My enlistment in the military ended in early February of this year. I had been having an affair with a lance corporal named John Patrick McMenemy. He was an Irishman who had come from Rochester, New York. He was both charming and stupid. When my enlistment neared an end, I was offered enticements to re-enlist. The best offer was promotion to Staff Sargeant, with a bonus of $5000 cash. If I did not want that, I was also offered a civilian job, a GS-13 level position as a computer operations supervisor. I refused all the offers, as I longed to be free from a military contract. I wanted to return to civilian life with no employment that involved a contract. I had come to see that a contract was a form of enslavement. It meant that I was owned by the employer who contracted with me. The contract controlled me absolutely; freedom was sold for the income.
After my discharge, I flew to Hawaii, where John Patrick was now assigned. He and I got together at the hotel room I was renting. We slept together, savoring each other. He had lost rank, having been busted for fighting. This was the beginning of the end of the relationship, as I learned he was a complete fool drowning in his own stupidity. He was hot tempered. He proposed a plan to me: that we would get married and he would start a college program in marine biology. It was a degree program that would take many years. I saw the future too well: years of supporting him through college, then he would drift away with some twenty year old. No thank you! I left the hotel without letting him know I was going, and flew back to California. I did not know it but I was pregnant, and got nauseous on the flight. I went to live with my Aunt Marie, my mother's younger sister, in Anaheim. She had a Greek husband, John Kazes. He owned a saw / blade sharpening business in Stanton. He was old world, straight from Greece and spoke Greek. They attended Greek Orthodox church meetings and Greek festivals. My aunt cooked delicious Greek food and they taught me a few words of Greek, mostly food words. I learned to cook dishes with lamb and Greek style seasonings. One day as I was talking to her husband, my uncle John came out of the bathrrom where he had been shaving, and pushed me back on the bed and french-kissed me, with his tongue in my mouth. I was surprised and he suddenly got off me and stood up, saying “don't say anything”. That evening at dinner, sitting across the table from him, I looked at him, stared at him. He got angry and said “Don't give me that look !” I never told my aunt about this. Some years later, she divorced him and then in time met a man named Bob Rhodes and married him. Bob was a very negative man, always finding fault with anything anyone said, no matter what it was. He loved to gamble, and they wound up living in Reno where they spent much of their time in the casinos. He died, then she went to Florida to Panama City to live. She lived there for some years before sucumbing to the deterioration of old age and passing away. I never saw her from the time they were living in Nevada till her death.
At any rate, getting back to 1970: I went to work for State Farm Insurance Agency in Santa Ana, where I was a keydata entry operator, typing in data cards all day long. The machine was like a typewriter that cut holes in data cards so that they could be fed into mainframe computers for processing information. I was part of a clerical pool of all women. They were mostly housewives who were in their twenties. One of them, whom I came to call (not in her presence, of course) the “American Beauty Rose”, wanted nothing more than to have a baby. Every day the conversation among these women was about children and babies. The American Beauty Rose talked constantly about the many ways she was trying to increase the odds of getting pregnant: she had sex in the shower, sex at optimal ovulation times, sex in the morning, afternoon and at midnight. It got to be so boring, this preoccupation with pregnancy and children. The entire group had nothing more to talk about: not world affairs or art or science or good books, but just children, babies and trying to have babies. God ! I was in the company of mindless breeders.
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