Shorts

  Some stuff has happened to me that needs a mention without a whole blog for its own, so here are a few short items from Ft. Worth in no particular order.
  One warm summer day, Kare and I were invited to go to a wedding that was in a park in Arlington.  We got there and found that the bride and groom wanted to get married nude.  So, they went behind some bushes and got married.  The bride's father didn't like the idea of his daughter getting naked, so he stormed out.  He went to his car to leave, and his fan belt broke, which left him stranded.
 I saw an ad in a magazine for people interested in participating in a study on their sex lives.  I answered the ad, and they sent me a questionnaire and survey on the topic.  I answered the questions truthfully, and it ended up in a book called "The Hite Report on Male Sexuality" by Shere Hite.  Thankfully, they didn't include my name.
  I had to rent a car to go out of town.  I got a Mustang.  I was driving back home on the interstate at night. All the cars coming toward me flashed their lights at me.  I realized I had on my brights,  but I couldn't find the thing to push with your foot to dim the lights.  It wasn't until I got home that I found the dimmer on the steering column.  Boy, did I feel stupid.
 One of the nice places in Ft. Worth was the water park downtown.  Water cascading over rocks and concrete slabs.  I went there a lot as a means to relieve stress.  I wrote a lot of poems there.  About a year after I left, "Logan's Run" was filmed in the Ft. Worth area, and they used that water park as part of their movie. 
  One Saturday, I went to a mall near Carswell Air Force Base.  Next to the mall was a big hill which overlooked the base.  I got to watch F-15's take off and land.  The Secretary of Defense was there to watch the planes take their trial runs.  It was cool.
  One thing about Fort Worth is that it is not pronounced the way it looks.  It is pronounced "Foat Wuth".  We sold these t-shirts that said "Foat Wuth, Ah Luv Yew".  They were big sellers.  I still have mine.
  I worked with an older woman at Sanger Harris named Gert Weisberg.  Her son was a professional bowler.  Gert wanted to read some of my poetry, so I picked out a few for her.  She came back the next day and told me I was "deep".  I wonder what she thought of me before reading them.  Shallow?
  We sold these nut bars in our Candy Department.  A shipment came in with bugs inside the bars.  The bars were enclosed in clear plastic, so the bugs had to have gotten into the bars at the factory.  It was like looking at tiny ant farms.  We called the vendor, but they said it was impossible for the bugs to have gotten in the packages.  It was all very gross.  The vendor wouldn't take them back, so they were all destroyed.  Several cases of these bug farms.
  I was leaving work early one night, and it was raining very hard.  The roads started to flood.  My car started to float down the road.  I got the car off of that road and cut through some residential streets to get home.  Normally, it would take me 20 minutes to get home.  That night, it took 45 minutes.  I got home and called the store to tell my co-workers to be careful going home.  I asked them the next day about it, and they told me that the rain had stopped when they left work, and all they saw was some mud on the roads.  It just goes to show that if you don't like the weather, wait a minute and it will change.
  I got a couple of days off at Christmas in 1978 and flew home to Columbia.  The flight was uneventful until we got to Columbia.  The pilot overshot the runway and landed halfway down the runway.  He jammed on the brakes.  When we got to the gate, the passengers applauded.  We weren't applauding the pilot.  We were applauding that we were still alive.