Joyce and I found an apartment in Brown’s Addition and I started looking for a job, again. That Thanksgiving Mom was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer so I was spending a lot of time in Sequim helping Pop until she passed away in January of 1990. In a short time we also lost Oscar Bell and Uncle Alva. After I returned to Spokane a position in Customer Service with Northwest Telecommunications became available. I Really thought this was going to be my next retirement job. Soon after starting work, our lease on the apartment was coming up for renewal with a substantial increase in rent. We had been complaining about a noisy young man living above us who had won an insurance case. Management wouldn’t do anything about him so we decided to look for another place and found a duplex on 15th. While living there I was a part time maintenance man for the complex, three duplexes together. Joyce and I had discussed the possibility of purchasing the complex but decided to look around. That’s when we found and bought the house on 29 E. 39th.
It wasn’t too long after moving in that my dream of Northwest Telco being my last job took a turn. LDDS purchased NWT and they started letting people go. I stayed on a while as a customer service representative but their service wasn’t the same as before and I quit. It didn’t take long before Sprint was opening a Cell Phone Store. I interviewed and was hired. During the interview they actually encouraged me to apply for manager but I didn’t feel comfortable, not knowing anything about retail. Sprint sounded like an ideal company. They promised to be very employee and customer oriented. For nine weeks we were flown to Dallas, Texas for classes during the week at the Delta Airlines campus. Then we flew home on weekends. One weekend, I transferred my round trip ticket to Joyce and she flew down. Another weekend I was home from training and Spokane had an ice storm and we lost power to the house. The neighbor’s tree actually lost a limb that pulled the cable from our house. We ended up getting a room at Inn at the Park. I had to fly back to school and Joe stayed with Joyce until electricity was restored to his house. I came home later and arranged to have power reconnected to the house.
When school was completed, I returned home and got the store opened. It was the first Sprint store to open. The only problem working at a retail store was not getting our work schedule for the week until the Friday before. I made a number of suggestions to improve that but they got turned down and the promises they made in the beginning went by the wayside. Sprint needed money so the employee support and customer service suffered. The store had been open about a year and Sprint sold the building. A number of us, the higher paid ones, were let go. I was still in contact with some of the employees working there. One of the women told me of an incident that happened when she was on a business trip with the District Manager and one of the commercial salesmen. I recommended she take it to HR and make a complaint. I was later contacted by an investigator and she eventually won her sexual harassment suit. I did send out more resumes. After most interviews I went on I was usually told I was overqualified for the position. I pretty much gave up. Mike’s family moved in with us and lived in the basement for a while. It was pretty fun since we had the kids visiting upstairs quite often.
I started getting into meditation. The leader of the group I was with was a Native American. It was an interesting group. One of the participants claimed to be able to read past lives and it turned out I had been an Indian horse trader and she had been my daughter. Another interesting episode took place when our leader brought her Peruvian Whistles to a gathering. We formed a circle where the whistles were placed in middle and, if you got the urge, you picked one up and blew into it. Soon you could hear music and singing and weird things and visions started happening. Our leader taught Reiki and I eventually took classes and got my certificate. As I was thinking about opening a Reiki business, I learned you have to be a nurse, a licensed massage therapist or a minister to touch someone. Taking a weekend online test to be a minister didn’t appeal to me so I decided to become a massage therapist. I signed up at Noetic School of Massage.
