Chapter 2: Retirement #1

CHAPTER 2: RETIREMENT #1

Growing up the idea of retiring early was a dream. I can't even remember now what I was dreaming of retiring from. I suppose it was the almost delirious delight that I felt before summer vacation. By the beginning of August I was ready for school to start again, but towards the end of May that anticipation of the first day of holiday with seemingly endless days of being in charge of most of what I wanted to do was delicious. I set an early goal in life to retire by the time I was thirty

In June of 1982 I was twenty nine. I had recently finished the most ethically challenging teaching experience of my career as a sixth grade classroom teacher at Mary Star of the Sea in Freeport, Bahamas. The school's preferred method of discipline was corporal punishment. This was something I did not personally approve of or had I ever worked in a school where it was acceptable. I fought sending students to the office where they would "be beaten" or resorting myself to the more common classroom practice of the belt.

In the small south Mississippi town where I grew-up, corporal punishment was normal. I didn't escape middle school without getting a couple licks. Most of the teachers had some sort of paddle displayed to discourage misbehavior. A middle school science teacher had a couple of belts he kept handy. If he finished a lesson early he would pick a couple of boys. The boys would grab each others' left hand and with a belt in their right hand they would attempt to get the best of their opponent in a belt fight. This much loved teacher went on to become superintendent of education for Pearl River County. My cultural past did not make corporal punishment foreign to me, but my experiences led me to the strong impression that asides from being cruel, it was ineffective. Disruptive students would compete to see who could get the most 'licks'. Cooperative students rarely needed more than a verbal warning, and there were many more constructive ways to direct and change behavior. 

When I was interviewed over the phone for the job, the first question the principal asked was, "How are you on discipline?"

This should have been a clue. I had a system where misbehaving students outlined a topic in the encyclopedia for rule infractions. If they built up too many outlines, I contacted parents to arrange for the child to stay after-school. In the five years I had taught before coming to Mary Star, I could could count on one hand the number of times I had called parents about a discipline problem. Within two weeks of being at Mary Star I had several students staying after school every day. 

There were two sixth grade classrooms in the school. The kids were streamed based on reading level and behavior. In my class were thirty two kids who either read at least a couple years below grade level and/or were often disruptive in class. I had many more than one parent tell me to just "beat" the child if they were bad, but I trudged on. The beautiful Bahamian sky and water would be calling, and I would be spending an extra hour helping the recalcitrant reduce their outlining debt five days a week. This went on for months.

It was the week before Christmas break. One of my most frequent visitors to afternoon detention was once again spending a Friday afternoon with me. As we were walking back into the classroom after dismissal, Ryan said to me, "Mr. Crosby, why don't you just beat me, mon? If you keep me, when I get home my parents are going to beat me. Why don't you just beat me, and we both go home?"

There seemed a lot of wisdom in Ryan's words. He took a lick from the belt for each outline he owed, and we both happily rode our bikes to our respective homes. On Monday a new system was announced. Students could choose to stay after or take a lick from the belt for excessive outlines. Rarely did anyone choose to stay. 

As the end of school approached, I broke my two year contract and let administration know I was not returning. With my 30th birthday four months away, I retired.

My great grandfather, Colonel L.O. Crosby, was rumored to have started his fortune by traveling to Mississippi from South Carolina to sell coffins during a yellow fever epidemic. His efforts were advanced by his three sons and their offspring. By my generation there were lots of cousins. Stock in what was at the time Crosby Chemicals gave me a monthly pre-tax income of about one thousand dollars a month in years that had good timber harvests. I had one hundred thousand dollars in a cd at interest around fifteen percent  This gave me close to two thousand dollars a month after taxes. 

The US government would tax my foreign income unless I was in the USA no more than thirty days in a year, so after leaving Mary Star I planned to travel through South America. My first stop was Ecuador. I had taught fourth grade in Guayaquil two years before and still had friends there. One of those friends, John Wallace, was importing hats, textiles, and handicrafts to the USA. He persuaded me to give it a go. I had already spent a couple seasons in the French Quarter farmers market selling handicrafts between Thanksgiving and Christmas. My retirement plan included continuing my fledgling handicraft business. 

