One afternoon we went shopping. We had two major grocery stores we liked. One was pretty far away, over ten blocks. It was called "No Frills" and that's exactly what it was. There were yellow plastic bags that you could pay a nickel for to put your stuff in. You could use their carts and any empty boxes but you had to pack your stuff yourself. We always used their boxes.
Outside the store we'd push the cart all the way back to our place and put the empty cart in the small courtyard behind our house. The next day, if I wasn't in too much pain, I'd push it all the way back and use the bus to get home. You couldn't take groceries in boxes on the bus. The bus quit running early so it was pointless anyway. If we didn't have much money, we went to this store.
There was another one closer to us that had good groceries but they cost a bit more. If we could afford the money it was worth it to not have to walk so far. We went there this time and got a few groceries. Not enough to need a cart. I had a small canvas bag I put the half gallon of ice cream in and Tom carried the other bag. We were walking along and he was talking to me.
We passed the junk yards with the old cars in them. They had a fence around them and a gate with chain lock on it when it was closed which it was at that time of the evening.
There was a manhole in the sidewalk with a cover on it. It looked normal. I paid it no attention. Tom was still talking to me when he said later that I disappeared. I had stepped on the edge of the cover. It flipped up in the air and I went down half way into the hole. I cut a big gouge just below my knee. Blood was pouring out and I was staring in shock.
Tom was still walking and talking. The bag he was carrying hid me from view. I yelled and he turned around in horror. He sat the bag on the sidewalk and came back to help me up. He saw the blood and said we needed an ambulance. He ran to a door and got someone to call the post. A cop came and the ambulance was slow in getting there but they did.
While I'm sitting still in the hole with blood pouring out of me and the cop talking to me a dog runs out snarling from the junk yard grabs my purse and is off with it. I don't know which of the three of us was more shocked. The cop ran after the dog after calling for back up, of all things.
He went under the chain and caught up with the dog who was happily chewing my purse. He told me he had to hit him with his radio to get the purse back and then he ran out of there. The dog came after him but by then the ambulance and the other cop was there. The dog slithered back.
At first, the cop didn't believe I could fall in the hole. I think he secretly suspected Tom of pushing me there.
While I was in the ER, both of cops were testing the hole. One of them told me he stood on it and nothing happened.
I came home from the ER with what looked like a beehive wrapped around my leg. I had about 17 stitches. I was sound asleep in minutes. In the morning I had to wash my canvas bag which the cop had brought back and left on our door step with the melting ice cream in it.
In the afternoon, the cop was back and wanted to know if I was capable of walking back to the man hole. He wanted to know exactly what I had done. I went with him. I told him I just stepped on the edge. He said it was impossible the thing wouldn't budge when he stepped on it. He proved it by stepping on it. He stood there and he jumped up and down and nothing moved. He got off of it. I said, "Now stick the toe of your boot on the edge."
He did and it neatly flipped up in the air. He stared at it, shook his head and said OK.
He told me the dog that stole my purse had been purchased from the local pound. It had been a dog they had taken from a criminal who used it to steal purses. The dog was suppose to have been chained up at all times at the junk yard but the owner let it loose at night.
Somebody said I should sue the town or they'd never fix it and some kid could get hurt. I got a lawyer who would take a third of whatever I got. I didn't care. I just wanted it fixed. They settled out of court when the cop swore out a statement in my defense. I went over a few weeks later and saw they had cemented all the way around it. I doubt it would have lasted though winter but I'd done my best.
Another odd thing regarding this happened. This happened in fall and it was getting pretty cold at night but not in the day time. I had to go into to post to have my leg looked at. They had OK'd it because of me being in the guards.
I was waiting for the bus on the corner when it started getting cold. It was getting colder the longer I waited but it finally arrived and I got to the ER. First they tried to find my pulse and it seems I had none. It was a young kid and maybe, just maybe he didn't do it right.
So he put the blood pressure cuff on me. I had no blood pressure. He stuck a thermometer in my mouth. It didn't register a temp at all. He was mumbling when he said this to me. "Er, I hate to tell you ma'am, but I think you're dead. At least according to these instruments you are." He called someone else over, someone older who tried it and still I registered nothing.
They bundled a blanket around me to try to warm me up. I was still real cold. It was a nice warm day when I left the house. I couldn't fit long pants around my bandaged leg. It was snowing now. After a half hour they tried again and got a pulse. They kept me there till I was normal. By then someone had found Tom and he got a friend of his to drive us home. They figured it was the cold that had prevented the instruments from getting my measurements.
Between Christmas and New Year's, Mary moved about three blocks from us to a much nicer apartment. It was real cold and she needed help. Tom was working so I did what I could. She had a guy helping as well, they would fill up my car and his and we'd drive over and they would unload them both. Sometime in the night the temperature dropped real low. It was the last load. They put the last things in my car after they filled his and we started out.
