As the end of my first year in San Francisco approached, I was ready for a change. My lease would be up soon and I didn’t envision signing on for another year at Clipper Street. A two bedroom on upper Market became available, in a building of only three units, with a view more spectacular than the one I had already been enjoying. The rent was reasonable, but considerably more that I was paying, yet it would be less if I was splitting it with someone … I wonder whom? When I mentioned the place to Vince he said it sounded nice, if I thought I needed such a big place, and if I could afford it.
Not the response I was looking for, but I was biding my time. Not long thereafter I looked at a place in the Fillmore, not far from Vince’s apartment; the first floor flat of a Victorian that would make a nice home for both of us, with an excellent space for my business, and that was how I presented it to Vince. He said, “Well, we haven’t talked about living together.” And I said, “Well, perhaps that’s what I’m doing now, starting the conversation.” There was never any question about him moving into my place, wasn’t going to happen; I pretty much felt the same way about his, not to mention the Daffy and parking issues, although he suggested it.
Once he got himself around to the inevitable, he jumped into the apartment hunting with gusto. As usual, ever the control freak, seemingly taking charge of everything, while I handled all of the details and did all of the legwork. We looked at a huge place just three blocks from his, on the fourth floor with majestic arched windows overlooking Lafayette Park. With the living room like a grand ballroom, it was really too overwhelming to consider, even though the price was within our range, at the high end. Parking was still an issue though. A few blocks west of that we looked at a place in a Spanish hacienda style building, an absolutely gorgeous unit with fireplace (no parking) but we were about 30 minutes too late.
We didn’t look at many more places before we checked out a spacious two bedroom at 3848 Sacramento Street, in Presidio Heights (couldn’t ask for a better address), right in back of the Children’s‘ Hospital, and closer to U.C.S.F. where Vince worked. There was no parking, but all of the blocks north of that place, and many east and west, sported some of the largest and most elegant mansions in the city, so housing density was minimal, as was parking congestion.
The building was another Spanish hacienda style that spread uphill. The apartment itself was on the third level (there were two above) of a multi-terraced zigzagging garden stairway. I’ll skip the suspense and get on with the descriptions; we took it at $990 a month (ADDRESS #24). Upon entering, the living room was huge, and there was a large alcove to the left, the angled wall of which featured a beautiful stone fireplace. That spot became our living room, and I fabricated a six panel folding upholstered screen to separate and define the entrance (one thing I hate is a front door that opens right into the living room), while creating a back drop for the sofa.
Flashback to a few months earlier: Vince had bought a sofa to replace the twin sized mattress on the floor of his living room. We shopped around and he found one he liked at Macys. I offered to buy it through my business to save him the sales tax. He hesitated at first, “Things are going well, I know, but what happens if we are not still together when my sofa is ready?” he asked. “Vince, no matter the status of our relationship, I’m not the kind of person who would steal your sofa!” So he bought it, and it became our living room sofa at #3848. The other, larger, half of the living room was adjacent to the kitchen, and we set that up as the dining room, using Vince’s nice antique table and chairs. The opposite wall of which accommodated his very hefty armoire.
All of the floors were hardwood, except for tile in the kitchen and the two baths, carpet in the smaller bedroom and the actual dining room, which was one step up from the living room, and opened onto it by way of an eight foot wide archway. There was a ten foot wide by eight foot high sliding door to the narrow yet private back courtyard, and a large window to the left that overlooked the private deck. We made that room a den, furnished with my sofa, coffee table, bentwood rocker, and antique trunk, along with my dining table and chairs, as sort of a game/project table. I had bought a Sony Trinitron (the worst television I have ever had), and we bought a tall and sturdy wooden rolling stand, so that we could swing it back and forth between the kitchen and den.
The kitchen was a spacious galley style, with a bar along the counter that faced the living room (our dining room), a pantry at one end and a sliding door at the back, opening onto the deck. At first we used the larger bedroom as our bedroom, and the smaller was my office. All things considered the moves went well, Vince of course putting on a show of orchestrating the entire process, while I was the one doing the grunt work and getting things done.
It was truly a blessing that we rented a new place for the two of us, rather than one of us moving into the others, and quite wondrous how our separate pieces homogenized to become our home. The first thing he had said about the new apartment was, “I’m gonna make us a nice home here, Honey.” What did he mean by that exactly? Did he think that he would be doing the arranging and decorating? That was preposterous, of course, because I’M THE DECORATOR!!! Yeah, right! It was not long before we had to face that inevitable hurdle, buying something for the new place together.
