There had been drug dealers and prostitutes and a “witch” living there. The police would come for Debbie when she had a drug-overdose-triggered “complete psychotic break” and the FBI to investigate number 12, where a member of the Weather Underground had stayed. Rent was cheap and the location just up the street from the Blue Moon Tavern where Gary would always find change dropped on the ground in the parking lot at back. More important, the building was only a few blocks west of The Ave and the University of Washington campus, which guaranteed it was always fully occupied.

Today is not our wedding anniversary, which will be next month, but is still an important anniversary for Gary and me. In 1972 we moved together into a tiny apartment in a notorious building in the University District of Seattle. The owner was a professional house-painter who had shoved two old houses together and carved out more than a dozen studio apartments. He mixed together leftover paint, various whites and what must have been barn red, and so the entire building was coated in pink paint. Locally it was known as “Big Pink,” which it was.

Gary and I were both students at the University of Washington the coming fall, and perhaps that is why Bruce offered to reduce our rent in exchange for looking after the place and keeping it fully rented. There were several sets of stairs and in addition to the more discreditable tenants, the couple in #7 had served in the Peace Corps and were graduate students at the UW, and others worked locally for minimum wage, as we did ourselves. Within a few weeks of our arrival, the last of the drug dealers set fire to his kitchen and was forced to move out. We rented to friends and perhaps the atmosphere improved during the three years we lived there, but the laundry was in the basement in a creepy space. Gary insisted he be the one to do the laundry. (He’s been doing it ever since and accidentally dyed his underwear pink two or three times before he learned to sort colors.)

Perhaps the owner could tell we did not smoke or drink or use drugs. If he’d asked we would have told him that, but I don’t know that he did ask. We were too poor to eat out more than two or three times a year, and while eventually we began showing Ann Ann, we lived a largely Spartan existence. In actual fact, during those three years we lived in squalor, but we were students and in love and it was all temporary to my mind. Occasionally we borrowed a car from my parents, and we took the bus, but mostly we walked everywhere. Sometimes we walked for many miles in a day. On Saturdays, we took the bus downtown and Gary would drag me through pawnshops to look at guitars he could not afford to buy. Homeless men frequently stopped Gary who patiently listened to their life stories. They always thanked him even when he had no change to spare. They knew he did not judge—an Anthropology major by temperament as much as by choice.

Most of our friends and college acquaintances owned cars, lived in nicer apartments, and had parents who paid some of their bills. They gained the better paying jobs and found work-study and took out loans. Gary and I were on our own and our grades were good. We would eventually graduate Phi Beta Kappa and cum Laude with four degrees between us, debt free. This was rare even then. I won scholarships and we both worked year around—Gary in Receiving at the University Book Store, then the largest university book store in the country. I worked in the music department, to which I owe my fondness for Nonesuch recordings of Baroque and Chamber music, ethnomusicology, and Paul Horn. I once coaxed a customer to show me what he had in his music case and he stood before the cash register and played “Syrinx” on a gold flute.

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In June of 1972, I drove across country with my step grandmother Genevieve to a spinning workshop in the small town of Peabody, Kansas. The sidewalks were stamped at intersections with dates from the previous century. I heard a whippoorwill and saw fireflies for the first time.

Two cheerful farming women had organized and taught the workshop. We stayed in an upstairs room of a home, enjoyed breakfast in the couple’s kitchen, and for a week we spun many different fleeces on a traditional walking wheel, hand spindles, and various other spinning wheels. We gathered samples of fleeces from Navajo and Australian sheep, Rambouillet and Merino and other breeds of sheep and goat—the farm had forty-three. We watched sheep being sheered, and we gathered and used vegetable dyes to tint our handspun wool violet, orange, cerulean, and chartreuse. Iris flowers, logwood, cochineal, fungus. I came home with a notebook filled with carefully labeled fibers and dye samples. (Moths would destroy them years later.)

Genevieve and I took turns with the driving east and west, up to seven hundred miles in a day, and we mostly stayed with old friends of hers. The hog farmer in Missouri had served with Genevieve as a nurse during the war. The eighty-something years old sisters in Iowa were cousins of Genevieve’s who refused government assistance or charity, still raised most of their food in a backyard given over to veg, and though one was nearly blind, they embroidered and sold dainty hankies. I bought three. In the flat middle of the country, we drove directly into a lightening storm until it was too frightening and we had to pull to the side of the road until it passed over. I saw more during that drive to and from than I have since though I have crossed the country several times by plane. Flying over the Grand Canyon or even into Atlanta is not so vivid as driving through the Bad Lands or smelling the steamy breath of a cow mooing into my face in eastern Missouri.

The hard part of the trip for me was not the car’s automatic transmission that I was not used to, or the long hours of driving, or staying with people I did not know, or the treeless landscapes, or even the mosquitoes in Utah, but missing my boyfriend. I sent registered letters and it was never enough.

While I was safely a couple of thousand miles away, I wrote to my mother and told her of my intention to move out of my parents’ home and into that dreadful little apartment with Gary. She took it rather well considering, told me she would inform my father, and did not disown me. (My dad was upset.) I went right on roasting the Thanksgiving turkey.

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It was hot on July 4th, 1972, and we had spent the day painting out the vivid cerulean blue walls of our new apartment. I thought I wanted off white, but Bruce offered soft pale taupe paint leftover from a job for free. We had dickered about the pure white enamel I initially wanted for the trim. “You really do not want pure white,” Bruce kept saying. But by the time we’d painted the walls that afternoon, I came around. The existing eggshell black trim not only would have been a nightmare to cover, but had become elegant instead of creepy once the walls were painted. The black ceiling in the “bedroom” was still not attractive but stayed because it was ten feet up and we were too hot and tired to stand on a ladder for two coats. The tall double-hung windows were all painted shut, which had made painting miserable even after Gary got two of them to shift. Eventually we would get all the windows to open, but that first night forty-eight years ago it was miserably hot and we slept in a twin bed, head to foot.

Happy anniversary, Sweetheart.

 

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