One more day of solid driving, not even that hard, and we would be home.
Not so. The wind in Minnesota and Wisconsin was even worse than North Dakota. Tornadoes and heavy storm fronts were passing to the south. We caught the edge of these storms, and I can say from personal experience that driving through sub-hurricane strength rain and wind was very, very difficult.
Butch believed the truck handled better going fast than slow even in hurricanes. He drove straight into the weather and Kathy and I did our best to keep up. If you’ve ever driven through a car wash you know how cozy it is to hear the wash of water and not be able to see out the windows. It’s very soothing, isn’t it? Now try it at 80 mph while chasing after a blurry orange truck.
We hit Minneapolis first thing in the morning and we had no problem getting through. We whizzed past the city of glassy skyscrapers and ornate German churches and sighed with relief when we passed into Wisconsin. The day’s travels included driving through three big cities: Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago. One down, two to go.
The grind began in earnest after Minneapolis. The wind whipped up strong and the rain came down hard. We got our biggest scare driving through Milwaukee. I-94 passes through the center of town on a raised bridge from which you can see in all directions: all the old churches, breweries, and the baseball stadium. I had enjoyed it when we drove through in March and looked forward to stealing a few glances around from behind the steering wheel.
However, just as we rounded onto the bridge a gust of wind struck the car across the side and pushed us two lanes over. I skidded back into control of the car and Butch swiveled back and forth in the U-Haul like it had been slapped, and that was the end of the sight-seeing.
Okay, I was humble now. Just drive, Charlie. Just drive.
Butch had experienced most of the wind problems up to that point. The car I was driving didn’t put as much sail into the wind. For the rest of the trip, however, I had to wrestle the wind too. Mostly I could drive without difficulty until, without warning, I was ten feet to the left and trying to stay in the saddle. Think of it like plugging in an old blow dryer in a bathtub full of water. It’s just like plugging it in an empty tub, until it isn’t.
And so it went, past Milwaukee and into Chicago. Like Milwaukee I had been hoping to take in some of the scenery, and like Milwaukee the weather made it impossible. Chicago, being Chicago, was ready to give us an old fashioned ass whipping. Driving through the city was as cold and grim as playing against the Bears. Later I heard news reports that the wind gusts there had reached over 100 mph.
And more of the same past Chicago, through Indiana and up through southern and western Michigan. Driving through an upper Midwest storm is all about holding on and pushing forward. Three hundred miles to go, then two-sixty, then two twenty, then one-eighty…
And, at about 8:30 that night, we arrived at Kathy’s sister’s house. Kathy pulled me out of the car with my hands stuck in a claw position. I asked, “Where’s the bed? Where’s the bed?” I was ready to sleep for a hundred hours.
But not Kathy. There were things to do, as there always were at the end of a trip, no matter how long or how tiring. Unload the car first and get a load of laundry started? Um, okay, no problem. Where is that bed again?
Our hard driving had paid off. We reached our destination in only three days, landing there on Mother’s Day. It didn’t matter so much to Kathy or me, but Butch was able to drive the U-Haul back to his house and hug his wife and kids hard.
We met Butch at our new place the next morning to unload. As he had promised, the truck and trailer unloaded much faster than they had loaded, and we had extra help from Butch’s young daughters. The boxes we had last seen in Seattle had suddenly reappeared in our new place. Ah, back to boxes!
The next day we started taking everything out of boxes and putting the contents where they belonged. Kathy and her sister Marti did the bulk of the work, and I carried empty boxes and items that we didn’t need back to our storage unit. There isn’t much to say about the apartment. In a way, after so much work, having our home back and all put together feels a bit like an anticlimax, except that it feels good. Kathy’s things look as good as ever. My new office feels much more spacious than the old one. Life is almost back to normal now after weeks of waiting, and working, and waiting some more. Once we both have jobs the transition will be complete. Fingers crossed.
We were looking for a change: I wanted a different hill to climb and Kathy just wanted to come back home. Now here we are.
Life is good.
