On The Cheap

 

     When Linda and I were first married we didn't have much money, buy the time we bought groceries and put gas in the tank we were about broke, you might say we lived on love. When we wanted to relax we had to look at things that didn't cost a lot of money. It's true things didn't cost as much back then but based on our pay we often had to pinch pennies.

     We could go to the drive-in for fifty cents and buy drinks and popcorn for less than a dollar and fill up the tank on the car for another two or three dollars. Sounds good ? consider that I only made $49 every two weeks and Linda made another $50 every week, our car payment was $50, rent was $100 plus insurance, maintenance, clothes and so on and so forth. So, we found and did things that didn't cost much money.

     Take for instance, when we were stationed in San Diego, I would stand extra watches at night for some of the single guys who liked to go to town, they would pay me $5 and I would loan our car to them but they had to bring it back clean and full of gas. We would double with another couple and go to the drive-in, it cost $1 per car load, to cut cost we would pop a grocery bag full of popcorn and buy four quart size bottles of coke for another $1 at the grocery store. Balboa Park and zoo was free and we often doubled with another couple.

     Several single guys rented a place on the beach and invited us over one night for a Grunion hunt. At that time I had never heard of a Grunion and had no idea what it was but I soon got an education. Turns out that Grunion are small fish maybe five inches long, when the spawn they do it out of the ocean and usually on a moonlit night. The grunion would come to the beach riding a wave, as the wave receded they quickly bury half their bodies tail first in the sand to lay their eggs. They would go back out to sea with the next wave having deposited their eggs and somehow fertilized them.

     Hunting Grunions was a popular thing to do, the beaches would be crowded with people running around barefoot carrying buckets. The waves would be colored silver there were that many fish coming in on each wave and all you had to do was pick them up by the handful. I remember that the air was cool and the water was cooler but the fun we had was worth it. Once we had a supply of the little fish we went inside and broke out a frying pan and cold beers, some sort of oil or maybe lard was heated in the pan and then the fish were dropped in the pan "as is", no de-scaling or gutting of any kind was needed. Just fry them little suckers until they were crisp like french fries and then pop them in your mouth and chew, catsup was optional.

     We both had aunts and uncles living in Los Angles and we would spend the weekend with them on occasion, all it cost was gas. We started out when we went up to hock Linda's stereo because we were short of money, we would get $50 for it then Linda would pinch pennies to get it back. We did this a couple of times until Linda's uncle found out and chewed us out, he would lend us money if we needed it. For both of us they were family that we rarely saw growing up and we enjoyed our time with them.

     Each time I returned from Vietnam we would get free family passes from Disneyland , we would go spend the weekend with Linda's uncle and aunt. They had a young son named Bobby that was about eight or nine and passed for our kid so we would take him with us. When I was discharged we spent the weekend with our aunts and uncles saying goodbye, it would be the last time we saw Linda's aunt and uncle as they passed away several years later, we never saw Bobby again although he did , for awhile, keep up with a couple of her cousins but nobody has heard of him for years.

     At my advanced age I look back on those days and wonder where the time has gone, we had a good life and I'm filled with the memories of it.

     

The Christmas Tree

 

     When I went to Vietnam in November of 1967, Linda and I had been married for five months. Linda decided that she would like to stay with my family while I was away, little did she know of the life style changes she would uncover. For instance, instead of having just two sisters she gained three brothers and one sister who were all strangers to her.

     One of the first life changes she had was Christmas of 1967. Mom broke out the Christmas decorations and Linda was surprised to come home to find a Christmas tree with leaves made of a shiny aluminum, it had a rotating color light wheel that sat on the floor aimed up at the tree. The light wheel would rotate changing the color of the tree from red to green to yellow, the only decorations were shiny crystal red balls hanging from the limbs. This was not a Christmas Linda was used too, she grew up with a live green tree decorated with bright colored ornaments, strings of garland, strands of blinking lights and doused with silver tinsels that resembled ice cycles and topped off with a star on top. Mom's tree was nothing like Linda's idea of Christmas.

     Linda could not believe her eyes when she saw mom's tree, all of a sudden she realized she was far from home. I don't know the exact details but Linda went out and bought the best artificial tree she could find, it looked like a real spruce tree, it was green and stood about seven feet tall. Christmas in the Riggan household in 1967 was different but it was a Christmas more like the ones she grew up with and actually so did I and my siblings, I don't know what my mother was thinking when she bought that tinsel tree.

     I came home in the spring and we went to San Diego for a few months before I went back to Vietnam. 1968 was the second Christmas I spent in a foreign land, Linda had gone back to Florida until I came home again in the spring of 1969. 

     For many years afterwards we celebrated Christmas with the tree Linda had bought in 1967. We lived in rentals for the first three years and put up our tree but every Christmas Eve we celebrated ,with my family. Mom went back to her chrome tree with the rotating light but we always came home to a green tree covered in bright decorations. 

     In the early 1970's we bought our first house in an older section of East Nashville, it 35 years old then and miraculously it still stands today. I expanded the house by opening up the old garage and breezeway. I replaced the garage door with a large picture window that was made up with 72 individual panes of glass and come Christmas we put up Linda's tree and decorated it. We had the usual colored crystal balls, garland and tinsel but I wanted it to stand out so I added more lights. Actually, I added a lot of lights, I had 400 hundred lights on the tree, it was really bright both inside the house and outside, we were the talk of the neighborhood, I wouldn't be surprised if it could be seen from space.

     Linda's tree became a part of the family traditions. In 1978 we left Tennessee, the next twenty years found us moving all across the country from Tennessee to Florida to California to Georgia to Kansas to Georgia to California and back to Georgia. Linda's tree brightened all of our Christmases until the early 2000's, by then it was showing it's age. The boys were young men now and leaving home, Christmas just wasn't the same anymore, I don't remember when we retired her tree, sometime about 2005 I think. It was replaced with a smaller ceramic tree Linda had made back in the 1970's, it stood about 20 inches tall, it was not as bright, it was a sign of us slowing down.

     I have become accustomed to the meager Christmas, Linda and I would celebrate with the boy's but without all the fanfare of decorations, we had arrived at the point where we understood that Christmas was for young children and ours were no longer young. Danny followed in our footsteps and didn't settled in to having kids until in his thirties and as it turned out Linda only got to spend two Christmases with her granddaughter. 

     Kay and I have a rather spartan Christmas, we don't put up a tree, decorating for Christmas consist of a centerpiece on the table, cards and stockings on the mantle and a wreath on the door. We have a family gathering at Vicki's house and I go to watch the kids open their presents on Christmas morning then Kay and I go to a family gathering with her family. The grandkids are getting older and in a few years probably won't want to hang around with old people but then maybe they will.

     Every now and then something will jog my memory of long ago Christmases which is what caused me write this story. I'm grateful we have memories, they are the history books of our life and every day we write another page.