My vision for a perfect retirement involved spending Mardi Gras through Jazz Fest in New Orleans. In 1978 I had been married for a year to my first wife. We bought a shotgun house in uptown New Orleans close to Audubon Park for fifty three thousand dollars. The house was built in 1890 and had a shed that had been a stable. The shed had a dirt floor. 

Our marriage was on shaky ground before buying the house. Our first apartment had a very noisy and aggressive neighbor. He was forming a band. They practiced loudly a couple nights a week. We thought owning a house might help us fix our unpreparedness to be married, but our problem was not where we lived. We divorced without resolving community property. We rented out the house to friends. I fixed up the shed, running electricity and water off the main house and put in some flooring. It was a free place to live in New Orleans.

After Jazz Fest my perfect retirement vision saw me enjoying the cool weather and the cheap living in Ecuador and occasionally shopping for handicrafts. There were a few months to fill in. The dream had considerable flexibility for these months. Options included lounging on  Caribbean islands in winter and roaming Andean countries in summer as finances allowed. I had confidence that two thousand dollars a month along with the handicraft business and occasional substitute teaching would support my retirement. The big worry for most retirees, do I have enough money for retirement, I had sussed.

I gathered my courage to let the strict head of school, Geneva Majors, know I was breaking contract and not returning to Mary Star for a second year. I had a little trepidation that she might take her paddle to me. (She was not an unattractive woman, so the thought was not entirely unpleasant.)  She wished me well and wrote me a wonderful letter of recommendation. I bought a new belt, and the summer vacation to last the rest of my life began. 

Tony, my housemate in The Bahamas, and I were spending a leisurely morning surveying the Lucayan beach from our hammocks. I had been housesitting a six bedroom mansion on the beach since soon after arriving in Freeport. The real estate agent who managed the property put other tenants in a wing of the mansion. Tony had been there for several months. He was working illegally blowing glass for someone who owned a few tourist shops. Previously he had worked as a carnie. He told me he was the guy who sat on the platform over a tank of water and yelled at people to try to get them to pay to throw softballs and dunk him. He then let out this laugh that grated at my very soul. He smiled, sipped his beer, and said, "That laugh always got them to pay another dollar when they missed."

 

We were talking about the fun we had had in that house when I saw another teacher from Mary Star walking by with two other women. I called out a greeting Tony and I had been perfecting to encourage females to leave the beach and wander into our garden, "Piña Colada!"

Jill, my colleague from Mary Star, stared toward where the call had originated. I heard her say to her companions, "I think I know that guy."

They all waved and came up for morning piña coladas. Introductions were made. When I was introduced to the woman who would become wife number two it felt like the hair on the back of my neck stood up. She was blond, freckled, and shapely. I hope that is a nice way to put the attractiveness of a woman who would become the mother of two of my children. Jill's other friend was tall, dark, and also shapely. They were both teachers who had previously worked at Mary Star and were on vacation.

We had piña coladas and talked about teaching and what Tony did. He gave them a tour of the garage where he had his glass blowing workshop. Wife number two was teaching first grade in Brazil. Jill's other friend taught middle school science in Jupiter, Florida. We all eagerly agreed to meet at a bar in Lucaya later that evening. Over the next week we saw each other often. When I left the Bahamas, I had another stop on my trip through South America, São Paulo, Brazil.

With Wally, a friend from New Orleans, I set off on my trip through South America. We flew to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. In 1982 this was not the crime ridden town it would become by the time I worked in Honduras twenty-seven years later. A couple days there and we were ready to move south. Nicaragua was in the first years of the Contra War against the Sandinista government. We flew over Nicaragua to San Jose, Costa Rica. Our goal was to find a beach populated with beautiful adventurous European women. With little preparation or information about where we were going, we took a bus to Puerto Limón on the Caribbean coast. It had a beautiful beach populated by parrots and mosquitoes. There wasn't a beautiful woman of any nationality within miles of the beach. There was just me and Wally.      

Around the town were signs for a disco. We adjusted our goal. Now we were searching for beautiful Coast Rican women. On the night of the disco we strolled over to the venue which was a wooden shell of a building resembling a large storage shed. The music pulsing from inside was just a little louder than the generator that was making the event possible. Wally and I surveyed the people entering. There was a five dollar cover charge. We were on a budget. There was no place to use a credit card and no ATMs. Our limited supply of traveler's checks was all we had for the indefinite period of our trip, and eventually we would want to buy a ticket home.