We spent a day searching high and low for two bar stools/chairs for the lunch counter at the kitchen, and finally found bar height director's chair style, all the way down in Palo Alto. We agreed on those and then what color? Something subtle and tasteful, of course, to blend in with every thing else. Bright yellow? No! Bright red? I don’t think so! As if those colors weren’t bad enough, he wasn’t talking about both yellow or both red … he wanted one of each. Not matching?!?! This was not going to be easy. It’s just bar stools, yellow and red it is.
Such a spacious apartment, almost 2000 square feet, provided a lot of wall space … perfect for my art collect, bought at the church auction a few months earlier. Slowly we begged, cajoled, spatted, negotiated and compromised our way through getting set up, and ultimately merged our two households into a comfortable, tasteful, and very impressive abode. Yet one of the biggest stalemates involved one of the smallest items.
One of my most cherished possessions was (and still is, although it’s now in storage in the New Mexico desert) a small “devil” pitcher that Mrs Harris had given to me. It was from a valuable antique pitcher collection that she had inherited, and at the time she gave it to me she said, “I don’t have any business with the devil, so you should have this.” With a subtle smirk and a devilish little twinkle in her eyes.
Well, I always saw that pitcher as an object d’art, so I put it in a prominent place on the mantle in the living room. Vince moved it to the counter in the kitchen. His rational … it was, after all, a cream pitcher. For a while that pitcher did a lot of moving back and forth, probably spending more time in transit between the mantle and the counter, than it did in any one place. Until I blew my top, and then the pitcher stayed put on the mantle.
We got settled in time to have a Thanksgiving party for fourteen that year, and it was my first experience with Vince planning and preparing a dinner. He was over the top. First, the grocery shopping, over $400 (1983 dollars). As we wheeled our two overflowing carriages to the checkout, more than one person asked if we had left anything in the store for anyone else. Next it was all of Vince’s self-created stress. Good lord, Vince, you are putting all of this on yourself!? If you cannot do it with a sense of joy, don’t do it! I’ll roast the damn turkey, I’ve cooked plenty, and we’ll have a few veggies and a party. It’s about the gathering not the menu. He continued to obsess; which had nothing to do with the party being a smashing success.
That year we also hosted the Christmas party for Vince’s department at UCSF, because ours was the nicest and most spacious home of any on staff. For that reason our home became party central for Christmas parties and other department get togethers. Fortunately, these were all potluck affairs, so Vince did not have to be quite as obsessive and compulsive, although he still managed to be, but it was contained.
Life was good. We had successfully settled into our home together, and everything was going well. Which, being an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACA), was not a workable scenario for me. When we had returned from Rhode Island that summer of 1983, apparently I brought back a lot of baggage, in addition to the boxes I shipped and the suitcases that I carried. At first I handled it in a classic ACA manner (although I had yet to hear of ACA at the time), I did a “geographic” … the move to Sacramento Street. That address is number twenty-three in thirty-eight years, so you know I had done many a “geographic” long before ACA came into my consciousness.
Once the move to Sacramento Street was accomplished, however, I still had to deal with the baggage. Some nights I would drive out to Land’s End, park, and contemplate the cliffs down to the sea. I do not know how close I was to doing something foolish, but I do know that it was thoughts of Daffy, and my responsibility for her wellbeing, that got me back home. For the first time in my life I had all that I had ever wanted, and felt secure in that—yet I was slipping fast.
From one of his colleagues at UCSF, a psychiatric nurse, Vince got me a referral to a psychiatrist, and I went back into therapy. The going was tough, and I never felt that Vince accepted the realness of what I was going through. He was sensitive and understanding of anyone else's emotional difficulties, just not mine. Consequently, he was more a part of the problem than a solution. But I persevered, and gradually got some of the pieces back in place; which was a good thing, because at about six months I got a call telling me that my psychiatrist had died, “of natural causes at home.”
He was a young and very good-looking man (hey, at over a hundred dollars per session, I wanted someone nice to look at for those 50 minutes each week). Through some vibe I had picked up over the phone, or something, I could never shake the feeling that he had committed suicide. The psychiatric nurse hooked me up with another psychiatrist, but by then I was not in crisis, so I wasn’t motivated to do the difficult work of bonding with a new therapist. Instead I weaned myself off of the Elavil (anti-depressant), and phased out therapy in a few weeks.