They went ahead of me. I didn't make it. I got halfway there and she stalled. I couldn't get it started and I was quickly freezing. I had managed to stop in front of a closed store but I was still in the road. I was terrified I'd freeze to death before morning. I couldn't get out and walk because that would mean a quick death from freezing. I sat there and shivered. I turned the lights on. At least the battery still worked.
I was nodding off when flashing lights woke me. It was a cop. He tried but he couldn't get it going either. I locked it up and left it there where he'd pushed it into a parking slot. He drove me home and I crawled my half frozen body into bed next to Tom. He'd come home from work, figured I was helping Mary still and gone to bed. I have to say this for him. He put his arms around me and held me till I stopped shaking and fell asleep.
The next morning before I was up, he went over and unlocked the car and it started right up. I've no idea what fate was trying to teach me that night but I hope I learned my lesson because I never want to go through that again.
I have one other story I can tell, maybe two but neither are really a story.
One was that I had made a batch of cookies and I package up a plate of them for Mary to take over to her at her new house but she wasn't home. There was note on the door saying she'd gone to visit her mother for the week. I trudged back with my cookies but I went the back way. There was a little snow but it was sunny and not freezing much. I came by the entrance to a train tunnel that was no longer being used. There was an old "tramp looking" man siting in there. I didn't care if he was a drunk or just someone down on his luck. I offered him the cookies and he took them gladly and thanked me.
The other thing was that there was a lady in our neighborhood who had dogs. They barked a lot for about a week. Mary was still living near us. She came over and said something was wrong. She never saw anyone come or go from that woman's house. Neither of us knew what to do so I called animal control and told them.
They checked and they said the woman was in the hospital. She said she had left food and water for them and her boyfriend was supposed to be checking on them to give them more and take them out to poop. We'd never seen anyone and we told the guy that. We all went over there and the dogs were barking up a storm. He made us stand back while he opened the door.
There were four huge dogs. He slammed the door and leaned on it while he called for back up. We watched. The dogs went to the shelter.
The landlady asked me to clean it up as best I could. Tom helped and we bagged up tons of garbage. When they ran out of food, they tore apart anything and everything. They even chewed open canned goods. We figured they drank water from the toilet. There was dog poop everywhere. I did what I could but there was nothing salvagable in the apartment. In the end she had to have it gutted and rebuilt. She even had to put in new walls and flooring. She was one angry landlady.
I'm sure she was also angry later after we left when she discovered the hole in the wall over the bed in our apartment. Tom had been sitting in bed and was angry about something that happened at post. I don't know what. He was always getting into arguments with people out there. He never wanted to be a cook in the first place and he couldn't adjust to that.
He had signed up to work on some kind of rocket or missle program but he got sick. He was at Redstone Arsenal. I think he had pneumonia. They gave him meds and kept him in the hospital for a few weeks at least. When he got out he wasn't allowed back in the program he'd been in. I think it was canceled but he said it was because he was still on meds. I don't know and never did but the upshot was they stuck him in cook school instead.
That's what he was doing at Fort Lee when I met him. He just could never accept that. He did his job as well as anyone else. I never heard of complaints about him that way. He was always rebelling though. He wouldn't cut his hair. He'd go to work without underwear and the women would complain about how much they could see. Sometimes he would "forget" to wear deodorant.
His uniforms were never clean enough. I suppose that was partly my fault as I did the laundry. There is a lot of red sand stone in this area. It gets on cook whites easily especially if Tom walked home or if he had to wear it out in the field. This wasn't normal but it did happen on occaison. I really think he was trying to get sent somewhere else. Maybe he didn't even realized some of the stuff he was doing.
So he was angry about something from work and he lifted his arm up and pounded into the wall over his head. I don't know if it hurt his hand but it sure broke a hole in the wall.
Another time they brought him home from the base. He'd fallen off a truck and hurt his back. He was only home two days and back to work. It was only when we were in Hawaii that I found out what had happened. He'd had a seizure when he fell. He only had that one while we lived in Colorado as far as I know.
In Hawaii he had a lot. They said sometimes that they were idiopathic meaning they didn't have a cause for them. He was not an epileptic. They were sure of that. One report in Hawaii said it was possibly alcohol related. In Hawaii, they gave him medicine. He refused to take it. He also refused to take it in Ohio. When he went for a medical checkup in Hawaii, he had to pick up his medical file first. He had time so he came home for lunch and brought the file with him. I looked through it because I was basically nosy to see what it said.
There were all sorts of papers there about every time he'd ever been to sick call or the ER.
And yet, my medical files from Fort Jackson mysteriously went missing...