I was 18 years old when we got married. Two weeks later I turned 19. Young dumb and in love. Those first years of marriage were no walk in the park. We no sooner got married went on our honey moon weekend and the next week we moved away from all of our friends and family. Neither of us had a job. I have no idea what we expected to live on. The only thing we knew was Michael was going to move to Dallas to go to school and neither of us wanted to be that far apart from one another. Michael asked me to marry him on December 9, 1989. We got our marriage licence on January 9, 1990 and were married by January 20, 1990. Twenty one years of marriage. By today's standards that is a long time.
When we moved to Dallas I found a job working for Kirby trying to sale vacuum cleaners. I hated it. I'm not a sales person in the least. I couldn't justify selling a vacuum that cost $1,200.00. I'm way to practical minded for that. No matter how good the product. One weekend they sent all of the new sales people off to make 10 presentations to either friends or family. The only problem was all of our family and friends were three hours away. On our drive back from Belton our Ford Taurus broke down on the side of the road. We had to literally walk 5 miles back to a small Texas town call West. We got the car running the next day. I ended up quiting that awful job. I was working 7 AM until 11 PM and not getting anything out of it.
My cousin got me an interview for a bank that was called First Gibraltars. Since I had what I thought was such a fantastic paying job I told Michael I wanted him to concentrate on school and when he finished he could get a job as well. After all he had paid for everything for the last four years and his schooling was only going to be a year. We were scraping by. It was so bad at times we had noddles with ground turkey meat. If we were lucky we would get to add cheese to the mix. Try working when you only have one car. We would have to get up supper early so Micahel could drive me to my cousins house. One of us would drive her car in to down town Dallas. So I would drive from Buckner blvd. in Dallas to Roulette back to Dallas and then do the same thing in reverse every evening. When the Taurus finally gave out we had to buy a new car. It was a Hyundai Excel. It cost us $5,000.00 it was brand new and we thought we were on top of the world. Let me also note this car didn't have a radio or air conditioning in it. Yep, young and dumb.
On our first anniversary I made spaghetti and we danced to Frank Sinatra. We ended up giving each other the same exact anniversary card. I didn't get him anything else. he surprised me with pearl ear rings with gold around them. I wore them every day until the pearl broke off. That was a sad day.
Michael graduated mortuary school and got a job working every other night going in at 5 PM and getting off work at 8 AM and working every other weekend. He would go in on Friday night at 5 PM and work until 8 AM on Monday. We were in heaven. One problem. We only had one car. So we rushed out when we found out he had a job and got a second car. It was a brand new Chevy Cavalier. It actually had air conditioning and a radio. We were moving up in the world.
To be continued.
