wrapping it up
My apologies for not getting back in touch for so long. Jude and I just finished up a visit from her daughter Katrina and her husband Rick that went extremely well, from a rousing whale-watching tour to a cougar sighting to numerous cocktails on the beach of our creek. I was surprised at how close the boat got to the whales and sea lions. So please allow me to wrap up my journey back to civilian life.
Moving from the funk of New Orleans to the fundamentalism of Humboldt, Kansas, was culturally shocking. My office in my father’s dry goods store was on a mezzanine that wasn’t used for anything else. So I put in a small head shop with a black light room. It was an instant scandal. I had to sell the infamous poster of Dennis Hopper flipping off the rubes in Easy Rider under the counter. A woman claimed that I was burning some incense in the store that made her go crazy and buy everything there. I checked the receipts from that day. The biggest purchase was $17.
We won some good will by giving away strobe candles on a Founders’ Day celebration, but it was clear that we weren’t Humboldt material. My wife Suzy and I were already moving in different directions, so we started couples counseling. Although Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from warfare has bedeviled humans from the git, it wasn’t formally acknowledged by the psychiatric community until 1980. I was wrestling with a nebulous beast.
Suzy and I couldn’t handle it as a couple. We were driving home from a father\son dinner I had attended with my dad and I told her that I’d freaked out over how everybody’s shoes there looked the same. “Why don’t you just leave, then?”, she spat out. The next morning, when I picked up our mail, I got a letter from my college/Marine pal Jim. He was now running a newspaper for his father in Edinberg, Texas. I took it as a sign and headed his way.
This was the lowest point of my life. After a week, I called Suzy and she drove to Dallas to pick me up. We reconciled in the best way possible: attending a concert of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But it wasn’t enough. We went on hurting each other for years, calling it a draw with a divorce in 1974. She took our daughter Meghon and I took our son Chris.
My PTSD was full blown but still undiagnosed. After Chris went out on his own, I held a series of jobs and lived in a Econoline van for years. One of those jobs, on a psych locked unit, matched me up with Jude, the love of my life. Everything got better. We married, then started the lengthy process of filing for disability with the U.S. Veterans Administration. After years of waiting (even being turned down once) we won the claim in 2019. Life got infinitely easier for us. Now we’re on an incredible farm on an incredible island in an incredible nation, and I can have cocktails on the beach any time I want.