For over an hour we watched who entered. We assessed the attractiveness and availability of the single women entering. Did they show any interest in the gringos hanging out across the dirt road from the entrance? Finally we gave in. A couple of possibilities had entered after giving us coy smiles. We paid the five dollars and squinted as we entered the dimly lit disco. A table in the back had beers for two dollars which was twice the price outside the "club", but we bought two. Within a minute of buying the beers the generator broke. The hall was plunged into complete darkness and the sounds of peoples' disappointment as they shuffled to the door mixed with the ringing that remained even after the music stopped . Our pleas to get our five dollars back were wasted energy. Ultimately we laughed at the possibility that the  whole thing had been staged to get fourteen dollars from the two gringos in town.

The next day we were on a train that took us along the Caribbean coast to Panama. At the border all the passengers were taken to a wooden shack where blood was taken. We waited about two hours while the blood was analyzed to see what diseases we might be carrying. We were assessed clean and the train ride continued into Panama. It stopped where we could catch a ferry to Bocas del Toro. The map showed Bocas as an island in the Caribbean. Here we were sure we would find the beautiful European women lounging topless on the beach.

The boat unloaded at the port,  and we walked a couple miles into town. Within seconds of entering the town we realized we were not going to find what we were looking for. The main street in town was lined with duty free stores run by Chinese shopkeepers. The only other street we found led to the port. Within minutes of getting into town we were looking for ways out of town. There was another boat in five days and a flight to Panama City in three days.

We ran back to the port only to see the ferry sailing away. Our next stop was the airport to buy a ticket. Then we wandered back into town. There was a restaurant that had a deck that hung over the water. For the next two days we were constant customers. We bought hooks and fishing line at a duty free shop and spent our time sipping beer and catching and releasing the small fish under the deck.

On our third day in Bocas we were at the airport early. The flight was at sunrise.The plane took off and flew low, hugging the coast. The sun was rising over the turquoise water of the Caribbean to the east and the lush hilly Panamanian coast was to the west. It was stunning, and then the plane turned and flew straight up the Panama Canal before turning for the airport. 

At the airport Wally decided to head back to New Orleans, and I caught a flight to Ecuador. I was planning to spend a month there, send a shipment of handicrafts back to New Orleans, and then travel through Peru & Bolivia to Brazil. After a stop to visit my new friend in São Paulo I was planning to head up the Brazilian coast until it got close to Thanksgiving and then fly back to New Orleans for a month of selling Ecuadorian handicrafts. 

Upon arrival in Quito I headed to El Pub. Gerard, the Austrian owner of the bar, had let me stay upstairs in the past. The bar was a gathering place for the Quito rugby team and a hangout for friends from my previous time in Ecuador. Gerard was a good source of information. I heard about friends who were still in Quito. He let me use the phone. Within an hour I had reconnected with two friends, John, the friend who got me involved in the handicraft business, and Moya.

 

Moya was Canadian and an artist. She was teaching at Colegio Americano in Quito when we met at a teachers' party two years prior. The attraction was electric. She was tall, over 6 feet, with a resemblance to Julia Roberts. I was living with another teacher in Guayaquil when Moya and I met, but destiny and desire would draw us close over the ensuing two years and for decades to come. 

She was renting a room on a roof of an apartment building in Quito when I flew in from Panama. The one room apartment was a kitchen, which consisted of a table, two chairs, bottled gas stovetop, and a small refrigerator, and a mattress on the cement floor. The bathroom was in a small outhouse across the roof.  The shower was a hose. The living area was the entire roof with incredible views of the Andes mountains in every direction.

My plan to spend a month in Ecuador turned to two. We wandered the mountain markets buying sweaters, scarves, tapestries, and shigras. We traveled to the coast to buy straw Christmas ornaments. John would often come along. On one excursion we arrived late in the evening to the small beach village of Crucita. Nothing appeared to be open. We had a bottle of Johnnie Walker with us for this kind of emergency. We strolled down the beach. After getting a fire going we opened the bottle. We sipped whiskey, told stories, laughed, and marveled at how wonderful we considered our lives. A few hours later we fell asleep around the embers. 