Next I joined the newly opened Pacific Heights Health Club (PHHC) on Pine Street at Fillmore, about two miles from #3848. Vince wanted to know why I joined, being that I never went to the Market Street gym where the membership was half the price of PHHC. Well, I said, maybe paying so much will keep me motivated. It did. In addition to all of the southern New England baggage, I had also brought back my black 10-speed Raleigh, the one that had helped me through my first bout of debilitating depression a few years earlier.
Three or four days a week I would bicycle to PHHC for my work out, which was usually mid-morning when there were few people there, if any. PHHC had a full time trainer, Frank, who was studying for is Masters in Exercise Physiology. Because there was rarely anyone else at the gym when I worked out, Frank was like having my own personal trainer. After two years I had more than biceps! When Frank got his degree, he and his wife (also an Exercise Physiologist) took positions at a resort in Nevada. I never quite clicked with his replacement, and gradually my enthusiasm waned.
An additional benefit of healthful activity was quitting cigarettes. I had had an on-again off-again relationship with them since high school, and while at Cheshire I had even written the following:
Ode to the Cancer Stick
That filthy weed of wealthy now kills us all,
And damn the useless waste great men they fall.
We could to eighty-two a healthful light,
We drop at forty-one, Oh, horrid sight!
Of all the poetry, plays, and whatnot that I had written during those teen years, that’s the one I remember. “Oh, horrid sight!” and a big Oh! Brother! to that.
When Billy and I hooked up I had quit smoking, and then during our first break-up crisis I started again. A simple thing. One Saturday at Puritan I joined a few employees for a brown bag lunch. Someone offered me a cigarette and I took it. Within a week I was up to a pack a day. That’s when I learned a very important lesson … it only takes one! After seven years, it only took one. Now I know why alcohols who are sober are not “recovered” alcoholics, but “recovering” alcoholics. The addiction is always there, and it only takes one.
So I smoked from then on but quit again my second night on the cross country trip to San Francisco. I was at a bar in Niagara Falls, ran out, and headed for the vending machine when I stopped myself; didn’t smoke cigarettes again until Vince and I got together. He was a smoker (of course, nurses are the biggest group of smokers in the States, doctors are second). So when I quit thanks to the bicycling and the PHHC, it had been about five years since that faithful cigarette back at Puritan. I had been so ashamed of smoking again after abstaining for seven years, that during those five years I was pretty much a closet smoker. I hadn’t realized that until quitting once again. When I’d proudly tell people that I had quit, they’d look surprised and say, “I never knew you smoked!”
Thanks to the stability that our relationship provided, financial and emotional, Vince enrolled at Golden Gate University, and started working on his BS, which he had abandoned when he left Schenectady and moved to San Francisco. He was a strange student though. He motivated himself with negative self-talk. Despite never getting anything less than an “A” he was always convinced that the work was beyond him.
When studying for an exam he would repeatedly reinforce that he didn‘t know the material, and that he would fail. After the exam he would still be convinced that he had failed, and would fret about that for a week. The funniest part was when he got the exam results. “How did you do?“ I would ask when I picked him up at school. He would reply sheepishly, “Well, I got an A,“ and then he’d be off, “but that’s what I hate about this school, their standards are too low.” Blah, blah, blah! Without exception he’d go through that same scenario over and over again, yet he was always an “A“ student and graduated sigma cum laud
One semester he was taking a course on the legal aspects of healthcare, and just about that time I had a problem getting paid for a job I did in Hillsborough for a designer. Six months had passed, numerous dunning notices sent, and still the guy owed me $500. What to do? I knew that the deadbeat owned a Shell gas station in Excelsior, and one rainy day I realized that my Datsun needed new tires. So I went to this fellow’s station, and discussed tires with him. We had only met once before, briefly, many months earlier, and I was confident that he wouldn’t remember me. I was right.
It was rather enjoyable to observe as he went through the motions of selling me new tires, and in the end I agreed with him that the best value for money was Shell’s top of the line … four at $125 each came to $500. Imagine that. However, during the sales pitch I had noticed a sign that said “no checks” so as he was about to close the deal I said I’d have to come back later, after I went to the bank to get the cash. “Oh, no! No, no! You look like an honest fellow to me, I‘ll take your check.” Yep, as honest as you. Gotcha SUCKER!!!
