Sammy, Tammy, and Me

Tammy had driven her own car, so I asked her to stop on the way home and get a few things at the supermarket. I recited the list, and she said she'd do it. I was cooking a marinara sauce, and I had more of everything on hand, so I added some more tomato paste and another pound of sausage, and got out a bigger pot for the pasta. That part's easy, especially when you have half a day's notice.

Dave appeared, shortly after the girls had arrived after work. Introductions were handled, cold beers passed out, and he perched on a stool in the corner of the kitchen while I got the meal ready for the table. Seemed like a nice guy, an engineer in a firm that built the structural steel columns and beams for industrial buildings. He was from Omaha, and just like so many young men these days, hadn't lived at home since he went away to college at age 18. As we talked, I started to understand that he had no home life and hadn't for a long time, so he was accustomed to going out for everything - meals, entertainment, hobbies, socializing - anything other than sleeping, personal hygiene, and getting dressed. To him, his apartment was nothing but a crash pad, and that seemed natural to him.

The conversation veered around to Sam, and I could tell that he was seriously in love with her, whether he realized it or not. So I talked a bit about her background - family, home life, how she came to move here to live with me - and let her history show that she was more attuned to a home centered lifestyle. I didn't reach out and hit him over the head with the obvious culture clash, but I left it out there for him to grab onto if he was so inclined. Gradually an understanding seemed to be taking root in his mind, so I nudged the conversation along with the question, "How do you see the future of your relationship with Sam?" It was a question he'd obviously been dreading, and he went from a self-assured, poised young man to a stumbling mass of confusion in about a microsecond.

I hastened to try to settle him down. "Hold on. You're young yet, and you've got a long life ahead of you. We never really know what's around the corner or down the road."

"But you see, that's just it. I don't know what lies ahead, and yet I want to have a life that includes Sam. I feel lucky to have found her and I don't want to lose her just because I can't get focused on settling down."

"But isn't that what dating is all about? Getting to know each other, gradually letting the big puzzle pieces fall into place? Of course, dating is different from living a totally unattached life, especially because you both want to be together, first once a week, then two or three times, and finally so much that you automatically include each other in every plan you make. People who don't use dating that way, as a transition to total togetherness, can get a rude shock when they get married, and that causes a lot of early divorces."

"Yeah, I see what you mean, but how does a guy do that? I mean, I have my friends and we do stuff together, and then other nights I see Sam. It's either-or. Never and."

"Then maybe that's what you ought to look at. What's the reason that your normal, healthy leisure time activities can't include Sam? There's nothing there to feel guilty about. You seem to have put your finger on the root cause of your uneasiness, and as an engineer you're comfortable with complicated problems.

"How do your friends deal with this? Have you ever talked with them about it? What about the ones who are married? Are they dealing with it, or are they just content to grow apart, heading along the road to divorce court?"

"I don't know if we'd really feel comfortable talking about such a personal matter. I'll have to think about that."

By this time the pasta was cooked, and I drained it and sprayed it with cold water to keep it from sticking together. "Well, this meal is ready to be served. How about getting the ladies set up with something to drink, while I put this on the table."

* * * * * *

After dinner the girls cleaned up the mess I'd made of the kitchen, while Dave and I sat out on the patio to enjoy a cold beer. He asked me about my family history, very politely, but with an obvious subtitle: "What the hell makes you think you're such an authority on how other people should live their lives?"

"I married young. My wife was a great catch, but I didn't appreciate what I had. Very simply, we never got it together. She had her friends and I had mine. We ate supper together every night and slept in the same bed. Then it was supper together five nights a week, then four, and so on. Pretty soon we were just passing in the hallway. The silly part of it was that we really cared for each other, but we just weren't smart enough or mature enough to see where we were headed. So after two and a half years, we divorced, amicably because there were no serious regrets. It felt as if we'd never really been married."

"How did you feel after the divorce? Was it hard to adjust?"