The next morning we awoke at sunrise. There was still about a third of the bottle left. We polished that off before sauntering into Crucita. A beachside fish restaurant was just opening. The owner proudly invited us in with promises that he had American music. Ready for a fish and beer main course after our whiskey appetizer we entered.The owner put on his Frank Sinatra cassette.The tape started with Frank telling a joke, "I feel sorry for people who don't drink because when they wake up, that is the best they are going to feel all day."

After a couple months in Ecuador I was living too much in my thoughts about where I was planning to go next and no longer truly appreciating the moment. Moya  urged me to start my journey. We were honest with each other, so she knew of the Bahamian attraction in Brazil. Wisely she seemed to know or sense that she could have asked me to stay and I would have, but my mind would have often drifted to what it assumed it had missed. She traveled with me to the town of Huaquillas on the Peruvian border. We spent what would be our last night together for more than a decade in a hotel that also rented rooms by the hour. The next morning she walked me to the border. I crossed and caught a bus to Lima.

Now, writing this thirty-five years later, Peru and Bolivia are a blur. I can recall a ceviche and pisco sour at an outdoor cafe in Lima, a bar in Huancayo where the Sendero Luminoso tried to recruit me, the train ride and hike up to Macchu Pichu, and watching another gringo chew coca leaves beside Lake Titicaca. From LaPaz I flew across Bolivia until I stopped in Santa Cruz, a town I would oddly end up visiting again before too long. I crossed the border into Brazil and hopped the first flight I could to Sao Paolo. Traveling alone gave me a feeling of emptiness. I thought more about where I was going next than appreciating where I was.

My new friend from the Bahamas had given me her phone number before she left Freeport. She taught me how to say the number in Portuguese, a number I can remember in Portuguese to this day. Soon after landing I was comfortably sharing her townhouse with her and her roommate in a housing development a short downhill walk from the international school where they taught. Within a week of arriving the elementary assistant principal asked me to replace a teacher who had to leave for back surgery. I was teaching full time, but it was temporary. I didn't consider retirement over. The teacher returned from back surgery before Thanksgiving. I flew back to New Orleans with a flight change in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

The holiday season at the market in the French Quarter was fun. You never knew who you would meet or what you might see. One morning, as everyone was setting up, a naked man ran through the market with a dollar bill tied to his penis and a couple of policemen chasing behind him. Sales were good. Enough money was stashed away to finance next summer's trip to Ecuador.

 My Brazilian roommate flew up to spend Christmas with me. We were months past the first mutual speaking of, "I love you". She spent ten glorious days with me in the shed. Before she left I was persuaded to return to Sao Paolo in the spring. I went to my travel agent and found a tour package to Brazil between Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. The tour package was cheaper than any round trip flight the agent could find. I booked it planning to throw away everything except the flights.

Since leaving college I had played rugby for the New Orleans Rugby Club. I had organized two tours for the club previously, one to the Cayman Islands and one to the Bahamas. I began to plan with the team a tour to South America with stops in Bogota and Quito. By New Years there were enough players to make the tour a possibility. I sent letters to people I knew at both teams. Dates were confirmed. Weekly dinners were arranged where we sold beer and collected money from those who needed the discipline of someone else putting money away for them to pay for plane tickets, hotels, ground transportation, and team party funds. By the time I left for Brazil after Mardi Gras the tour organizing machine was working well.

Mardi Gras that year was especially memorable. My sister, Helen, had made me a chicken costume to fit in with a group of friends who were going to Mardi Gras as poultry. I had friends from the Bahamas visiting and we had gotten separated in the Quarter. It was about 8 o'clock at night, and I was wandering home down Bourbon Street when it started to drizzle. People moved out of the street, but it wasn't cold. I was strutting down the middle of the road when I came to The Famous Door. A cop threw a guy to the ground and started beating him with a billy club close to the music club. People rushed from all sides of the street and surrounded the scene. I was carried to the front of the crowd. Everyone was yelling at the cop to stop. More policemen arrived. The police yelled at people to move away. No one moved. The police started grabbing people out of the crowd. Chicken man was handcuffed and put in the paddy wagon.

In the paddy wagon was a waiter from the Royal Sonesta. He had just walked out the hotel door after working all day, seen the yelling crowd, walked over to see what was going on, and was now on his way to jail. He had a gram of cocaine on him. No one had been searched except the guy who had been beaten with the billy club. There were about six of us who had been ripped from our Carnival revelry now sitting forlorn in the paddy wagon. The waiter threw the cocaine under the bench. 

