Adventure 439: The Story of George, 16

February 6, 2018

Real time found George awake and alert this morning. He wolfed down a breakfast of French toast and sausage. His urine is beginning to show signs of clearing. No doctor has come in as of 9 A.M., but the day is young, so hope is on high. George said he slept well. Last evening may have been the most enjoyable time I've ever spent with him. He was telling Judy and I stories about living in the orchards as a kid, about riding the bus to school, and about how the town kids looked down on the orchard kids. There was quite a bit of laughing going on. It felt good.

In certain ways, George allows himself to express guilt concerning some of his life decisions. He wanted very much to build a good family life, but he and Christine were like oil and water. They constantly bickered, each feeling unappreciated by the other, but as George says, "I wasn't a total bad ass, I just had some bad stretches." Somewhere around 1958, Chris had had enough. She did what she thought would work. She called one of her sisters (Diane), hopped a Greyhound with Sandy and Judy, and moved herself to Edmonds, WA. She left George with Tim and Tom to fend for themselves. George says that if it weren't for his parents he didn't know what he would have done. The three, George, Tim and Tom moved into George's parent's home on 4th Ave and 4th Street right up the hill from downtown Lewiston. George Sr. and Rosa had moved into town a couple years earlier when the five acre place became too much to handle for just the two of them. George's mother, Rosa, worked at St. Joseph's Hospital, a three block walk for her, and George Sr. worked as a brakeman on the Union Pacific Railroad.  George and the boys lived almost two years in that house. At the time George worked for the postal service, and maybe it was because his personal life was in crisis that he had his accident. He had a driving route in the orchards and many of his stops included a string of nine or ten mailboxes altogether on one stand. He would slide mail in a box and move his mail truck slightly to the next. On one stop there was a toddler no more than two or three who always came out to check the mail with his mother. That was fine, but one day the toddler dashed out of the house before his mother could contain him. He darted across the street to the mailboxes. George's attention was focused on sliding the mail into the boxes so he didn't see the toddler until the kid screaming from under the truck. Fortunately, the kid wasn't injured when George ran over him, but as one might imagine, the mother was distraught to say the least. The upshot of the whole thing was that George was called on the carpet by the "powers that be". They gave George the opportunity to remain employed by offering him a walking route, but his injured pride wouldn't allow him to accept the compromise. He left the postal service in a huff. Shortly, after that, Chris who was having guilt pangs of her own, feeling she had abandoned her children, came back to Lewiston and took Tim and Tom back to the coast with her.According to George, she was "jealous" of the care Rosa was giving the boys. At any rate, George not only lost his job, he lost his family. It was a hard time for  him, and as he says, "It wasn't all Chris's fault; I was to blame, too." It was also hard on the boys. Chris made the move halfway through the school year, uprooting the boys in mid stream. Tim was a fifth grader; Tom a fourth grader. In the blink of three days, they were in a new town, a new house, and a new school. It was the next wave in a sea of tumultuous times.

Judy, yukking it up with George. George likes Judy, but then who doesn't?