Job Search
My job search has been progressing smoothly and has given me every satisfaction I could wish for, except a job.
I had forgotten how depressing it is. I haven’t had to look for a job for eight years, the summer the contract expired on a job that I had held for nearly five years. It was also when Kathy, my wife-to-be, came to live with me.
“Seattle is cool!” she told me one day soon after she arrived. She had found a job at a veterinary hospital in less than two weeks.
I, on the other hand, had been out of work for a month. “The regional technology job market is going through a soft phase,” I told her. At least it was for me. Then Windows 95 was released with the biggest, most publicized technology launch in my working life, and three weeks later I started a new job at Microsoft. Since then I have advanced steadily in business software consulting: upward and onward. That is, until I quit to move to Michigan.
I had considered staying with my current employer in some kind of loose leave-of-absence arrangement, but in the end I decided to resign. It was better to make a clean break. A cross-country move is a little bit like being a fireman. Similar to a fireman, my day was taken up with unpredictable fits of preparation, hard work, waiting, and occasional panic. Working on software, however, takes long stretches of unbroken calm and contemplation that are not easily found in the rumble seat of a fire truck. Even after we arrived in Michigan there were days of things to do to get fully entrenched in our new home. Services had to be connected. Supplies had to be purchased. Cars had to be maintained. The list went on and on. The calendar, far from furling cleanly out before me, looked more like the Stars and Stripes at Fort McHenry.
Not that I didn’t try to land a job even from the beginning. I posted my résumé on several job websites after I resigned, which created the first challenge, that of communicating plans and expectations to potential employers. I had several conversations with recruiters that went something like this.
I said, “I’m ready to interview immediately, at least over the phone, but I can’t work until I’m settled in Michigan.”
“When will you be settled?”
“I don’t know exactly. Probably some time in May. And we’ll be in Michigan in March to find a place to live.”
“So you’re going to be here in March?”
“Right, for a few weeks.”
“You’re not moving here?”
“Yes I am, but in two stages. First find a place to live.
Then come back and move all our belongings. I’ll be out for the first stage soon.”
“You could interview then?”
“Sure.”
“But you’re in...Seattle...now?” I could hear the recruiter look down to read the address on my résumé.
“Right – for a few more days.”
“And you’re coming here when?”
“I’m leaving in about a week. My wife and I are driving it.”
“Really! How long does that take?”
“Well, I don’t know yet. Between three days and a week, we think.”
“Wow. And then you could be available for an interview?”
“Sure.”
“And that puts us out to...looks like...early April. Sound about right?”
“I think so.”
“Well good. I’ll keep your name on file and we’ll see if we can get something lined up for you when you get here. Sound good?”
“Sure.”
“Okay then.”
All these conversations with recruiters were followed by a silent telephone. None of them called back, and I was not surprised.
I did not make much progress on the job hunt before the move, due in part, I’m sure, to living neither here nor there. Despite trying to explain what I was looking for, and where, and when, I think I created more confusion than understanding.
I had a couple of particularly interesting conversations during that phase. One was from a company I’ll call Rooster Technologies. Rooster Technologies is a consulting and outplacement firm to whom I had sent my résumé.
I think the recruiter at Rooster Technologies was impressed with my résumé because she acted on it first thing in the morning, at 8:30 AM Detroit time, or 5:30 Seattle time, when I was still sleeping.
If I had known she was going to call I would have made preparations, like wearing clothes. But never mind, I was ready. We spoke for a few minutes about my experience, interests, and background, and she asked me to take an online technical skills test. In particular the test was supposed to measure my knowledge of J2EE.
For the benefit of people who may not know this, J2EE stands for “Java 2 Enterprise Edition.” It is a collection of related technologies that let developers create software for common tasks, like building web sites, querying data from databases, and sending and receiving email. There are dozens of specific J2EE technologies and they are complex enough that almost any software developer knows some of them better than others. This is the case for me as well. I could teach classes in some of the technologies, and I am only a student in others. For that reason, any test on J2EE is a gamble. Would I be tested on what I knew, or what I didn’t?