In order to start classes you had to have a massage so I received my first massage at age 63. I really enjoyed taking the classes and working with the other students. One of our classes was a trip to WSU where we studied cadavers. Another was to EWU where we offered free massages to students. On the way back from Cheney, one of the massage tables blew out of the back of our instructor’s pickup. Another car of students and I stopped. It was very dark and as one of the students was going to step into the middle of the road to get the table I pulled her back just as an eighteen wheeler came along and hit the table. There was nothing to pick up after that. Close to graduation we went out to a local ranch for a weekend. One of the students was an Iroquois Indian from Canada. We had a bonfire ceremony and she gave everyone an Indian name. Mine was Brave Buffalo, Ohitika-Tantanka. After graduation I set up an office at home and at a local tanning salon, Stone Shadow Massage. I wanted to have more time available for my clients. A woman I had met, Jenny Ray, was giving a class on hot stone massage up in Canada and I signed up. She is Native American, Sioux, and started each day outside with a stone pipe ceremony to the four directions and then singing and drumming indoors. The class lasted two weekends and at the end she had a naming ceremony and gave me Sacred Buffalo, Wakan-Tantanka. Since I was given two names I can combine them, Brave-Sacred-Buffalo, or, Ohitika-a’-Wakan-Tantanka. After I had been doing massage a few months I injured my rotator cuff and had to have surgery. During the surgery nerves were injured in my right arm and I ended up shutting down my massage office.
Around 2004, Mike and the kids moved back in to the basement. It was fun having them back in the house again. Then around 2006, I ended up in the hospital with walking pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer. Pop met his new girl friend, Thelma, when he was attending an annual trucking company BBQ in Anacortes. Thelma was from Houston, Texas and Pop drove down in his motorhome to be with her. She didn’t like motorhomes so Pop sold it down there. A few weeks later, there was a knock on our front door and it was Pop. He’d had an argument with Thelma and moved out. We set him up in the front bedroom. A couple of months later, he took off back to Houston. He spent a couple of months there and came back to Spokane. We shifted things around again. After a few calls from Thelma and her daughter, he returned to Houston again. A couple times I tried to convince him to get a motel and stay in Houston for a few days instead of moving back up. His excuse, “You can’t argue with those damn Texans!” I’m not sure how many times he disrupted our lives moving in and out. When he came back the last time we told him he had to find another place to live. He and I found a retirement home about a mile from our house. He wanted a motorized two wheel scooter that you stand on to move around the retirement home but they said no. I went on line and found him a three wheeler that he really liked. He lived there for about three months or so and then asked if he could move back in with us. We relented.
Life slowed down. Pop didn’t like to travel very far because he didn’t feel comfortable being far from a bathroom. Joyce and I were able to take a few trips but didn’t make any extended ones. Pop really wanted to take a cruise and we had purchased an Alaska cruise for the three of us. For some reason Pop changed his mind. It was a good thing I had purchased trip insurance. Another time, he and I were going to take a trip down to California, Nevada, and circle back up to Washington but he backed out. Around June or July of 2011, Mike and Nadine purchased the hotel in Kendrick. Their place gave us a great destination to visit away from Spokane. After Halloween that year we set up a bedroom in what we called the white room. Later, when the apartment they had been renting out became available, we bought it. We moved some furniture down and made up the bedroom for Pop. Joyce and I set the up the living room as our bedroom. We used the apartment as our home away from home. In 2012, we decided to sell the house in Spokane. We moved Pop out and down to the apartment to make the house more appealing to potential buyers. Joyce and I were still up in Spokane, splitting time between Kendrick and traveling. Mike thought they could keep a better eye on Grandpa, so they built an extra room in their place and moved him in with them. Pop mentioned wanting his name on some property. The Gazette came up for sale so he bought that. We intended to remodel the inside for us all. In 2013 the house in Spokane sold.
Joyce and I, with the help of Mike, the boys and Tim, moved down to the Kendrick apartment. We rearranged things to make it more livable for the two of us. All we had accumulated for twenty years living in the house didn’t fit in the apartment so we stored it in the Gazette. Pop and I tried to continue our weekly trips to the casino but as time went by it became harder and harder for him and we finally quit. In 2014, while Joyce and I were in California, Pop passed away. Mike and Nadine took care of the arrangements before we returned home. Later we had a memorial for him in Lacey. Pop’s ashes are resting on a bookcase in the apartment.