The first place that I drove to on those brand new tires was my bank to stop payment on the check. Later when I shared this story with Vince he was at first too shocked to say anything, then he went ballistic. Ballistic was not necessarily unusual for Vince. He was convinced that I had done something illegal. Well, of course I had, it’s called fraud. I knew that. The next day Vince had his legal class, and he discussed my transgression with the prof. Naturally he confirmed that I had committed fraud, and added that, should I end up in court, the fact that I was owed the same amount of money would have had no bearing on the case, because I had “taken the law into my own hands.” No shit.
Vince couldn’t wait to share all of that with me, and I told him it didn’t matter. In the end I was confident that this guy would accept the fact that I had gotten the better of him, and that would be the end of it. Three weeks later I got the call. “I know why you’re calling,” I said, “You want to know why I stopped payment.” “Why would you do a thing like that?” he wanted to know, so I told him. He told me that my fees had been too high. Didn’t matter, the agreement had been signed. “Say you fix my car and I think you are charging too much, if I refuse to pay I don’t get my car do I?” In the end he decided that he should take this up with his designer, and I agreed that that was probably the best thing to do. That was the end of it. Actually, it wasn’t. A couple of weeks later I got a rebate check from Shell, $10 on each of the tires, so it was a $40 bonus for all of the aggravation.
Not long after the new tires, the Datsun started giving me trouble. It was also a standard transmission, all of my cars had been, I preferred standard to automatic … but after a year negotiating San Francisco hills and Bay Area traffic, I had a change of heart. Also, I had never had air conditioning, and no air-conditioning was fine for San Francisco, but it didn’t take too many trips south to Saratoga or north to Napa in 110° weather, to convince me that air-conditioning would be a plus. So one morning when the Datsun wouldn’t start, I took a taxi to the nearest VW dealership to buy a Vanagon … I had been doing some window shopping and knew what I wanted.
Now being a frugal ol’ New England antique dealer, car buying was horse trading and I drew a hard bargain. When I had bought a Pinto station wagon in the early ‘70s, at one dealership I had walked out three times but they kept dragging me back for a better offer. The last time I was in my car and about to pull into traffic, when they convinced me to come back for another try. That time I was pissed, and told them, “Until your offer matches the price that I already told you I’d pay, don’t bother me again.” The next dealership matched my price.
San Francisco was different, and Ron Greenspan VW was not prepared for me, nor was Vince, who had gone with me. I was wheeling and dealing, demanding and strutting around, while Vince followed in my wake, totally freaked out, and apologized to everyone, “He’s not usually this way!” he’d say, “He‘s having a bad day.” In the end I got my price and my terms, and much to my surprise (in Rhode Island it always took a couple of days), drove off the lot that afternoon in the new Vanagon … in what would become one of the two worst vehicles that I ever owned (the first was my first Toyota, yet one of my two best was also a Toyota).
By the end of our first year or so at #3848 I was doing okay, but I was still not reconciled to a lot about life with Vince. So I got him to join me in couple’s counseling, just about dragging him kicking and screaming all of the way. We would meet with the psychologist together one week, and separately the next. My individual sessions had clarified a lot of what was bothering me, and after a few weeks the therapist got me to the point where I was willing to discuss these issues with Vince.
Although I had yet to discover ACA, and the powerful lifelong dynamics that were directing my behavior, two big ones were an inability to express anger and the avoidance of confrontation (unless I was really pushed). So getting me to confront these issues with Vince was a big move, and during the following joint session I did so. Vince was devastated. The next morning I got up at six to take him to work as usual, but he was just about heading out the door, feeling that I never wanted to have anything to do with him again. To make a long story short, I did everything in my power to help him heal his wounds, and to get our relationship back on track. While stuffing my issues and my angers, which was easy because I had been trained from an early age by my mother to do just that, and I had been doing it all of my life.
So I told him he didn’t need to go back to the therapist anymore, and after two more sessions by myself I brought it to a close. It was time for another “geographic” but moving out of #3848 was certainly not an option. Well, it was, but not one I was willing to pursue. Then the perfect opportunity fell out of the sky and into my lap (as has been the case most of my life), a storefront for Western Window Design (WWD). There was a new up-market condominium development on Divisadero Street at Eddy, probably one of the first in the gentrification of that area. In the ground level “basement” of this complex opening onto Divisadero there were three small storefronts. The first already contained a dry cleaning shop, I forget what the second was. The third was for rent.
