Our Son

I don’t write a lot about our son because he is very protective of his personal life. He was a huge happy baby. Papa Joe used to love to hear him laugh because he had a deep laugh, which came from the bottom of his toes. It made everyone smile. He was an adorable blond and often people would stop me to say that he should be a model. Forget it. He was not one to smile on demand. Ever.

When he was a child, we were talking about how he was going to buy Christmas presents. We were walking out of Safeway when he started to run and began picking things up off the pavement. It was a very windy day and money was blowing towards him. It was almost $80.00. We stood and waited for someone to come and claim it. We waited. We then sat in the car and waited some more. No one ever came to look for the money.

When he was around 8-years old, we spotted San Francisco's Pier 39's ring toss game where the prize was a large stuffed California Raisin. Michael grabbed William and said, “You can win this.” And he did.

These are just two examples. He has always been very lucky almost like he was born under a lucky star.

We had been married eight years before he was born. We had really nice cars, amazing vacations and cruises, great jobs, a house that we could afford before making the decision to start trying to have a child. I think both families had given up that we would ever have children. I knew that it would have been a disaster to our marriage if we had a child too early. I wanted to be financially stable in order to stay home for the first few years.

We tried. We vowed not to think about it. Within 2 weeks, I knew I was pregnant. Fate.

The company I worked for was based in Indianapolis, Indiana and they had made the decision to close the local division. They asked if I would stay on after the baby was born, do the payroll at home and go into the office once a week for an hour or so. For doing this, I would receive my full pay. Of course! This arrangement lasted for six months.

When William was about 4 months old, Michael announced that he needed a vacation. The stress of a newborn baby was weighing on us. We arranged to stay with my high school friend who was living in Hawaii. She invited us to stay in her guest room in a house way back in the Manoa area of Oahu for as long as we wanted. As they worked in restaurants at night, we were out of the house during the day so they could sleep then we were alone at night. She even loaned us her car so we could drive around during the day.

Caroline was also a pilot and she flew us to Maui for a stay at the Hyatt Regency in Lahaina. We stayed a week then flew back for our final days on the islands. We were there for almost a month. It was a time that we will never forget and often tell parents of newborns to get away from home. No laundry, no meals, no grocery shopping, no phone calls, no nothing except bonding with the baby and resting.

After we got home, Michael started a new job that included a pay increase that made up for my loss of income, almost to the penny.

Also after we got home, I realized that we needed to move. The house was on a really busy street with no sidewalks and I was worried that he would be killed riding a bike. He also had begun to crawl and suddenly it felt too small.

So, within six months of returning from Hawaii, we had sold our house in a horrible real estate market of 18% interest rates and bought our current home. It took every dime we had and we began to rebuild our lives once again. The house closed on William’s first birthday of January 20, 1982.