I mostly lost the gamble with the test given to me by Rooster Technologies. It emphasized topics that I did not know well, although I knew enough to make educated guesses.
After taking the test the recruiter called me back. “Good news,” she said. “You scored in the 89th percentile.”
“Great,” I said.
And with a few more words we hung up, and I have not heard from her since.
What saddens me isn’t that I was able to score in the 89th percentile largely on the strength of my ability to guess. No, what saddens me is that all the knowledge I have earned fair and square squeezes neatly in that last eleven percent.
The other interesting conversation was actually two conversations with a company I’ll call Chicken George Partners. Chicken George is a consulting and outplacement firm.
The first call was from a woman named Melissa. She asked me a few questions about my experience, interests, and background, and she told me about an opening she had for a software architect at a startup company in Bellevue, Washington.
“No, no,” I told her. “I’m actually looking for work in the Detroit area. I think I put that at the top of my résumé.”
“Oh,” she answered. She didn’t want to say so, but the influence of Chicken George Partners did not reach all the way to Detroit. Perhaps, I thought, it got about as far as Bozeman, Montana and then trailed off.
I said I was sorry if it was not clear I was not looking for work in Washington State. She said sorry for the confusion and good luck on my future search. I said thanks and that was the last I expected to hear from Chicken George.
But it wasn’t. That afternoon I got a call from Benjamin. He was from Chicken George too, and wanted to tell me about an opportunity in Redmond, Washington.
I listened until he finished, and said, “Actually, I spoke with Melissa this morning. You talk to her at all?”
“You bet I know Melissa. But listen, she and I are working on different job orders...”
“Sorry about the mix-up, Benjamin,” I said. “She and I were talking about one of her job orders this morning and I told her I’m moving to the Detroit area and looking for work there.”
“Oh, okay,” Benjamin said, and again I imagined the map of the United States in his head with no pins in it near Detroit.
“Well good luck to you, and you take care.”
“Thanks, Benjamin,” I said.
Then Kathy and I drove to Michigan to find a place to live. We stayed with Kathy’s sister Marti. I updated my online résumés with her phone number while keeping the Seattle address. No doubt it was confusing for everyone, but in my defense I’ll say that I updated as much as I knew as soon as I knew it. If it confused the recruiters, it confused Kathy and me even more.
One potential employer, however, was not confused! Not long after arriving in Michigan I got an email, which said something to this effect.
Dear Mr. Close –
I came across your résumé on [popular job website] and I would like to discuss an opportunity with you in the Farmington Hills area at your earliest convenience. [Company Name] is a major player in the financial services industry. I can be reached at [contact information].
Regards
Elizabeth [Surname]
I did a little checking up on [Company Name], and sure enough it was a big and well-known financial services company, actually a subsidiary of a really, really big and well known financial services company. And they were in Michigan! And they had found me! I felt like I had finally arrived at my new home. I could see clearly now. The rain was gone.
I was so happy that I actually printed off the email and stood over Kathy while she read it. I bit my lip and held my hands at my sides, wondering if she understood its significance.
“Neat!” said Kathy.
“It’s in Farmington Hills!” I said. “Somebody in Michigan found my résumé.”
And then she understood and we were both happy together. She was like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and I was like the high-stepping munchkin who hooks her by the elbow and dances her around in a circle. Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho!
I called Elizabeth the next day after studying her company’s website. I wanted to be prepared. I said, “Hello. This is Charlie Close. You sent me an email yesterday?”
“Why, hello, Mr. Close. Thanks for calling me back. You’ve had a chance to look at our website?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My preparation had paid off already.
“Good. Then you know that we’re a financial services company that specializes in providing investment and financial planning advice to families and individuals.”
“Yes, I do.” I said. That was clearly on their website.
“Is that a mission you could get excited about, Mr. Close?”
“Certainly,” I said. Financial planning is good.
