Family History: Albuquerque

1968.  I either never knew or have forgotten why we moved to Albuquerque.  As mentioned before Georg told me why we left Germany, but no reason was given for why we went to Albuquerque.  I do not remember much of the trip that brought us to the US.  We landed in New York after a flight that I have unfortunately forgotten any details about, Dad picked up a silver Chrysler Fury III, and we headed west and south while taking in a lot of sightseeing as well.  The car was big, a lot more so than our old Bug, and I liked it.  We toured New York, perhaps for a few days, and Sis and I shopped at shops with Mom that seemed bigger and more hectic than those in Wernau.  If I recall, this was where some friends of Dad from the Air Force had us stay over, a kind gesture which I remember most because of their kids being nice though barely leaving any other impression, the color TV that was in their basement, and seeing Star Trek for the first time.  We went to the Statue of Liberty, and Dad told us about what we were seeing, and about how when he was a kid Americans donated a huge amount of money, mostly in pennies, to have some work done on the Grand Lady.  I heard that only workers were allowed to go up into the torch in the late 60s, but it was impressive seeing New York below us from the head.  We may have seen a museum or two as well before starting the Great Drive.

We stopped in Washington DC and toured the area for several days as well.  It was amazing!  We took in several of the Smithsonian museums, and I remember the seemingly endless racks of stamps (I was a devoted collector in those days and for some years later, until I went on active duty and basically stopped cold), important and interesting pieces from our country's past such as the Ft. McHenry flag, and of course in the Natural History museum the dinosaurs, the rocks and minerals, and so much more.  We also went to the National Archives and saw the Constitution, and Dad told me how important that document is to freedom and our way of life.  Other stops included the Capital, the Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson Monuments, and the old FBI building, where they had an impressive display of bad-guy weapons and had an agent fire a submachine gun at the visitors who were behind a thick bullet proof window.  I had the souvenir case from one of those rounds for many years. 

While near DC we had a day tour of Gettysburg.  My first remembered battlefield trip, not counting the many castles we visited in Germany.  Hallowed ground, where the USA was quite possibly saved by the sacrifice of thousands of brave men.  Of course back then it did not mean that to me, despite Dad telling us about the battle and how significant it was.  For me it meant time with the family, cool cannons placed about where they were back in those fateful days and some almost as cool monuments.  Signs to read, about actions that in coming times were to mean so much.  Little Round Top where the 20th Maine held the flank and saved it all, and Pickets Charge where the South was irretrievably broken stand out but I am sure we saw many other parts of the field.  I probably still have the toy cannon that Dad bought me when we left.

I do not remember much of the rest of the trip.  I believe that we made fairly leisurely progress, stopping to see the sights off and on during the drive, but sadly those memories are gone.  Driving through Texas I was of course impressed by the sheer size of the state.  And since I did not remember seeing desert conditions before in my young life the landscape did make what to me was a first impression, with the yellow-brown near barren conditions still being in their own strange way beautiful.  Finally we reached New Mexico, and our new home.

Albuquerque was a good place to live, even though we would only be there for about a year.  The new house was huge compared to our apartment in Wernau.  We lived at 3409 Yosemite Dr, on a half-circle that was served by the road that was the closest paved road to the Sandia Mountains.  We were the first owners.  Tramway, now a major street a few blocks away, was a dirt road back in those days, the last vestige of civilization before walking on fundamentally untouched land and being awed by Nature in the form of the foothills of the Sandia Mountains.  Best friends Kirk and Kent Wall lived a couple of houses to our left (looking out our front door), and the twins Sherry and Terry Gates, their sister, and Happy Hoosier, one of the most magnificent German Shepherds I have ever met, lived behind our back yard.  Speaking of the back yard it was huge, and many of the neighborhood kids would congregate with Sis and I to play softball, or other kid games.  Luckily the windows were strong because several times we put long fly balls off of them.  Despite our funny accents (Kirk or Kent once could not understand when I said "TV" when I was excited that we had purchased our color set, in the German accent it probably sounded like "Tay Vay" and of course everyone around already had one) the kids were nice, and school was ridiculously easy.  Sis and I were both well ahead of our classmates in every subject except English, not because we were geniuses but because the German school system is, or at least was, far superior to the Albuquerque public schools.  My teacher, Mrs. Webb, was a bit older and seemed not nearly as good as the German teachers, though I did not dislike her but rather simply was not impressed by her.