Another guy who had been pulled in asked,"Don't you want that?"

The waiter replied that he didn't know what the guy was talking about, so the guy lay out a line down the middle bench of the paddy wagon and hoovered the whole thing. His Carnival revelry would not end for awhile.

For Mardi Gras the New Orleans police had set-up two temporary holding pens in the garage of central lockup. Both pens were packed. There was room to sit on the cold, and getting colder, cement floor, but you couldn't stretch your legs out. The sight of a  bedraggled soggy chicken man brought a brief moment of hilarity and jeering from my fellow prisoners. It soon died down and the misery of our situation as the night grew colder and colder engulfed us.

Probably somewhere around midnight a squad car pulled in beside our cage. A couple cops got out and pulled a large handcuffed white guy out of the back. One of the cops threw the guy against the cage I was in and said, "Say 'You're an asshole'."

The white guy, who was about half a head taller than the cop, said, "You're an asshole."

The cop slapped him, and said, "Say, 'I'm an asshole'."

The white guy glared at the cop and replied, "You're an asshole."

The cop slapped him again and tried again with the same result.

A black guy with a muscle shirt on and the muscles to go with it stood up in the other cage and spoke to the cop. He and the cop seemed to know each other. The cop knew his name, Sonny. Sonny negotiated, "If you put him in here and I beat the shit out of him will you let me go?"

The cop liked the idea. The white guy lunged at the cage Sonny was in shouting that he would beat the shit out of Sonny. An opinion Sonny vehemently disagreed with. This went on for about a minute. The cop then took the cuffs off and put the white guy in our cage. Things died down.

When I was finally able to make a phone call at about 5 a.m., I found out the charge was "Drunk in Public". On Mardi Gras Day!? In New Orleans!? Bail was one hundred dollars. My brother, who was in law school, represented me at the arraignment. We were going to fight this injustice. All my other paddy wagon friends were at the same arraignment. Fortunately I wasn't first. The first person pleaded not guilty. The judge increased bail and set trial for six months in the future. The next guy pleaded 'no contest' was fined fifty dollars and time served. He got fifty dollars back and he was done. My brother looked at me and whispered, "Plead no contest". Chicken man was free, but had added to his record. Brazil trip and summer rugby tour were still on course.

My Brazil tour package was only for ten days. I flew into Rio, picked up my luggage, and caught a flight to São Paulo. The persuasion skills of my Brazilian lover were considerable. She offered to buy me a return ticket, and I threw away the tour return flight. There was little for me to do in São Paulo, though. I bought some semi-precious stones to add to my handicraft business product line and got all the export paperwork. I picked up the odd day substitute teaching, but mostly I hung around the pool at the housing development and made a half-hearted attempt to learn Portuguese. Jazz Fest was coming, and I felt obligations to make sure the rugby tour was not going sideways. My return flight was booked, and my future second wife and I made plans to meet in Ecuador when her school year ended. We were going to go into the handicraft business together.

At the airport on the day of my flight, we watched as the flight showed delayed. An hour passed with no explanation. Another hour passed, and then officials informed us the incoming flight had landed at the wrong airport. The plane was in Campinas, a three hour bus ride away. The agents for Lloyd Aereo Boliviano were discussing whether to fly the plane to Sao Paolo or bus us to Campinas. An hour later the decision was made. Another hour passed as the bus was arranged. Everyone was assured any connecting flight would wait. Three hours later we were in Campinas.

I had bought about forty gem stones, mostly amethyst and citrines. Each stone was wrapped in a little piece of paper with its carat size and cost. They were in two pockets on each side of my shirt. As I went through a security check to get on the plane, I was patted down. The Brazilian security agent felt the stones. He pulled me out of line and took me to a small room. The flight was leaving in less than thirty minutes. He unwrapped every stone and laid them out on the table. I pulled out the government papers I had permitting export of the stones. The agent was looking for a bribe, and I was not budging. Five minutes before the flight he let me go. I dumped the stones in one pocket and the little slips of paper in the other.

