A Dream Realized Chapter Four

When the decision was made to move clear across the country, the most pressing issue was to get an address to which to move our belongings.  We decided to use a professional moving van with real, live movers (the first and last time I had this luxury in the six moves during my marriage).  It was decided that I would remain home to pack and my husband would fly out to San Francisco to find our new digs.  It was the end of October.  Once again, he stayed with my brother and sister-in-law and she was kind enough to take the time to show him around the city to look at some places to consider.

And so it was that on October 31, 1976 my husband found himself at the corner of Market and Castro Streets at the zenith of the predominantly gay community in San Francisco.  He was there to check out an an apartment for rent.  Apparently there was a great deal more to check out that day; i.e. an outrageous Halloween parade showcasing many of the local residents in all their finery!  He found and paid a deposit on a small apartment on 17th Street right above Castro and flew back home to help finish packing.

Having just driven across the country less than a month ago, I was quite confident we could accomplish this trip without too many mishaps.  We sold one of our cars before we left.  Would you believe we opted to sell our Plymouth Duster (remember those?) and kept an AMC Gremlin?  If we had it to do again, I strongly suspect we would've reversed the vehicles.  We packed ourselves and a huge glass jar full of loose change, carefully wrapped, into the Gremlin.  We were ready and the three of us set out on our journey westward in early November, my husband, the jar and I.  Opportunity had knocked and we opened the door wide to let it come in and carry us into a new adventure.

At each stop for the night, we lugged that huge jar into our motel room and back to the car in the morning.  You'd have thought our life savings were in that jar!  Since we were only 23 and 25 years old, perhaps they were.  We treated that thing like our child.  When we finally arrived at our destination, I discovered that our apartment was on the second floor and, happily, there was an elevator to carry our furniture up to it.  We unpacked the car and brought upour things to our new little nest.  My husband had the glass jar held tightly in his arms.  Somehow it got away from him and dropped, smashing into a million pieces, coins rolling every which way not three feet from the door to our apartment.  The choice expletive that came out of my husband's mouth was loud enough to wake the dead.  Greetings, San Francisco.  We had arrived!  I got a large plastic garbage bag and scooped the mess of glass and coins into it.  For a long time afterward, I would be picking out change for bus fares and the Laundromat gingerly from the shards of glass.