Thinking back on the TV, it opened a lot of ideas on American culture to us.  Mom and Dad did not let us watch a lot, keeping us outside playing or inside doing homework or playing instead.  But the news kept us aware of current events, and since back in those days news tended to be news instead of propaganda for whatever political leaning the station or network favored it was more balanced than the crap that is offered today (if you do not like my opinion feel free to do something other than read this).  Game shows, sports, a few shows like Star Trek and the like were what I saw.  And special reports like rocket launches.  The sports included football, baseball, track and field, and hockey as well as the weekly program "Wide World of Sports" which featured a little bit of a lot of different sports offerings.  The Olympics were big, of course.  The TV helped me pick my favorite teams.  For football, it was the Los Angeles Rams.  I recall them playing in the first game I ever watched, and what kept me hooked was the unit and player names as much as them winning that game.  The Fearsome Foursome defensive line, with Deacon Jones and Merlin Olson crunching people and getting much mention from the announcer.  The Quarterback Roman Gabriel was another decent player with a cool name.  Not long after that Life magazine had an article on the Rams, and that helped seal my support of the team until they left Los Angeles.  For baseball, I became a Detroit Tigers fan, mostly I think because of the team name since my favorite animal was the Tiger.  It did not hurt that they won the World Series that year behind players like Al Kaline, Willie Horton, and the pitching greats Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich.   In hockey I liked the Montreal Canadians, with great players like The Roadrunner Yvan Cournoyer and The Pocket Rocket Henri Richard keeping us entertained, though there were many great players in the NHL at that time.  But the reason I first was a Habs fan was that my Mom had emigrated to Canada after the war, first to Montreal where she became a fan when the people she worked for used to give her their season tickets for many games.

Dad found work on a construction crew, which given his wartime experiences was not a good thing.  I guess when you have had a bunch of diseases and conditions that debilitate your body like he had it is not a good thing to work in the hot sun.  Not to mention that the untreated PTSD was probably wrecking him emotionally.  Even back in the '60s the Veterans Administration was often a useless waste of taxpayer funds, and I do not recall my Dad getting any help at all from that organization.  Given that they had allocated him only 15% disability it is obvious that they were the same often bureaucratic scum then as now.  Mom stayed home as mother and caregiver, and kept us kids in line while at the same time letting us grow.  Within a few months Dad had to quit the job, and I do not think he had a long term job for the rest of his life.  Still, life was good even though we were not rich in money, because we had a stable and good family life.  Thinking back on it, while we still made trips around the local area they were infrequent compared to our time in Germany, though if that is because of Dad's worsening condition or Sis and I getting to the ages when we somehow made it clear that we preferred to spend more time with our friends I do not know.  Perhaps this drifting from my first family was a bit of both.  I did spend a lot of time with the group of friends that were centered by those I named above, and some of us would occasionally take a lunch up into the Sandia Mountains, to a large rock formation that was visible from our home and just hang out and explore.  Most of my time on these excursions was spent with the Wall brothers and Gates sisters, though other kids came along at times too.  There were arroyos in our neighborhood, designed to carry water from the summer storms to the Rio Grande miles away, and we learned to stay away from them when it rained or looked like it might rain, because the term "flash flood" was the perfect description for what happens when the rare rain dumped on our side of the mountain and the sun baked earth was not ready to absorb the moisture.  At other times they were fun to walk or play in.

My group of friends used the wide cement block walls that form the fences of probably most homes in and around Albuquerque as our own walking paths.  We were able to move fairly quickly around the neighborhood like that, and I look back with a touch of wonder that I never fell off a wall, especially since the I was probably not the most balanced of boys even back in those days.  I was just a bit hesitant to cross the really high ones, but always eventually did.  Also it was interesting that we were never yelled at by any homeowners in our travels.  No one told us to get off their wall, or to stay away from their property.  Perhaps this wall wandering was accepted, or perhaps people were just more accepting of kids being kids back in that day, or maybe it was an Albuquerque thing.  Typically we would use the walls to get to a friends house to play, and of course later to return home. It was a lot more fun than walking on sidewalks, though today I would not even try to climb up on the walls, much less walk along them.  Good days of youth, to soon gone, never to be repeated in this life.

I learned that my knees, each of which has the thick gnarled scar of my birth-tearing away from my brother and which I had thought were the way "normal" knees were supposed to be, were in fact different and thus that the rest of the family, and all my friends were the normal ones.  I found out when Mom told me about the circumstances of my birth.  Strange how much of a shock that was.  It took me a while to accept the new reality, but apparently the scars made no difference to my friends and I was soon able to accept that they were not strange and that my strangeness was not a bad thing, just the way it was.  Dad also told me that even though I would be big and that school football coaches would want me on their team that I should not play, because my birth-doctor had said that some of the circumstances related to my birth had resulted in my kneecaps being weakened and thus susceptible to being damaged if I engaged in a rough sport like football.  I do not know if the damage was from the kneecaps being weak due to the attachment to my brother, or from the surgery that was apparently needed after birth, but in any case I avoided football except for pickup, non-tackle games.  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, imagining that I could have been a pretty good running back with my size and body style, but life is what it is, and it is not what it is not and so it is best not to let imagination of what might have been run to rampant.