My flight to Miami connected in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. We arrived there over five hours late, but we had been assured connecting flights would wait. When I asked the agent in Santa Cruz where to catch the Miami flight, he said the flight left hours ago. My angry complaints about the promises I had received that the flight would wait were met with laughter. The agent's response was, "For one gringo?"

I asked when was the next flight to Miami. "In three days".

I was back in Santa Cruz with three days to explore the seemingly uninteresting town I had rushed through just months earlier on my way to Brazil. 

After checking into a hotel I went to a Chinese restaurant close by. While waiting for my food, the waitress brought me a note. The note was in Spanish and basically said, "I would like to meet you. This is my phone number."

The only other people in the restaurant were a young couple. I thought the note was from the waitress. I got up and met the waitress as she was coming out of the kitchen. She told me the note was from the woman in the couple. The couple got up and left. As the note writer was leaving she gave me a smile and a wave. A minute later she came back in the restaurant and brought me her business card. She had a beauty salon in town and invited me to come by the next day.

With nothing else to do, I found her beauty salon the next day. She had no customers, so she invited me go to the movies. After the movie we went to a bar run by her family. Her brothers were playing pool. They introduced themselves, shook hands, and gave me knowing smiles and winks. I was beginning to get worried. I tried to escape.

My new friend, Maria, left with me. She wanted me to walk her back to her salon. We walked back through a park where there was a photographer with a Polaroid type camera. She was very enthusiastic and insistent about having our picture taken. What the heck? 

When we arrived back at the salon, she pulled out a photo album. She turned to the last page of photos and carefully inserted our photo. She then showed the album. It was all pictures of her with gringos taken in the same park.

I said, "Good bye". Maria invited me to come back the next day. I chose to avoid that part of Santa Cruz for the rest of my visit.

Eventually I was back in New Orleans for Jazz Fest, gem stone peddling, and final rugby tour planning. I substitute taught some. I had a day teaching a middle school class at a private school where I had worked before taking the job in the Bahamas. One of my former students who was now in sixth grade came by with a friend. My former student, Ben, was a piano player, as I am. He wanted to introduce me to his friend because his friend was a VERY good piano player. His friend was a fellow sixth grader named Harry Connick.

Soon after Jazz Fest the increasing heat and humidity of the rapidly approaching New Orleans summer made life in the shed more and more unpleasant. By early June I was back in Quito waiting for my love from Brazil and the New Orleans rugby team. My girlfriend and I rented an apartment from a teacher at an international school in Quito, Academia Cotopaxi.

In July I flew to Bogota to meet the rugby team. Colombia was not considered a particularly safe country at this time. Kidnapping by militant leftist groups or drug traffickers, who were often the same thing, was not infrequent. Colombian military was very visible and usually very somber and well armed. As I stood watching the New Orleans team come through immigration, I thought this would not end well. The players were handing and throwing Mardi Gras beads to people including the soldiers who lined the passage through customs and immigration control. One of the soldiers turned so I could see his face. He was smiling. I had never seen a Colombian soldier smile before. They were all smiling. The team had the rugby ball stamped into the country and then sang a modest little ditty for the airport. The Bogota Sports Club members took us to their club where they plied us with drink in the much honored tradition of getting the opposition wasted the night before the game.

After Bogota the tour moved to Quito where we played the Quito rugby team and a team that was visiting from the Basque region of Spain. The matches were a couple days apart. There was a party following the matches. The party was in an old colonial stone building. There was no heat in the building, but it wasn't so cold that it was uncomfortable with a heavy Andean sweater.

As the party progressed and beer and Cuba libres were consumed, the singing became more bawdy. The New Orleans team had a skit called the elephant walk. The team members formed a line. The lead person bent over with one arm hanging down like an elephant's trunk and the other arm stretched between his legs. The other people in line would bend over, grab the arm dangling between the legs of the person in front, and extend their other arm between their legs.

Everyone in the elephant walk was completely naked.

After our elephant walk through the party we quickly returned to where we had left our clothes. They were gone. At first there was panic that we had been robbed. Very slowly my girlfriend confessed she had hidden them. She was not forthcoming about where she hid them. Once comfortable that money, passports, and other valuables had not been stolen, the team returned to the party. We were past the point where the chilly weather was being noticed.