“Good. Then what I’d like to do is schedule you to come to a meeting with some of our senior directors and managers. They’ll get a chance to meet you and explain everything in greater detail. If all goes well, I can set up an interview. Sound good?”
Now I was confused. Why was there a meeting before an interview, and why would a bunch of senior managers and directors want to talk to a newbie like me, and why did I have the feeling I would not be the only candidate invited to this meeting?
“Excuse me,” I said. “Just wondering – what exactly is the job?”
Elizabeth said, “Of course. The job is providing investment and financial planning advice to families and individuals.”
“Oh,” I said.
“We’ve found that people with your background usually do very well. Do you believe in keeping your options open?”
“Sure I do,” I said.
“Then I think this opportunity would be a good one for you. You see –”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been doing information technology for ten years now and I think that’s the kind of work I’m looking for.”
“As I said, people of your background have been especially successful here in the past. We could –”
“I’m sorry. I’m just not interested, but thanks for your time.”
And that was the end of that. I had to walk out of the bedroom where I had gone for privacy and let Kathy know that the opportunity had not worked out. Ha ha ha. Ho ho ho.
It was at about the same time that I received a call from a hoarse-sounding woman with a Brooklyn accent named Nina.
“Mr. Close?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good evening, sir. How are you today?”
“I’m good. Thanks.”
“That’s good. The reason I’m calling is that I understand you recently left your employment. Is that correct, sir?”
“Yes...” I said.
“Well I know that can be a very stressful experience. The reason I’m calling is that I provide financial counseling to people in your situation. There is a lot you can do to get the most out of your COBRA health insurance and your 401(k) that most people don’t know about. Do you think that would be helpful to someone like yourself?”
The conversation did not go much farther. I cut it short and wondered how people like Nina could find me so quickly but not people who could offer me a real job.
Even though these calls did not turn in to a job, I choose to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. My very presence, though unemployed, was helping to keep the wheels of industry turning. I served a purpose, and that is what is so great about our economy: nothing in it is wasted.
I kept looking, chin up and chest out, and soon I reached the interview stage for another job, this one better suited to my skills. It was for a startup software company in Livonia that makes business software for large organizations to help them reduce cost and improve legal compliance, which closely resembled the kind of product I worked on for the last five years. So far, so good.
I applied for the job and received a request to do a phone screen interview. Excellent, I thought. I assumed the call would be from a member of the company’s human resources department wanting to ask general questions about my experience, interests, and background.
But it wasn’t. The call was from the wife of the company’s chief technology officer and she came packing bigger hardware. For most of an hour she asked me detailed technical questions designed to discover how familiar I was with the technology they used to build their product. It went very well. She stayed almost completely inside my eleven percent and I handled the questions easily, and the questions, while not the most difficult imaginable, were tough enough to show I wasn’t bluffing. Near the end I started whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown” in my head. Was it a definitive technical test? No, but I had passed, and it was good enough to get me a face-to-face interview.
Shot. Buzzer. Swish.
I arrived at the interview in jacket and tie and I immediately got a sense of the good old days back at my last job. I was hired there as one of the first seventy-five employees, a small company even by startup standards. It was still possible for everyone to know everyone.
It looked much the same here at first glance. It was housed in an office building located in a semi-industrial suburb of Detroit where the rent is reasonable. The company fit inside one large room full of cubicles. I didn’t know what the dress code would be, but I needn’t have worried. Corporate casual was the upper end. Mostly there were jeans, shorts, and T-shirts, and no one I saw was over the age of forty.
The interview was with a fellow I’ll call Meadowlark. He was one of two lead engineers on a ten-person development team. I tried to prepare by looking him up on the Internet and came away impressed. This guy had his own side business making software tools, and also contributed to other software projects. I expected him to ask me some difficult questions.
We talked for the better part of two hours. He talked about the company, the kind of work it did, and what he thought it needed to improve. He described the kind of work that might be expected of me, and the more I listened the more it sounded like my prior experience. I chimed in from time to time with observations about things my old company had done well and mistakes it had made. Ah, I thought, so much possibility and so much work to do.