So many memories.  Although we were not big on church, Mom and Dad volunteered to support a local church "feed the poor" effort.  They spent a day in some local apple orchards, picking the apples which meant climbing into the trees, and later handing out baskets of the fruit to local poor people.  My Dad was angry when they came home and never did it again.  The reason was that many, if not most, of the recipients were younger and in better shape than he was, which is not surprising given what he had gone through.  He wondered, and I agreed and agree with him, why the healthy poor could not have gone on that trip to pick their own food?  The Sandia Peak Tram was and perhaps still is the longest in the world.  As you move up or down the mountainside you can see Albuquerque out one side, which is a beautiful sight especially at night, and the mountainside out the other three sides.  You see a lot of cactus and scrub brush, big rock formations, and sometimes wildlife.  At the top they have a ski area, a somewhat high priced restaurant, and good viewing of the other side of the mountain as well as the city.  We did not go often, but had fun even though we were not skiers and only had drinks at the top.  A good family memory.  School:  At recess and PE we played kickball, touch football and softball, and during the winter we engaged in mass snowball fights that usually featured boys against girls with the girls sometimes huddling in a mass with the surrounding boys launching snowballs into a "cannot miss" situation.  I think that everyone survived without great injury, and hope that kids today can still let loose like we did, but think that our sadly nanny-fied culture probably prohibits this now.  Our society and kids both loose if this is true.  Real life has some risks, and the sooner we teach our kids how to deal with risks the better.  Anyhow, I was not great at those sports, having never played them before, but I was not a total klutz either.  One incident in softball stands out.  I was in left field and a kid smacked a long home run well beyond where any of us could get it.  For whatever reason play started before I was back in position and the next kid sent the ball back into deep left again.  This one I caught (no mitt; I did not get one until a couple of years later) while still coming back to the field.  Of course the other team wanted that declared a home run too, since if I had been in position it would have been well beyond me, but we argued that a catch was a catch and the batter was out.  I think we won that argument.  In football, all I knew about the game was what I saw on TV, and of course the cameras focused on the player with the ball so I saw a lot of tackling.  So at first when I lined up on the offense or defensive line I naturally tackled the kid from the other side.  The kids were fairly insistent that I needed to not tackle or hold anyone, and I soon learned the basic rules.  I joined the Boy Scouts, and Dad was there to help with camp-outs and meetings although he never became an Adult Leader.  It was fun, and we had a lot of activities.  One camp-out stays in memory as the time I sat on a cactus.  A real learning experience indeed.

Christmas.  The Christmas that we were in Albuquerque was one of the best in my life.  Dad was making enough money to get us a few more presents than normal, and he and Mom had picked a few life changing ones for me.  First, they indulged their continuing fascination with knowledge by getting me a telescope and a microscope.  For several years we enjoyed taking them out now and again and checking out the moon and other celestial items or the local scenery with the one, and the mysteries of the very small with the other.  It was fun, and learning about the very big non-Earth part of the universe and the microscopic aspects of our own planet were powerful forces that carried over to a desire for knowledge that has lasted even to today, though perhaps not with the burning intensity it had in my youth.  But the really big gift, for the whole family, arrived Christmas morning when Sherry and Terri, with faces that seemed sad but at the same time happy, rang our doorbell and handed me a large shoe box.  I thanked them and carried it back into the house, and when I opened it this small German Shepherd puppy looked into my eyes and I instantly became a German Shepherd loving boy, a wonderful condition which endures to this day.  Teufel von Berlichingen had arrived in the Marshall home.  Strangely enough, although there were other toys, I remember none of them.  Thinking back over the years, there are very few gifts I remember, and so conclude that indeed the right gift leads to happiness more so than a lot of them.