"Yes and no. I missed having someone to sleep with. I don't mean just sex. It was more the feeling of being alone all night. I didn't sleep well. Then I dated. That was tough. I didn't know what I was looking for, so I had no idea how to find it. By mere chance I met a girl from a big family, lots of sisters who were married to regular guys and had kids. There were family get togethers at least twice a month, not always the whole clan but two or three couples and their kids. We got married and carried on the family tradition, and we also had other friends, but the emphasis was on married couples doing whatever. It was all new to me but I got used to it, and it worked. We eventually had two kids, a boy and a girl, who are both married now. My son lives in the northwest and my daughter in the southeast. We talk on the phone, but rarely face to face.

"My wife died at age forty, from a heart attack. Quite sudden. Then a few years later the company I was with had to downsize. I was a corporate officer, but my whole division got shut down and I was left with a nice office and my executive secretary, but nothing to do. So they gave me a very attractive golden parachute, and I was suddenly as free as a bird, still in my forties. Those two shocks, my wife's death and my forced retirement, left me adrift. If it weren't for my in-laws including me in every family thing they did, I'd have had a tough time of it. When the economy recovered, house prices went sky high. I had a really nice house with a very small mortgage. The market was so active that I had people competing to buy it, and it sold for more than my asking price. By then I'd had enough northeastern winters to last a lifetime, so I sold practically everything I owned and moved out here to start over."

"So you were here, all alone, with no friends or family or job or anything. That was starting over, all right. Starting from scratch. Weren't you lonely?"

"Oh, I had lots of long, quiet nights to think about things. I wasn't bogged down with guilt for anything I'd done, but I felt that I could have done better with the opportunities I'd had. So I tried to figure out what had gone well and what had gone poorly. I thought about people I knew who had made better and worse decisions than I had. After a few weeks of that I started to see what life was all about. When you're right in the middle of it, you can't see the forest for the trees, but later, too late to do anything about it, you can see where you could have done better. These days I can face every new day with an open mind, and now I have the insight that comes from hindsight."

"Do you have any sage advice, based on all you've been through?"

"Only this: sift through the trivia to find the real problems, and then learn all you can about them. Answers are easy. It's the questions that are elusive."

* * * * * *

Tammy sat with me in the living room after Dave had left and Sam had gone into her little house to get ready for bed. I didn't know how much of my conversation with Dave she might have overheard, but I knew she was a good judge of people, so I asked, "What did you think of Dave?"

"A nice guy, immature, afraid of adult responsibility, terrified of getting roped into a life he won't be happy in. How about you?"

"Pretty much the same, but not so severe. He's scholarly, learns from experience. Distrusts new challenges until he can find out what they're all about. You could call him timid, or make it sound better by calling him cautious. Remember he's an engineer and they tend to analyze everything, sometimes over think things. We used to use the term 'paralysis by analysis.' Also he's a team player, not a soloist, and he's most comfortable with his friends around him. He has the idea that women are mysterious creatures, and that makes him afraid of real intellectual intimacy. The only woman he ever let into his life is his mother, and she applauded when he did something well, either in his studies or in athletics. So he thinks that Sam ought to do the same, and that playing team sports ought to bring them closer together, not drive them apart."

We sat and thought for a minute. "Tammy, Sam needs to know what she's dealing with here. She can make good decisions if she understands what's going on. You need to talk with her. She trusts you and even if she brushes you off she'll listen and remember what you've said."

"I'll give it a try. Sam is an adult with a ticking biological clock, and she's attracted to a grown man who's a little boy. I wish I felt more optimistic about their chances. She likes his looks, his earning potential, and his sexual performance. I wonder if she suspects all the things we've been talking about, and doesn't want to face up to them."

"Come over here and sit on my lap. We can't get anywhere by talking Sam and Dave to death, so let's change the subject."

She got up and came to me. "What subject do you have in mind?"