The agent that I met with told me that they would be willing to divide that already small space, creating two shops, each about fourteen feet wide by about twenty-two deep. And I could have the corner unit, the one with a big beautiful bay window facing Eddy Street, for $350 a month! In San Francisco!? Well, I couldn’t sign the lease fast enough. The shop next-door became a dress shop.
The space was raw, so I painted the walls a light grey, put a mauve wall-to-wall on the floor (it was the 80s, mauve was in), and added track lighting. My two four foot teak veneer book cases were perfect for samples and, positioned a few feet from the back of the space, served to partition off a small work and storage area out of sight. For the bay window, I used companion fabrics in a lovely green with mauve, burgundy, and yellow flowers. WWD’s colors were burgundy and gray.
The small print I used for a valance, with border in a solid mauve chintz, and the large print I used as side panel draperies, with tiebacks in the small print. All trimmed in the mauve chintz. The bay was completed with my original San Francisco dining table, used as a project/game table at #3848, and the matching director’s chairs, which made a perfect little conference area. For a desk I had a white Formica top made, an “L” six feet wide by seven feet long, with the inner angle of the “L” enclosed diagonally. Resting on top of three teak veneer two-draw file cabinets, it actually provided two good desk areas, one outside the “L” on the six foot span, and one inside the “L” on the diagonal.
In the process of setting up my business space, my former office at #3848, the small carpeted bedroom, became our bedroom, and the large bedroom with a hard wood floor became the guest room. The larger room had a closet about twice the size of the smaller room, and when we had first moved into that apartment Vince said that we should share the closet. No, no, I responded. I want my own closet; I’ll take the small one. Good thing.
The way Vince kept his closet was a mess, and he never closed the doors. So when that room became a guest room, I cordoned off the area in front of that big closet with an eight foot by eight foot bookcase that I built, a second teak bookcase, and a four panel upholstered folding screen. Inside that concealed area, on the back of the big bookcase, I built large deep shelves for laundry baskets (getting his dirty cloths off of the floor), and other large items that Vince would have left lying around. So basically, I completely hid his mess in a decorative way, and he never had to close the closet doors again. Not that he ever did, but thanks to my creation it stopped pissing me off.
As coincidence would have it, when I spent the first night of my October 1982 cross-country trip at an Albany motel, Vince was in Albany/Schenectady. His two-year-old nephew, Nick, had been rushed to Albany General and admitted to intensive care. He was critically ill, and no one knew what was wrong. Cheryl had called Vince, and he was on the next plane, the medico-in-shining-white-scrubs come to the rescue.
The doctors on Nick’s case were not at all receptive to taking orders from a San Francisco “nurse” but Vince antagonized and attacked, badgered and blustered, ranted and raved, and got Nick airlifted to Sloan Kettering in NYC … much to the chagrin of the omnipotent Albany doctors. By doing so, Vince had saved Nick’s life. He was diagnosed with neuroblastoma and, although the fatality rate is 99%, Nick was in the one percentile of survivors. But it was a long hard battle. Cheryl, one of the most focused and devoted mother’s I have ever known, did anything and everything to insure Nick’s continued survival.
So moving my office out of the house and setting up the guest room was timely. The summer of 1995 Nick was five and his baby brother Chris six months. Cheryl and Tony were planning to bring the boys to California, first to Los Angeles for Disneyland and Universal, and to visit four of Nick’s friends from Sloan Kettering, part of the program to affirm survival in Nick‘s mind. By the time they arrived, however, three of those four had died.
Vince and I borrowed a stroller, crib, and everything else a six month old baby needed, and then headed to Los Angeles in the Vanagon. Previously it had been having overheating problems, this model the first water cooled, but on the most recent visit to Ron Greenspan VW they told me all is well. Some miles after Firebaugh (i.e., in the middle of nowhere) on I-5 in the San Joaquin Valley, Vince took over the driving and I went back to take a nap. As soon as I lay down though, I realized that I should caution Vince to watch out for the “red” over-heating light, and when I got back up front it was on.
