I’m still internet-less here, and so far, no one has seen fit to allow me to, y’know, borrow their wireless connection. So, I’m typing this up in Notepad with every intention of getting to the office early enough to copy/paste/publish before I start nine hours of pricing negotiations. Of course, that’s my INTENTION. We’ll see how I feel when 5:30 rolls around and my alarm starts playing Fur Elise. (Yes, that’s really what it plays. It’s so horrific, I have to get up to shut it off.)

However, I do have a topic. In the continuing saga of Years Go By, I have a request for 1986. Which, coming on the heels of 1987 SHOULD be easy to remember. Yea? Well, not so much.

However! Dizzy Ms. Lizzy married Mr. Dizzy back in 1986, so she wants to hear what I was doing back in the days of big hair and Duran Duran.

Well, Ms. Lizzy, I was also a newlywed. For the first time. I had moved to West-by-gawd-Virginia in August of ‘85 and finished the final four classes for my degree (the school I graduated from allowed me to take the classes elsewhere and “reverse transfer” them back).

(I know, I’m doing 1986, but I graduated in December and this story comes AFTER graduation. Shush.)

In January, I started looking for that elusive first REAL JOB. I also cleaned house every day. Considering there was two of us in a two-bedroom townhouse with no furniture, that wasn’t very difficult. Or time consuming. We had a 13″ black & white television, a hand-me-down kitchen table with no chairs (I sat on a stool, he sat on milk crates), a recliner with a ripped seat, a faux-bentwood rocking chair (also with a ripped seat) and my bedroom set. Lots of wedding gifts (three toasters! two electric frying pans!), but no couch.

Two weeks into the year, I was stir-crazy. I tried new recipes on a husband whose idea of gourmet dining was putting vegetables on pizza. I met the retired lady who lived in the other side of the townhouse – she introduced me to okra. I took lots of walks down to the river hoping that something exciting would happen. Nothing ever did. (I mean, seriously, we lived downstream from a CHEMICAL plant – there should have been weird wildlife or plants or something…)

I begged for a pet to keep me company. I got a fish.

I went on useless interviews. At one, (they advertised for an entry-level financial analyst), I was told that I could PAY THEM to be able to SELL INSURANCE. Of course, since I was unemployed, they’d give me a loan to get certified to sell their insurance products – then they’d take that loan out of my commissions since there was no actual salary involved. They were sure I’d be able to pay them back after selling only 20 or 30 policies. I was sure I was going to tell them where to shove their certification.

On January 28th, I started cleaning out an antique file cabinet that stood in for an end table. It was full of papers collected over the course of years of schooling (his) and although I certainly didn’t intend to become organized or anything, I was so numb with boredom, I figured that I could, at the very least, make some room to stuff rejection letters and extra copies of my resume.

With the television crackling in the background and the fish swimming merrily in his bowl, I sat on the living room floor surrounded by six years of chemical engineering homework. I have no idea what show was on, but I do remember suddenly hearing the news break in.

I turned and tried to watch through the snow. I got up and fiddled with the aluminum foil (no cable) on the antenna. All I could see was something burning in the sky.

Then I realized. It was the Space Shuttle. The Challenger Explosion. All seven aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, the Teacher in Space – dead – 73 seconds after takeoff.

I sat there the entire rest of the afternoon, transfixed by the images and the news reports, mourning the loss of life. The papers eventually got dumped right back into the file cabinet; unsorted they remained.

—- I got a job the next week. But in the year we lived in that townhouse, we never did own a couch. —-

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