"Us." We explored that subject all the way to bed, but it didn't take a whole lot of conversation.

* * * * * *

I had been talking off and on with a realtor up north about buying a piece of land to build a cabin on, for a weekend getaway or vacation or whatever. He called me and said he had three that I might like, so I decided to drive up there and look at what he had. The girls said they'd take care of the homestead and keep a light in the window for me, and I promised to keep in touch.

I was driving "up there" in more ways than one. First, I was heading north, toward the top of the map. Second, it was up in the physical sense. There's a big fault line running roughly across the state from east to west. South of that, the elevation is mostly from 1,000 to 3,000 feet. To the north it's typically from 6,000 to 9,000. That's pretty high. Compared to many of the eastern states, our low spots are as high as their high spots. So when you drive north, you leave the desert and go into a forest with a variety of trees, but there seem to be more pines than anything else in the places where I've been.

I went to the real estate office of Herbert Lawson. Most men named Herbert go by either Herb or Bert. Herbert Lawson goes by Herbert. As the door closed behind me he looked up from his computer monitor and boomed out, "Hiya, Dick! Come on in! You couldn't have timed it better with a stopwatch. You're just in time for lunch. Give me a minute to save this and I'll be right with you."

We walked down the street to Dolly's Deli. Herbert was so busy returning greetings and shaking hands that I wondered if we'd get to the one vacant table before somebody else came in and snatched it. When we finally sat down, Herbert said, "You've got to let me order for you. The broccoli-chicken soup is world famous, and we'll follow that with one of Dolly's elkburgers. No sense coming all this way up to the mountains just to eat what they serve down in the flatland. You'll remember this lunch after you go home to the desert, and the memory will bring you back up here again."

I knew that Herbert was an enthusiastic booster for the area, and that he'd describe every real estate listing as if it were next door to the Taj Mahal, so I let his bombast bounce off my brain without getting deeply embedded. I also knew that under his buffoonery there lurked a sharp, honest businessman with a good sense for real estate values and a comprehensive knowledge of the land, the landowners, and future plans and possibilities. He pulled three data sheets out of his pocket and laid them before me, just as the soup was being served. I scanned while the soup cooled. "Where are these places, Herbert?"

"This one and this one are out of here to the east, both within a mile of route 60. The other one's out to the west, twenty miles from here. They've all got everything you said you wanted, a view, trees, not so many trees that you'd have a fire problem, and water. These two don't have wells now, but there are wells nearby so I'm sure you could hit water when you drill. Now this one has a cabin on it. Needs work, but the basic infrastructure is in place, well, septic tank, leach field, driveway, power line, so you wouldn't be starting from scratch. Want to look at that first?"

"Makes sense. Can we get to see all three today, or should I get a room and stay over?"

"Suppose we look at these two this afternoon. Even if we could get over to the other one today, there's no sense in you driving all the way home in the dark, so let's get you a motel room when we leave here.

"How'd you like the soup? That's a little touch I picked up in California. There's a chain in Orange County that has two soups every day. One's a soup d' jour and the other one is always cream of broccoli. It goes over big in that area, so I figured why not try it here. Adding the chicken was Dolly's idea."

"You figured? Do you own this place?"

"Well, yes, but I don't make a big thing of it. Dolly had managed a place across town for years, and when the owner closed it down and retired she was out of a job. So I backed her here. This location is good and I thought it'd go over well. She runs a great place, always on top of everything, clean and neat, does a good job of training the help, and it's convenient to my office so I get a good lunch every day. My wife knows I'm eating well and not romancing some waitress so she's happy, and her family thinks I'm Santa Claus so they're all happy."

"I got all that except for your in-laws. What's the connection I'm missing?"

"Oh, Dolly's my wife's younger sister."

"Okay, now I get it. You've got this area pretty well in the palm of your hand, haven't you?"

