Managing Editor
The other night I had a dream in which I was in a dark movie theater watching “The Sound of Music” with my date, Angela Cartwright, who was an actress who appeared in that film as Brigitta von Trapp.
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| Angela Cartwright portrayed Penny Robinson on the 1960s TV series 'Lost in Space.' COURTESY PHOTO |
I never missed anything with Angela Cartwright in it and so it’s interesting that she showed up in my dream 60 years later. But it seems the concept of people coming and going in my life has been a recurring theme for me.
For several years while I was attending college in the 1970s, I worked at a business called American Furniture Company. It was a physically demanding job that only paid me $2.70 an hour.
My duties were to unpack boxes of furniture delivered on the loading dock, remove the furniture from plastic coverings and ask a store merchandiser where it needed to be displayed on the sales floor. Unpacking and preparing it for display was the easy part, carrying it out to the sales floor was the hard part.
Some of the sofas and large couches were heavy and the store owner would only let us carry the furniture by their arms, thereby protecting them if we bumped into doorways. The merchandisers were tough and demanding, wanting these new pieces of furniture displayed immediately and they were not always kind to dock workers like me.
But one merchandiser was. Jerry Sena was always friendly and good-natured and laughed a lot with the dock workers. He always treated me with respect, and I found out he was an avid tennis player.
During Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, Jerry would pause at the display of televisions on the sales floor to see if Jimmy Connors or Cris Evert was playing in a match that day. If he was directing us to the location where he wanted the sofa or dinette set placed on the sales floor, I knew he was aware of how heavy the load we were carrying was, and he would give us a chance to stop and take a small break at some point.
Eventually I asked for a raise from $2.70 to $3 per hour at American Furniture. The store owner told me he would give me a 5-cent raise to $2.75 but since I had only worked there for two years, his policy was not to pay anyone $3 an hour unless they had worked for him for five years.
I moved on and eventually enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and following my military experience, I obtained my degree in journalism and started to work for newspapers as a reporter about 13 years after working for American Furniture Company.
One of the jobs I worked at was as a reporter for a twice-a-week newspaper called the Valencia County News-Bulletin in Valencia County, New Mexico.
Not long after being hired there, I was at my desk typing when I heard a voice speaking on the phone in a nearby cubicle and it sounded familiar. For several weeks if I was at my desk in the mornings, I would hear this voice and I racked my brain trying to figure out where I had heard it before.
One day I left my desk and walked over to that cubicle and discovered that the voice belonged to an advertising representative for the newspaper. When I introduced myself as the new reporter for the News-Bulletin newspaper and shook his hand, I realized that it was Jerry Sena.
We worked together for several years there before I moved to Florida, and I would sometimes have dinner with Jerry and his wife Yvonne at their home. To me it was just another example of someone re-entering my life after an absence.
The same can be said of some of my high school classmates, many of whom I had last seen in the early 1970s.
One day in November 2000, I was working for a newspaper in Florida and the phone rang. On the other end of the line was a former high school classmate of mine named Bob Fay.
He told me that I was on a list of missing school classmates, and he was tracking people down so I could be invited to our 30th high school reunion in 2001.
As it turned out, going to that reunion brought many people I knew and had grown up with back into my life after a stretch of more than 30 years. As I reconnected with them, I felt grateful and was happy to learn what had happened to them in their lives.
Through the years, some of my classmates who attended that 30th reunion celebration passed away, so the chance to see and talk to them again is not lost on me.
There’s an old saying I once heard that “people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” In my case, I can certainly attest to that as the truth. <
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