Barbra and I would go spend the weekends at my dad's house just to get away from the awfulness that was always going down in the apartment. One afternoon we returned to find that the record store where I was employed had burned to the ground. I don't know if I mentioned it but our apartment was directly across the street south of the store. The owner/manager, Stan B. lived across the street to the east of us, so he wasn't too far from the store, either. I remember going to his house to ask what had happened. He said he didn't know what had started the fire. Maybe electrical wires or something. It wasn't hard to believe, in the months and years to come, that he had deliberately started the fire. First off, the building we were in used to be a grocery store and there was far more room than we needed. Second, his brother was a record distributor and Stan got all his product from him, likely at a deep discount. Third, when the insurance money came through he was able to build a new shop that was perfect for what he needed it to be. I guess that's only natural, but to go from an old grocery store to a spare section of a lot in a bad location to a record store to be envied by all was a little suspicious. I don't know, though. That's what a lot of people thought happened. He was always pretty nice to me. Not that he was a very personable, "nice" kind of fella, but he seemed to like me. He was a Vietnam veteran with a wife and a young son. He had a daughter on the way before I was "fired". That's another story, I'm sure I'll get to it later.
Anyway, the store burned down and within a couple of weeks we had moved operations to another location across the city. Which kind of sucked because I kind of liked only having to walk about 100 feet to get to work. No matter...we had to get out of that apartment. Through some string pulling by the Methodist church minister we were able to get a house sort of out in the country. Way too much land, there was no way I could have kept it mowed and maintained. The house itself was too big. There were at least a couple of whole rooms that were empty because we had nothing to put in them. There are really only two things I remember about living in that huge house...one, I won't forget walking into the living room and seeing the news on television, saying the Keith Green and two of his four children had been killed in an airplane crash. Keith Green was a contemporary Christian artist/performer who I looked up to. Not that he was just a musician...he had organized a ministry in Texas that we kept up with...would have given money if we'd ever had enough than more to eat on...We had even discussed the possibility of moving to Texas and becoming involved on a full time basis. It really shook me up to learn of his death.
The second permanent memory of that big house is of making love to Barbra on a blanket spread outside behind the house. Never before, never again.
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