"Yeah, but this is just one corner of it. In the real estate business in a small town, you get to feel the pulse of the local economy, and you need to ride with it. There are all sorts of deals that I've had offered to me, including places that I listed but couldn't sell. But if you're just into land, or commercial, or residential, the ups and downs can blindside you and you can lose your shirt. If you're involved in a variety of things you can see what's coming down the track before everyone else hears the whistle. Like the John Deere dealership. That's a partnership between me and Charlie Crawford, the Chevy dealer. I own only a third of it, because Charlie knows how to run dealerships like that. I get to see what's happening before it happens but it doesn't take up a lot of my time, or involve me in making decisions in a business that I don't know anything about. And it's a money maker, which makes it nice, too. My wife's brother works there, so without even setting a foot onto the property I get to know what's going on."

"He sells tractors?"

"No, he fixes them. He's in charge of the shop and the parts department. He's been there for years. That's how Charlie and I got involved to start with. Ralph, my brother-in-law, had been watching the way the owner was running things, and he saw that he wasn't carrying the inventory he should have been so he knew the guy was having money problems. Next thing he was having trouble arranging financing for people who wanted to buy big equipment. Ralph was afraid the place would go belly up and he'd be on the street.

"I got a guy in here from Colorado to look over the whole business, all the assets and liabilities, inventory turnover, the local market that it sold into, even confidential information from Deere that I couldn't have got hold of, but he could. Then he gave me a complete confidential report and I took it to Charlie. We liked what we saw so we took it to the bank together. In the end, everybody made out on the deal. Charlie and I have a nice business there, I have a great source of information, the former owner got bailed out, and the bank is happy because they avoided a default and they get a nice interest payment from us every quarter. If you want to be a small businessman, that's what you have to do - make everybody a winner. But pull off one shady deal where local people get hurt, and suddenly everybody hates you. Next thing you don't know what's happening around town any more and your friends have become enemies. Then you might as well cut your losses, liquidate everything, and move somewhere far away."

* * * * * *

The first property we looked at was four acres with a small one bedroom cabin. It had been built on piers, concrete posts sunk into the ground every eight feet. I looked at every side of the cabin from twenty feet back, and I could see that some of the piers had apparently sunk deeper into the ground, so that the cabin was in the process of tearing itself apart by being up here and down there, where it ought to be level. From a little farther back I could see that the lot sloped down toward the road, and the cabin had been built in a slight sloping depression that would be a natural wash, carrying snowmelt water under and around the cabin every spring.

Inside the cabin I could see that the floor went up and down. There was no need to do the old marble test that I had seen old timers do when I was a boy, putting a marble on the floor and seeing if it rolled away, and if so, in what direction. "Sort of a sad story, Herbert, the way this place has been tearing itself apart. If they'd put it up on that little rise over to the west, it probably would have stayed put instead of sinking into the ground here and there. Nice place, otherwise. But instead of adding value to the property, it just adds expense because it needs to be torn down and a new one built over there where they should have put this in the first place."

"You're exactly right. If it didn't have that huge stone fireplace, maybe it could be lifted and moved over there, but as it is, you couldn't even salvage enough building materials from it to break even. Well, keep it in mind if you want a project place. It's a nice view lot, it has a good well and leach field, and I could get it for you cheap."

The next place was a fifteen acre plot of land with no improvements. We walked the lot lines, looked at the trees that covered it, and noted the roll and slope of the land. The best building site was a hundred feet back from the gravel road, up about twenty feet above the road level. The land sloped gently away from there in all directions, which should provide good drainage. I found a level place fifty feet away from there that would be a good place for a barn, and a driveway from there to the road would be easy to plow in the winter. About a hundred trees, from six inches to a foot in diameter, would have to be cut down, which could keep me in firewood for a long time.

"This looks interesting, Herbert. Tell me a little about the land. How far down to bedrock, how much runoff comes through here in the spring, how deep the frost line is, what I'd have to do for a leach field to satisfy the environmental folks, how good the water is and how far down, all that sort of stuff."