Teufel.  OK, to this day I love and miss Teufel, so this is going to be a bit rambling.  He was the embodiment of that fine breed, loyal, strong, intelligent.  He was energetic, sensitive to our moods and a fun puppy to be around.  We ended up using the telescope case to barricade him into a room, or perhaps it was out of a room, and that barrier only lasted a few weeks before he was scrambling over it to be around us.  From the start, my Mom - who had guard dogs when she was growing up - trained him, taught him what he needed to know to be a good dog and to fit in with our family.  And he was incredibly fast to learn.  He learned to go outside to do his business within a few days, and the basic commands every dog should know within a few weeks.  He learned how to go outside and bring the morning paper in, though for a while he would get all the neighbors' papers too and so I would go redeliver them.  As any great dog is, Teufel was protective although there were few real threats in those days.  His name?  Mom and Dad picked it.  It means "Devil of Berlichingen" which refers to the great knight Goetz von Berlichingen, one of the more famous knights in Germany who told the Imperial Commander of a besieging force who was demanding surrender that the Holy Roman Emperor could kiss his ass.  I believe that "Devil" was not meant as a religious reference, but rather as a reference to the rambunctious and sometimes mischievous nature that was evident from day one that Teufel displayed.  So many stories.  We were sitting around listening to "Die Fledermaus" (The Bat, a light operetta whose plot line you may look up if you so desire) on a record.  We often enjoyed listening to the classics, as both parents enjoyed good music and I was developing into quite a fan of the only music that can be considered great as well.  One of the lines involved a character shouting in frustration "zum Teufel!" and Teufel jumped up and looked around for the person who had called his name.  Teufel learned to read our mind when it was time for a vet visit, even if we spelled it out or talked around it.  Most of the time he was excited and happy to go on car rides, but for the vet we had to carry him to the car on the outbound part of the trip.  I had the rear end, Dad had the front.  Oh, and we had to be careful at doorways because he learned to slow the process down by spreading his front paws and thus blocking use of the doorway until one of us pushed them closer together again.  Playing with him was an immense joy.  He grew up running around with us in the back yard, playing softball out there with the friends, and staying near us in the house.  We made special Teufel softball rules allowing only one base when he fielded the ball, and of course you were out if he caught the ball without it touching the ground or tagging the base runner.  Also, he never could bat, and played for both teams.  At night he slept in my room, and from the start Mom did not think it proper for him to sleep on my bed, but once she and Dad were asleep Teufel would get up from his dog-bed at the foot of my bed and curl up at my feet, which I of course was happy to allow.

Dad and I both had pretty bad allergies, and I think that was the causative reason for us leaving Albuquerque.  Another issue that might have pushed my parents to this was that the school system was just not that good, and they did not want to hinder Sis or my development.  In any event, the summer after moving there we piled into the Fury III that the parents had named Betsy and set off for Seattle.  I remember feeling sad that we were leaving, possibly understanding that except for an occasional letter that my friends and I would most likely lose touch and would never see each other again.  I really enjoyed the year there, the romps in the mountains, the free spirited wandering around, and how wonderful my family was.

Another New Year: Early Days

2015.  Not a good year for my family.  Lot of stress, lot of sadness.  Much tied together in a web of interrelated negatives.

Specifics:  1.  Health continued to ratchet down.  2.  The job went from great a few years ago to good to now being tolerable.  3.  Finances took a hit when taxes went up, endangering plans to retire;  the five year plan that seemed to be achievable early last year has been turned into a minimum six year plan starting this year.  The kids, except for Kristi, continue to struggle to get good jobs.  4.  Vivian's death, and Travis after her, took more of our family members. The loss of friends Bill "BA" Andrews and Chris Anzalone hit me hard.  I have few enough friends and these two were fine men and good friends.  Chris was my oldest friend.

All interrelated.  Most of my health issues probably started back in March of '82, when a soccer injury while playing for the Mountain Home AFB club was misdiagnosed by an incompetent Air Force Physicians Assistant (PA) as a sprain instead of the ACL tear that it really was.  To compound her failure each of the next 4 or 5 PAs that saw me, being just as wretchedly incompetent as she was, apparently looked at her diagnosis and "treatment" plan and, as simple minds will, copied what she prescribed.  I became convinced that I was somehow at fault and spent the next 7 years learning how to run and walk without an ACL in the left knee.  I met another incompetent Air Force "medical" member who should have realized that there was something significant wrong instead of rushing to diagnose and simply removing cartilage from that same knee after a subsequent injury.  A couple of years later I finally ran into a Doctor with a functioning brain who recognized what the problem was and treated it.  Despite a well meaning but apparently also incompetent nurse nearly killing me after that surgery, it was a success.  Of course by then a lot of damage had been done so years later the knees are going bad, but at least I had a few more years of walking and even running without pain.  But in the last few years problems not only with the knee but other associated issues keep popping up and I feel like I'm in a downward spiral with no way to stop.

9 Jan.  37 years ago I returned home from taking a military physical, to find that after a 9+ month battle with cancer my Dad was dead.  He was a great man, who endured unimaginable hardship in WW II and came out of it to found this family.  I loved him, respected and honored him.  For several years after, I held a private ceremony grieving for him on this day.  This year I am following that path again; as I type this I listen to his favorite piece of music (Beethoven's 3rd) and mourn him.

10 Jan.  2 years ago I returned home from an out of office meeting to find that my Mom-in-Law had died from a heart attack.  She had been living with us for almost 20 years after her other daughter died, and despite a few rough periods during that time she was well liked by us all.  She resisted the urge to try and get us to change how we raised the kids or in other ways lived our life, which I greatly respected and liked.  Always helpful, quick to help in many ways from taking care of the kids to shopping to loaning money for education.  And most always nice.  If I had a hard day she would listen to my grumbling and soon I was feeling better.

Well, enough whining about things that cannot be changed.  Back at it!