Married

Brenda and I both majored in anthropology at FSU. We had classes together. We studied in the same area of the library together, where the anthropology journals were stacked. We noticed that we had similar senses of humor. That is, she caught my jokes and I caught hers, when sometimes nobody else but the professor, and sometimes when nobody else, including the professor, did.

I asked her out to a football game, and to a party afterwards, at a business major friend of my roommate's house, off campus.

We went, but we didn't know what to do.

Well, we drank, and held hands. Told stories.

Brenda came from a large family--"I have five brothers and I can burp"--in Panama City. She had a sister, too, but was something of a tomboy. Her five brothers, especially the brother closest to her in age, Potter, raised her.

Her sister was a last child, and was raised as a girl.

Brenda benefited from not being attended to by her mother, whom she knew, from an early age, was crazy.

Janice got the benefit of her mother's raising. She was "spoiled." Compared to Brenda.

Brenda didn't want to be a housewife, like her mother. She wanted to be an archeologist. A college professor.

I didn't want to be a wage-slave, like my father. I wanted to be a writer.

We thought that we could get married and have a family and share the child-raising and the housework chores without her having to be a housewife or me having to be a wage-slave.

I wanted to get married and have children and write books about combining writing and marriage and work. And that is what I did.

Brenda became a professional, a technical instructor, but she didn't really have a career because she didn't put her career first and her family second. I didn't have a career as a writer because I didn't put my career first and my family second. I became a professional, though. A technical writer.

Well, I guess we were both paraprofessionals. We had jobs, not careers. Well-paid jobs, here and there, and poorly paid jobs, when we couldn't get, or hold, well-paid jobs.

I lost jobs and we moved, in search of work, for me.

Brenda left good jobs for less-good jobs, to follow me.

Between us, we survived, and got our kids raised, and educated, and out on their own. Of course Owen's education was being on the road with bluegrass bands, and Balder's education was a Marine band and being on the road with a band he was co-founder of.

But that's where you learn to be a musician. On the road, playing in bands.

Besides studying together, most weeknights, Brenda and I would go to the Pastime Tavern on Friday and Saturday nights, and drink beer and watch television together.

I'd walk her home, then I'd walk to my dorm.

On the way home, we'd stop at a mon-and-pop pizza joint, or father-and-son pizza joint, and get a hot pastrami sandwich.
We also went to campus movies, concerts, lectures, art shows, college football games, and so forth.

One summer we went on a dig together. We fell in love that summer. I changed my area of specialization to archeology. From the history and philosophy of anthropological theory.

We thought we'd get advanced degrees, teach college somewhere, and take students into the field in the summers. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was going strong, then, and that was a reasonable, a practical thing to plan to do. Students one year ahead of us did it. Married couples one year ahead of us both did it.

I'd teach myself to write after work, start publishing books, and eventually, after I developed a readership, I'd quit my job and write full-time.

It was the days of wine and roses, chez Jack and Brenda.

In the Johnny Mercer song, "Days of Wine and Roses," there is a line, "through meadowland towards a closing door, that wasn't there before, a door marked `Nevermore.'"

The door was to close on us, when Nixon got in and shut the money to higher education off.

But the line in the Merle Haggard song, "I kept the wine and threw away the rose," didn't happen.

Brenda's family were all musical. They all played bluegrass and old-time country music. They liked Merle Haggard's music.

I like Merle Haggard. We didn't know it then, but our family song was to be "If We Make It Through December."

I don't remember much jazz at FSU.

Marcus Roberts is from Tallahassee, and later played there, but not when I was at FSU.

Jazz was dead to white college students by then.

They liked the Grateful Dead. They liked the hippie movement, the anti-war movement, they didn't want to go to Vietnam, man.

They wanted to get an MBA and be an investment banker, or an arbitrageur. A bond trader and master of the universe. Let the blacks and poor white trash from Appalachia fight in Vietnam.

College was a time to get the hippie thing out of their systems before they took over the universe.

As they said to each other in The Big Chill, "Could it all have been a pose?"

Well, is it now a pose? And are you death on anyone who says, "Yes, it was a pose--it is a pose. You poser."

Brenda and I weren't hippies, we were middle-class people who wanted to live the life of the mind.

Rich people live the life of the mind, not middle-class people. Or poor people live the life of the mind.

If we had to choose between hippies and business majors we would have been hippies, though. We knew hippies and their kids at bluegrass festivals. Powwows. Hootenannies. Hippies raised better kids than business majors.

Business majors are horrible, selfish, greedy people.

I just saw Bush at a press conference, asked about stalling, stonewalling, and he said, like William H. Macy, in Fargo, "We're cooperating here."

I wonder if he believes it. Does he even believe himself, anymore?

I don't believe him.