The company I worked for lost the contract and laid me off.

The good news is I had worked as a technical writer for 18 months and could legitimately call myself one.

I had written a mil spec technical manual, engineering-installation plans, a weekly status and progress report, configuration control documentation, factory test plans, engineering change proposals (ECPs).

The bad news was I was laid off.

Also, it turned out the company health insurance only paid $200 on a pregancy and delivery. The bill was more like $1,000.

Larry and Hazel loaned us the money to have Balder born in a hospital.

So I had learned that what I thought was a permanent job was actually a temporary job and what I thought was health care coverage was partial health care coverage.

I just made more money and had more things to lose when I lost my job. I wasn't more secure.

I was less secure. More dependent on my job. More willing to do whatever my job demanded to keep my job.

Just as, in the time I have been a writer, many writers have been willing to do the things publishers asked, in order to have a career as a writer. Rather than refuse to do them, and do the things their hearts and minds told them it was a writer's job to do, namely get at, and witness to, the truth. Fewer and fewer writers have been willing to do that.

Was this the Nixon recession or the Ford recession?

There was a recession on.

Brenda was nursing Balder and minding Owen.

I looked for work.

Because I had been laid off for lack of work, I was eligible for unemployment, and, because I had a wife and two children, before my unemployment benefits started up I was eligible for food stamps, and, after my benefits started, for a lesser amount of food stamps.

I could pay the rent and buy groceries but I couldn't pay all my bills.

Brenda kept chickens so we had yard eggs.

I got back on the register for information specialist.

I got a job in Tallahassee. As a press officer for the Secretary of Commerce.

I had a writing job in my old college town.

Brenda could put Owen and Balder in nursery school and go back to work in the state conservation lab, analyzing bones from archeological sites.

I thought the clique of writers associated with the university in Tallahassee would welcome me with open arms.

There were two more yets in my drinking I hadn't done.

I hadn't been hospitalized for high blood pressure from the drinking while TDY out of town and I hadn't crashed a U-Haul truck into the concrete guard rail on the bridge across the Apalachicola River moving from Fort Walton Beach to Tallahassee, Owen in the cab of the truck with me and Baler in Roland with Brenda, following me as I veered into the oncoming lane, swerved to miss a car, overcorrected, and went into the rail like Fireball Roberts.

I now did these.