State Street in Ohio
I never really liked living in Ohio. There were good times and there were bad times. There were even what I would call EVIL times. I'm not going to talk about those much if at all. I will talk about the good and some of the bad.
I did like the house on State Street. I didn't like the furnace which was an oil furnace. Maybe that dates back to Argyle and the people we knew whose home blew up and killed there kids because of the oil furnace.
Life here was OK. I won't say it was heavenly because it never was that. Tom and I got along for the most part but he was already changing. I joke that it's something in the water but if that we true then we'd all be crazy. I did mean some very nice folks there but like I said above there were evil ones too.
My first memory of here is that I was upstairs one day and I heard someone cough. There was no one else in the house but me and the kid and we weren't coughing. I wondered about that for a long time because it sounded like it was in the next bedroom. I later guesstimated that it was a sound coming from a next door house and it was just amplified so I heard it there.
Tom was working at Allied Resinous. It was where his dad worked and his step-mother and his brother and I think some earlier relative as well had worked there before he died. Tom said it was a guaranteed job and he had to take it. I thought maybe it was just because he didn't like New York anymore than I liked Ohio.
In Hawaii, he gave me his check and I paid the bills and did the shopping and housework except when he had to help me when I was pregnant and after Tommy was born. After Tommy was born he seemed like a near perfect husband. He changed Tommy sometimes, he helped around the house.
In Ohio that was all turned about. He not only didn't let me continue to do the banking and bill paying, he even refused to let me know how much he was getting. He didn't do much around the house unless it was helping me get Tommy to sleep at night. He would gladly putter with a broken car or build things but if it was something like picking up after himself even he wouldn't do that.
Yeah, I sucked that up too. At least he loved Tommy. We, however, had begun that backward slide in our marriage. It might have been doomed from the start. We had nothing much in common except Tommy. You can both love your kids completely but having kids does not weld your family together. It takes a lot more and we just didn't have it.
We didn't like the same music. He drank and smoked and I didn't. There was the big age difference. I loved to read and write. He didn't want to read anything he didn't have to read and he'd never been much of a letter writer.
A lot of people do not understand writers or artists and I was both.
He was heavily into guns and I could take them or leave them. He was crazy about video games which at that point in time I'd never even played one. He loved bars and going out with his friends and parties. I really hated all of that. Yep, we were doomed from the start.
We had a bad argument one day, and I have no idea what it was about. His parting shot was that he had married me just to punish me. I couldn't figure out what the heck I'd done that I needed punishment for but I believed he meant it at the time he said it. Now, years later, I think it was just something he yelled in anger. If it were true he would have been nasty to me from the start.
He was selfish. He did what he wanted first. I knew that from way back in Colorado. It was like he just didn't realize that everyone didn't think they way he did. I thought it wouldn't matter. When I get right down to it, back in Colorado I never really thought we would get married. I figured he'd get it out of his system and go his own way after awhile.
Was I selfish too? I still read my books and painted and wrote and took photos but I did do my housework and keep his clothes as clean as I could. Trying to get red soil out of cook whites is darn near impossible. The same can be said for getting machine oil out jeans but its not so noticeable if you don't get it out of the jeans.
We had been there awhile when I started getting the girl who lived next door and was still in school and her boy friend to drive me to the grocery store. Sometimes she'd watch Tommy in the car while I shopped. On this particular day Big Tom was at home. It was late fall and cold and he was working in the garage. He said he'd watch Tommy and they'd only be in the garage a few minutes. I trusted him.
I got back from the shopping and the house was locked. I had my keys so I unlocked it and they weren't in there. I went out to the garage and they were still in there. Tom said he'd somehow locked himself out of the house. They were darn near freezing. I grabbed the baby and we ran into the house to warm them both up.
I put Tommy in his crib with a blanket and Tom went to the basement for something. Maybe it was something to do with turning the heat up because it had gotten so cold.
The next thing I knew I heard him fall on the stairs coming up. I went to see if he was OK. He had blood on his face but he was alert. He was twitching. I now knew what that meant and called the emergency people even though he said he was all right.
They came and he let them examine him but he wouldn't go to the hospital. They told him to be sure to take his medicine. I knew he had it but I also knew he wasn't taking it. I couldn't force him to take it.
He told me once that he wanted to get a license but in order to do that he had to prove he could go three years without his medicine and without having a seizure. He never succeeded at that as far as I know.