The second house that Ms. Boss and I bought as a couple was a house that we ‘moved’ from a lot about two miles away to a piece of property we owned. It wasn’t a mobile home or a manufactured home, it was a regular home like you’d find in any subdivision that was put on a couple of steel beams and moved to our newly-poured foundation. When they poured the foundation wall, I told them to make it two and a half feet high. Knowing that my father-in-law, brother-in-law, and I would have to crawl under the house to plumb it, I asked for plenty of space and they poured the walls just I like I asked. Moving day came on a day I had to work, so I wasn’t there when they tried to put the house on the foundation. It turns out the beams would only go so high, and they had to make a raised path of dirt right down the middle – a path they couldn’t remove once the house was in place. Unfortunately, right down the middle is where the sewer line needed to hang from the bottom of the house making it necessary to crawl through a space significantly less than two and a half feet to get to most of the important parts of the house. On my first attempt to get over to where my father-in-law was to help him out, I found this out the hard way. I got stuck… and I panicked. It took me awhile to wriggle myself free. I don’t know that I ever crawled over to the north side of the house again. It cost me more than a few dollars and favors to get things done down there until we moved.
Our driveway at the same house was almost three quarters of a mile long. The first hundred yard were paved, but from there on, the gravel on the drive got thinner and thinner until there was nothing. While we had a four wheel drive Suburban to navigate this drive most times, it wasn’t always up to the task. One particular winter, the temperature yoyo’d for days, above freezing during the day, well-below freezing at night. It turned what was normally a fairly solid piece of our driveway into an absolute quagmire. I buried that Suburban up to the axles bringing the family home one afternoon. After getting the family out and walking them successfully home, I started digging. About an hour later, I got it unstuck and drove up the hill. For the next two weeks, we parked on the far side of the muddy spot and walked a quarter mile in. The next morning, I’d wake up, walk to the Suburban, drive it up to the house on frozen ground that was as good as pavement, take the girls to school, and drive back home. By the time we got back home, it was a impassable quagmire again. Nothing brings your attention to the weather forecast like a long, dirt driveway.
One weekend at the same house, our youngest Bosslet, less than a year old at the time, started acting like she was under the weather. Ms. Boss took the twins to church an hour away in the Suburban leaving our eldest, our youngest, and myself at home. No big deal, right? Wrong. Once they were an hour away with their phones off in church, the youngest Bosslet had a seizure, something I’ve never seen before in my life. The one thing I knew I needed to do was get her to the hospital. The one thing I knew I had no way of doing was getting her to the hospital. While I had a car parked at the house, it was a two-wheel drive and parked on the wrong side of the muddy spot due to piss poor planning. I called 9-1-1, scooped up my youngest, told my eldest to follow me, and started hiking. I got about a third of the way down the driveway when I slipped and fell in a spot we called ‘the Big Crossing’. I sat there for five seconds, covered in mud from head to toe, and said a single word, almost under my breath – ‘help’. I don’t know who I expected to hear me and I don’t know why I said it at all, but asking for help from anyone or anything has never been something that was easy for me. I picked myself up, I picked my youngest up, and I started hiking again. It must have been some sort of sight for the ambulance, who arrived just as I got to the end of the driveway, seeing some fat guy covered in mud from head to toe carrying a baby in his arms. I swore I would never be trapped like that or in that bad of shape where I couldn’t rise to the challenge ever again. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to forget promises like this you make to yourself.
I worked midnights for the better part of the first twelve years that I worked in public safety. There were times, especially when I worked five days a week, that I felt like I would never have a normal life. It seemed like I was doomed to miserable on the days that I worked or the days that I was off. Fortunately, I eventually found my ‘midnight tribe’ – a group that had the same strange schedule that I did. I certainly helped to hang out with a group of people who didn’t think that being up at 3:00 in the morning on a Tuesday was a strange thing.
The early years of the Boss Family were some pretty lean times. We had twins shortly after we were married and decided to move closer to family. No sooner had we established ourselves in our new location, our youngest came along. Working for Ms. Boss was out of the question as child care would have swallowed her income. I changed careers to make the move and was working a job an hour away at less pay than I was before. To generate some extra income, I worked a second job on nights and weekend. Monday though Friday was a one hour commute, eight and a half hours of work, one hour home. Saturday days were completely devoted to church. Saturday nights were an eight hour shift at my second job. Sundays were devoted to any work that needed to be done around the house. Our weekly food budget for six was $75. I applied for a supervisory job in the middle of all of this, only to be told that I was not what they were looking for. I can remember sitting there at times thinking “is this it? Is this all that there is? Is this what the rest of what my life will look like?” I’m happy to report today that the answer is “no”.