Pull over! Pull over! There on the shoulder of the highway, in the middle of this vast valley of nothingness, I looked up at the heavens and said, “Well, God, what do I do now?” When just at that very moment, a loud voice came out of the sky (I kid you not), bellowing, “DO YOU HAVE TRIPLE-A?” It was a CHP officer on his megaphone. He came up to the van and we told of our troubles, and he radioed AAA service in Firebaugh. While we were waiting for the tow I commented to Vince, “Wow! Talk about a good-looking cop!” Vince responded, “Well, it’s good I’m not the jealous type.” “Jealous!” I exclaimed, “You’d have to be pretty damn lame to get jealous over a hot cop in the middle of the desert, when the chances of me ever seeing him again were nil to zero!”
The tow truck arrived, and the driver was a valley boy born and bred; cannot remember whether or not he was munching on a piece of hay. The nearest VW shop was in Fresno, 75 miles away. AAA covered the first six miles, and I paid the balance at about $125. We rode in the truck with the hayseed, which was interesting because he knew every inch of the valley, and gave us a guided tour. We would pass an orchard and he’d tell us that it was almond trees, two or three or more miles later when the trees changed, those were apricots, and so on. I had once read that the San Joaquin Valley was called America’s “food basket” because it produced 25% of the food that went on American tables, and this involuntary tour gave me no reason to doubt that.
In Fresno I dropped the van at the VW shop, told them I’d pick it up in a few days. Then I shopped car rentals on the phone, trying to find an available station wagon (they were still called that then), but the best I could do was a very big Chevrolet, with a cavernous trunk. We managed to fit everything in, all the baby stuff, but it didn’t leave much room for passengers. On to Los Angeles we trekked, stopping at a Stuart Anderson’s for a fantastic steak dinner, which Vince hated. Meat and potatoes never did it for him; he always had to have "cuisine!"
We moved all of the baby paraphernalia into the motel room, then met Cheryl and family at LAX that evening. Vince pissed me off over something, probably me not wanting to scout around looking for a superb restaurant, when there was a Bob’s Big Boy right next to the motel. We were all hungry, and I had yet to come down from what had been a grueling day. I was not doing any more driving! By the time Vince acquiesced to eating at Bob’s, I was so pissed off that I refused to join them—or to eat, even though he had brought back take out for me.
The next three days we did all of the usual Los Angeles things. I had already done it all 2½ years earlier with my niece, Jayna, so I didn’t have a vested interest in any of the venues. At Disneyland, for example, the four of them would wait in the lines, and see the exhibits or take the rides, while I sat on a bench in the shade taking care of the baby. The funniest thing though was Universal Studios. When the tram stopped at a sound stage that we were going to visit, we were told that when we came out it would be a different tram, but to take the same seats. Well, when we got back a group of non-English speaking Japanese tourists had taken our seats. While Tony, Vince, and I were in a huddle, trying to decide what to do, we heard a commotion. There was Cheryl on the tram, grabbing the Japanese by the arm, one at a time, and dragging them off. That worked, even though where we sat didn’t really matter.
When it came time to leave Los Angeles, there was no way that we could fit everything and everyone into the Chevy, so I figured that we’d rent another car one way to Fresno, and then consolidate the contents into the Vanagon. As I recall it must have been a holiday weekend or something, but there was absolutely not one rental car available in all of Los Angeles. Plan B. I was able to get us a rental car in Bakersfield, so I booked it for the next day, for a one way trip to San Francisco. Then I went to a store and bought some rope.
The next morning we loaded the Chevy, lashing all of the big items to the roof, then squeezed in and headed for Bakersfield. We spent the night there at a motel near the so-called airport, which is where the car rental was located. In the morning we loaded what we could in that rental car, and I took the rest. They headed for the coast, to take the long and winding scenic route north to San Francisco, while I left for Fresno to turn the Chevy in and get my van.
The fellow at the shop went on and on about how the people in San Francisco didn’t know anything about cooling systems or cars in the desert, and what not, and that they had fixed the van for $250. I gave him a check and left. Before I got as far as Firebaugh, 150 miles away, the red light came on. Depending on how I drove, faster or slower, whatever, sometimes simply stopping and letting it cool down, I limped along. When I got to the crest of the Appian Way, above Pleasanton, the light came on and stayed on. So I shut off the engine, and coasted for fifteen miles down to a weighing station that had a payphone. Called the local VW dealer and they sent a tow. From there I took a BART bus to the nearest station, and headed for home.
Despite all of the vehicle hassle, we had an absolutely great time with Cheryl and Tony, Nick and the baby, Chris. They were an absolute joy, and it was heartwarming getting close to some of Vince’s family.
No comments:
Post a Comment