A Love Story continued ...

That first morning (our first in our home) we realized a major difference that we had not talked about, or even thought about, before we got married. You see the alarm clock was on my side of the bed and …there are a couple of things you need to realize about our trailer. We had a full size bed (not queen or king) in the bedroom. It was against a wall at the head and on one side of the mattress. At the foot of the bed was our closet and built in drawers. You had to be on the bed to get into the closet or open the drawers. Therefore, there was only one open side to the bed. That was the side I slept on, (I still sleep on that side 35+ years later) I don’t know exactly how we settle on which side of the bed we would sleep on, but it must have worked. Since my side had the only opening the alarm clock was on my side. We were using the one I had in dorm. So I set it was we went to bed that first night in our home. You need to understand that at that point in my life I needed loud noises to wake up. In fact in the dorm I had to put my alarm clock out of my reach so I had to get out of bed to turn it off. If I could reach it from bed I would smack it off and go right back to sleep. I didn’t use the radio option because that never woke me up, I used the alarm setting. On my clock that sounded a lot like a fog horn and I turned it up all the way.

This was not something Jody and I had ever talked about before we got married (I often bring it up in pre-marital counseling now). So the next morning when the alarm went off I didn’t budge at first (remember my side of the bed was the only open side), Jody however flew up, bounced off the wall landed on the open side and shut off the alarm. I began to arouse about then and heard her muttering about how loud the alarm was and I commented that I hadn’t heard it. I got ready and headed to work. That evening we had our first meal together as husband and wife in our own home. As we went to bed that night, Jody said she had already set the alarm. We went to sleep and the next morning I began to wake up, I opened one eyelid just far enough to look at the alarm clock, as I focused on the time I flew out of bed yelling that I had overslept and that commenting that the alarm didn’t go off. Jody said that it went off quite a while ago and when I didn’t get up she assumed that I was going into work later that day.

Remember Jody had set the alarm the night before. Her setting was to have the radio come on at a low volume when it was time to get up, that was what she was used doing. I never heard it and certainly didn’t wake up. That night we had a discussion about how the alarm clock needed to be set and how we could come to some compromise since we were miles apart on this issue. We got it worked out. Today we each have an alarm clock, since we now have a bedroom that is bigger than the size of the bed. We still do not wake the same way, but she doesn’t bounce off the wall anymore and I don’t sleep through the alarm.

This was the first of many issues that we had to work out in living together as husband and wife. It was really minor by comparison to many other things, but it set the tone that we had to work things out and remember that we were no longer living just for ourselves. Some of the first things we had to work out had to do with just living in our trailer. Our trailer had some unique things about it to put it mildly. Such as …