Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next.
Today I’m going to start serializing a memoir that I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress* from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I plan to post these chapters at the end of each week with other, more regular-type blog entries posted at the beginning of the week. I hope you enjoy these stories!
*Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Okay, first installment of Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue:
I don’t know about you, but one of the most crushing experiences of my childhood was learning that magic existed only in fairy tales. Recently, in fact, my disappointment was replayed when my eight-year-old cousin, Brittany, learned from a classmate that the Easter Bunny didn’t really exist. She came home sobbing, flinging outraged accusations at her guilt-stricken parents: “Why do you lie?!” she wept, her adorable pixie-face crumpled in betrayal and pain. “You knew there was no Easter Bunny!” she howled. “Why do you do that? Tell us there’s an Easter Bunny when you know there’s not!” Her parents were as traumatized as she was, poor things. And you know this scenario gets repeated in households all over the country. (“I suppose now you’re going to tell me there’s no Santa Claus?”)
Okay, so … there’s no Easter Bunny. No Santa Claus. At least, not in the way that we would actually like there to be. But I have good news for anyone out there who has mourned the passing of enchantment in our high-tech, scientific age. There is magic (not that it’s always good, of course). It just takes different forms than it used to in times past. It’s not likely that we’re going to move into a household of seven dwarves or that our lives are going to be made hopelessly miserable by crazed, evil royalty or that some weirdo with an unpronounceable name is going to help us spin straw into gold, but other things just as amazing can occur. And as it happens, my husband has a fairy godmother.
Thanks to her, we experienced a very magical period indeed.
Things didn’t start out looking real peachy, however. It was the end of 1982, and the small town in northern California where I lived was experiencing double-digit unemployment. My husband Richard and I had both been desperately looking for work for almost an entire year. He had contracted pneumonia while fetching a jeep in a blizzard for his former employer and then got laid off as he recuperated; I had tried finding a job in anything from secretarial work to carpentry to my actual area of expertise at the time, which was botany, which turned out to be about as useful as a talent for repairing lederhosen. We had even tried to find work at convenience markets, where we figured the chances of getting robbed, shot, bored to death or contaminated by some giant, radioactive, neon-colored beverage would create a high employee turnover and thus, a possibility of our getting hired. But no such luck.
Richard’s unemployment benefits, extended and re-extended and finally, over-extended, were getting ready to run out. His only job prospect was working at a mining claim in a location in Nevada so remote that I don’t think it was actually on this planet. We hated the thought of moving from the house we had just spent the last two years building with our own two bunged-up, calloused hands to live in a tiny little trailer in some vast, lunar basin where we not only didn’t know anyone, we probably wouldn’t even catch a glimpse of anyone, either. But there was nothing else forthcoming, so we redoubled our doomed job-searching efforts.
One gloomy November afternoon, I came home from an interview at a chiropractor’s office for a part time receptionist’s position that paid minimum wage. The nice woman who interviewed me cautioned me not to get my hopes up, showing me the stack of resumes they had received for this job, which was about eighteen inches thick. I took her advice and didn’t get my hopes up. I wasn’t sure, in fact, at this point, what could have gotten my hopes up. Everything looked bleak. Hopeless. I’d just about decided that the only thing to do was to start living on beetles and grubs and tree bark, possibly launching a business as a topless car washer, if I could only get a permit.
And then the phone rang. Richard picked it up and murmured a despondent hello.
So, I know that most adults believe that fairy godmothers exist only in folk tales. But as I mentioned, Richard actually has a fairy godmother. A native Texan, she is one-quarter Cherokee Indian and three-quarters blow-your-hair-back, knock-your-socks-off, stand-back-or-get-trampled wild woman. The last time Richard had seen Jane was eight years ago when we got married; we hadn’t heard from her since. He had grown up baby-sitting for her children when she and her husband attended Richard’s father’s church the years they lived in Little Rock. I didn’t know Jane all that well, only having met her at our wedding, but there were a thousand Jane stories in Richard’s family.
One of my favorites involved the time that she bought a van and then decided to have air-conditioning installed. This was in the early sixties when air-conditioning was a new thing, and it didn’t come installed in vans. She had to make arrangements with the dealership to have a unit placed on the top of the van and then vented into the interior. Everything went well until the first time it rained heavily, and it turned out that the van leaked; so Jane took the van back to the car dealer who had done the work.
At that time, Jane favored simple attire: white T shirts covered with baby goo, denim overalls, no shoes. Nor socks, for that matter. She had her five children with her and some of their friends, too, including Richard. Her thick shock of raven-black hair was cropped short, which emphasized her close-set, flinty brown eyes and classic raptorial Native American schnozz. And after having had a passle of children, she was a substantial woman. When she came striding into the dealership, trumpeting that she needed some help with her van, the meticulously groomed salesman out front quivered with distaste and bristled with disdain. He put his hand up, like a traffic cop, bringing Jane and her retinue to a halt.
“I’m afraid that you’ve come to the wrong place,” he told her.
Jane, a friendly person who prides herself on her gracious Southern womanhood, shook her head in amused exasperation and explained. “No, see—I just had an air-conditioning unit installed on the top of my van and the workmen didn’t do a thorough job of stopping up the holes they drilled, so the roof’s leaking. It’s no big deal. They just need to plug up the holes.
The ultra-tidy man drew himself up even further and glared at her. “We can’t help you,” he retorted, drawing out each word in insulting emphasis.
Jane blinked. “No, you don’t understand, we bought the unit here,” she told him, laughing a little. “We had it installed here. It’s no big thing. I just need to have the person who installed the unit plug up the holes.”
“Lady,” he snarled, “I just told you that we can’t help you. You need to leave. Now.”
He didn’t know it, of course, but he had just thrown his prissy little gauntlet down in front of the wrong woman. “Oh, really?” she replied.
He nodded stiffly.
“Okay, well, I just need to make a phone call.” She calmly gathered up her brood and sat them all down in the waiting area. She bought them each a Coke from the concession machine and told them to behave themselves. Then she got on the pay phone, speaking quietly so that no one could overhear her. After she hung up, she came and joined her kids and bought herself a Coke. She sat there and drank it, smiling at the salesman whenever he shot a poisonous glance in her direction.
Thirty minutes later, a Jaguar drove up and out popped two suits, lawyers to be exact. Jane’s lawyers. And her father’s lawyers. One of the many things the poor salesman didn’t realize was that Jane’s father, a wealthy manufacturer and household name, also owned quite a few car dealerships in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. In fact, he favored this particular make.
The lawyers stepped briskly into the show room, spotted Jane, and whipped out several papers from their briefcases. She signed each one with a flourish. The salesman paced, puzzled and angry, wondering what the hell she was up to. When the last paper was signed, Jane looked up at him with an evil grin.
“I’m sorry to tell you this, sir,” she told him, in her huskiest, most seductive, honey-and-whiskey voice, “but I just bought this dealership. And you’re fired. I just can’t have such rude people working for me, you know. I’m sure you understand.” With that, she flounced out like an empress, her barefoot band of children in tow, leaving the lawyers to clean up the details.
Richard swears it happened exactly like this. At any rate, she was on the phone. And from the increasingly surprised and pleased look on Richard’s face, I had a feeling that his fairy godmother was going to save us . . . from the trailer in the lunar basin, the grubs and the tree bark, and the topless car washing.
Thursday, March 19, 2009