By the end of the tour and as my girlfriend and I were beginning to arrange our return to the USA, some of the magic of the relationship was fading. Our differences were becoming apparent, but we were tied together by the merchandise we had bought. The plan was for us to sell sweaters and scarves in the Boston area, where wife number two was from, in the fall and return to New Orleans for Thanksgiving to Christmas. 

We helped finance some of the rugby players trip by paying them to carry merchandise back to New Orleans. I was going back to New Orleans, and we were going to meet up in Boston in a few weeks. Before this plan started we took a short break to Jamaica. My sister, Helen (maker of the Mardi Gras chicken costume), met us there.

Although the differences in our outlook toward many things was becoming an increasing friction in the relationship, we were still physically attracted to each other. After a couple days of sharing a room with Helen. We asked if we could buy her a drink. She thought this was a good idea, so we gave her some Jamaican dollars and pushed her out the door. We were unprepared for the passionate activity we were about to engage in and before long the consequences would bring one of the great loves of my life and an end to retirement.

That summer vacation feeling of freedom and endless time to do what you want or nothing at all flickered briefly when retirement started. The truth was I liked being in a classroom, and life was too short to spend much time doing nothing. 

My second wife and I took our two month old son on our buying trip to Ecuador the following year. On the day we dropped off our shipment at the American Airlines air freight office on Amazonas street fate was waiting for us. The previous year we had some minor success selling handicrafts. We got an order for a lot of scarves, but unfortunately we couldn't get back to Ecuador to fill the order because I broke my jaw.

A friend, Henry, was coach of Tulane rugby team. He and his wife were renting the house in front of the shed when my pregnant, and soon to be, second wife and I arrived in New Orleans after selling scarves and sweaters in Boston. He asked me if I would take over coaching the team one night when he couldn't make it. During a warm-up game of touch rugby before practice started a student's head made contact with my jaw. All of a sudden I couldn't control the end of my mouth. I tried to close it, and it just hung there.

To go to the emergency room would put a big hole in the retirement fund as was having a baby. A friend who was a doctor prescribed some pills for the pain and made an appointment for me with the right specialist for the following morning. I spent the night spitting blood in a cup. A couple days after that we got a call from a shop owner in the Boston area who wanted sixty dozen scarves. It was worth the return trip, but I couldn't do it with my jaw wired shut. My Spanish was bad enough as it was. 

An interesting thing I discovered while my jaw was wired shut as that people listened much better to my whispered speech squeezed through a metal fence if I used a French accent. 

The jaw mended. Our son was born. We spent a month in New Orleans adjusting to being parents. Then we looked at starting a windsurfing business in Grayton Beach for a month. It was a possibility when we returned to Ecuador with a two month old baby. 

Two months in Ecuador flew by. They call the weather in the Andes around Quito eternal spring, and it is delightful. The air is fresh, once you get used to less oxygen, and often has the very pleasant aroma of eucalyptus. The restaurants were inexpensive and delicious. Our son was a good baby and traveled well. It was fun to replenish the handicraft inventory.

The day before we were to leave we had packaged all the handicrafts and dropped them at the American Air Freight office on Amazonas Avenue.  It was around lunchtime and we often ate at a restaurant on Amazonas called Manolo’s. It was great for people watching. This was before the multi-story building went up across the street. There was an incredible view of Pichincha, the giant volcano that dominates the western side of Quito. Manolo's was over ten blocks away from the air freight office. My wife wanted to eat someplace else for one of our last meals in Quito on this trip. There was at least one restaurant on every block between the air fright office and Manolo’s. We stopped at every one. There was always something wrong (nothing appealing on menu, smell, cleanliness, slow service, wrong kind of food, out of something especially wanted. ...) until we were back at Manolo's. 

A couple minutes after we sat down, Mary, a teacher in Ecuador we knew, strolled into the outdoor cafe with a friend. She introduced us. Her friend had been complaining about his schedule for the upcoming school year. He didn't want to teach chemistry. Mary said, "Tom can teach chemistry."

The friend, Joe, looked at me. I confirmed I could. My premed undergraduate course of study had given me enough basics to teach most scientific disciplines. Joe wanted to rush me to the school director's office.

The second wife and I looked at each other. We looked at our baby. We looked at each other. I went to the interview and got the job. We closed up shop on our international handicraft business, went back to full time teaching, and ended retiremen, for awhile.