Marty and Mary Come Calling

 

by Pa Rock

Reminiscer

The last time my friend Marty came to visit was on May 3rd, 2019, the year before the plague.  I know that date is correct because I wrote about his visit in this blog the following day in a piece entitled "Forty Years Have Slipped Away!"  Now, of course, almost five more years have slipped away.

My wife and I both began our teaching careers in August of 1977, during the same week that Elvis died.  I was getting close to thirty-years-old, and she was a few years younger.    We had two young children to support when we signed those first teaching contracts with Mountain View-Birch Tree Schools, a large rural school district in southern Missouri, for a whopping $7,200 per annum each.  Fortunately, the state came up with a little more money over the summer after we had signed agreeing to teach, and our salaries were $7,600 per year by the time the school year actually started.

Marty was one of the students in a history class that I taught.  He was bright and not bashful about speaking up.  Marty was a kid who was easy to like.  In fact, he still is a kid who is easy to like!

The first year that we lived in Mountain View we rented a drafty old Victorian home.  As that year was ending and we had been offered slightly better contracts to teach another year, we decided to try and find a house of our own, and with a much-appreciated assist from my parents, our family was able to do that.  Mountain View was and is a small town, so it was not surprising that one of our students would be living right across the street from the home we purchased - and that student was Marty.

Marty and his parents had moved to Mountain View from the Chicago area not long before we had arrived.   His dad, Bill, had taken an early retirement from his job at a factory and needed someplace less expensive than Chicago in which to spend his golden years.  Marty's older sister was a young adult who had chosen to stay behind in Chicago.  Over the five years that we lived in that house we became good friends with Bill and Theresa and watched Marty finish high school and begin his college career.  When our third child, Tim, was born in September of 1979, it was Marty, an ace photographer with his own darkroom, who came to the hospital and took the first official photos of Baby Macy.

One of my memories of Marty as a neighbor occurred one warm afternoon while I was doing some work in the yard when all of a sudden Pink Floyd came blasting through the summer calm declaring "Teachers, leave those kids alone!"  Message received!

We didn't hear too much out of Marty or his family once we left Mountain View in 1983 and moved back to Noel.  Bill and Theresa did drive over for a visit one afternoon, but they hadn't phoned ahead and we didn't know they were coming - so we were out, and they spent their time in Noel becoming acquainted with our new neighbors.

Marty and a friend of his showed up at a cabin that I was living in out in the woods near Noel in the late 1990's.  He was driving a big convertible which reminded me of the one in which Patrick Swayze had chauffeured himself and his drag queen friends across the county in the movie, "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!  Julie Newmar" - a veritable boat of a car.   That cabin was so small that I couldn't get the mattress and box springs up the tiny stairwell to the bedroom where my iron bed was assembled and waiting, and Marty and his friend helped to lift those big items up and in through the door of the small porch/balcony on the second floor.

The next time I saw the kid from Mountain View was twenty years after that - as referenced above - when he showed up unexpectedly at my home here in West Plains in 2019.  The convertible was gone, and he was driving a large, shiny black pickup truck.  We had a nice visit that morning, and I'm sure Rosie was all over us as we talked about days gone by.

Marty came back yesterday, and this time he brought his wonderful wife, Mary.  They have been married quite a few years, but yesterday was the first time that Mary and I had a chance to meet.  She is a retired public school teacher (elementary) so we had that in common.  She told me that "principals" had driven her nuts, and I told her that as a principal, "superintendents" had driven me nuts!  Marty is a retired state worker who is now in a second career working for the large metropolitan city government where they live.

Marty told me that he is sixty-two, which, of course, is not possible - so he must have been lying!  

Marty's vehicles continue to fascinate me.  This time he was driving a new Ford Bronco which he had specially ordered, and one which attracted favorable comments from a couple of locals later at breakfast.  It is an odd shade of green which Marty said is called "Area 51," and he had a winch installed on the front bumper for which he claims no practical need.  I loved it and am thinking that I might like to have a winch on my Kia Soul, just in case I ever get the big lawnmower stuck in a ditch or need to pull down a building.  You just never know!

When Marty and Mary arrived I let the dogs maul them for awhile as I dragged out photos of the kids an grandkids, and then we went to town for breakfast at the Ozark Cafe where we enjoyed delicious food and a long conversation that stripped the hardened varnish off of our lives in Mountain View nearly a half-century earlier.

It was a truly wonderful visit.  Marty and Mary, thank you so much for coming to see me and the dogs! Please do it again sometime!