Cairns, Australia 2005.
Time is a healer. At 57 a badly broken foot takes it’s time, but I was fairly fit from a lifetime of hard physical labor. Even after David’s transport became a massive company I still made sure I got out in the yard with the guys and did a bit of the heavy stuff. Loyalty is won in many ways but in the trucking game you don’t get it sitting in the boardroom sipping chardonnay while others sweat.
I was in hospital for another week after Wendy visited and was then released to a regime of physiotherapy and daily visits to the swimming pool for low impact exercise. In this time I realized two things. The first was the company could run without me. I was fairly sure this would be the case because I always worked on the belief that as owner and general manager I should only give directions and it should be up to the bright and well paid managers I had recruited to get us there. The business was just too big for me to do everything. If a department was working well I didn’t interfere, although I made sure I knew what was going on. The other thing I realized was that I was actually not as fit as I thought. For my age I was better than average for sure but many beers had given me a belly and I ran out of puff pretty quickly at first.
During my many laps of the pool I also came to the realization that I had worked to create wealth all my life but now I had it I was not using it. I could have died in that accident and if I had I would have never used my money for me, just to make more money.
So I never went back to full time work.
I kept up my swimming and even got a fancy bicycle and became one of the bastards I had always cursed in thick traffic. My muscles hardened but I have no idea what the exhaust gasses did to my lungs. Australia did not start the change to unleaded petrol until 1986.
At work I created a shared ownership of the company. That year, as a Christmas bonus after all the work my managers and staff had done in my absence I gave them 50% of a multi million dollar empire. The managers got a good-sized chunk of the company and the share that the lowest paid employee (a part time cleaner) got was still worth about $20, 000 at the time. One condition of the deal was that any sales of the ownership should only be to current employees and I had expected two high-level instant sales and retirements, but I got three. What the hell, I thought, they earned it.
The other 50% was still mine, but on my death the income would be to look after my wife, if I had one at the time, and when she passed away there were shares for my brothers families and also Mary-Ann, Wendy’s daughter, who I had not seen for nineteen years but who I remembered with great fondness. I did not allow for children as I thought there was little chance of them now and if anything did happen I could always change my will at the time.
So work was over and I went home to wonder what to do while waiting for Wendy to walk back into my life forever. I did not stay celibate waiting, my life had not prepared me for this and I did have a number of flings with some of the young and pretty gold diggers that sought me out. Those that did well were rewarded and those that did not were not.
One day an envelope arrived in the mail it contained a photo of Wendy mostly in her nurse outfit, and on the back was lipstick where she had kissed it. Nothing was written, but nothing really needed to be written did it? I do like people who remember details and act on them.
I bought a fast boat. Wendy had mentioned the idea of island hopping and I liked it. I found an ocean racer that had just been finished when the governing body changed the rules and the boat was not eligable to race. It had twin Chevy 400 cube V8’s and one had blown up because some idiot had bought the boat and tried to use it for fishing. At low speed not enough cooling water got to the motors and one fried. I had it fixed up and this thing was scary when you opened it up. It had a couple of tiny sleeping cabins and a microscopic galley, but was fully functional. The tank capacity was so large it cost more to fill the boat than one of my semis. I could go a long way without fuelling though, which was what I wanted.
I spent a fair bit of time back at the farm which was still in the family and on one walk around I stumbled across the old 1937 Chevy pickup which I was driving the day I met Wendy. Back then there was no trade in on a new car so when a farm vehicle was replaced it was just parked under a tree or next to a barn to rust in peace. The Chevy was definitely rusty, Gippsland is not a dry environment, but it seemed to be recoverable and complete so I had it carted back to a factory I owned in Box Hill, Melbourne. It wasn’t too hard, I knew a bloke who had a truck.
I decided to restore it totally and spent far more money on it than it was worth in the end, but how do you follow the advice of the expert who tells you it will be cheaper to buy a seat at the swap meet than to repair the one that is in it when that is the actual seat you lost your virginity on so many years before?
I had the seat repaired, I had the rust cut out and patch panels fitted, I looked at the rusted solid motor with an eye to restoration but the block was beyond repair so I fitted a 235 blue flame instead. The blue flame was almost identical to the old stove bolt six but they were much more reliable due to full pressure oil and a few other differences. The rest of the truck, down to the now reconditioned crash box, was still the same vehicle that Wendy and I had sheltered from the storm in, back in 1945. It all took me back to Wendy and the memories of her three visits and the three most memorable nights of my life. As well as converting the 6 volt generator to a 12 volt alternator I did add a heater, a radio cassette and an under dash air conditioner.
I had plenty of time to think of my relationship with Wendy too.
Some people say your first love is the most memorable, but in my many years of observation this is often not true. Virginity is this barrier we keep between our childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood when we are young, and we are encouraged to make sure we save it for someone special. Too often though, this makes it a trophy that others want to take and many a loss of virginity involves coercion, deception and even violence. A lot of people regret how they lost their virginity and I realize I am one of the very few people I know who would not change a single thing about the night that was first time not just for me but for Wendy too.
I loved Wendy in the appreciative puppy way after our mutual first experience in the truck. I had discovered the reality replacing the myth of sex was so much better than I expected. I had found a girl who was sensitive, understanding and more knowledgeable than me and together we had explored the joy of sex. But Wendy was gone the next day and from then she became the inspiration I needed to work on being a better lover. She ended up being the fond memory that I used as a yardstick whenever I considered a permanent relationship. Wendy’s memory stopped me marrying a few times when I was younger and I never will know if this was good or bad for me at the time, but now I have no regrets at all. I worked hard to fill the hole in my life that a wife would normally fill and my regular affairs could only partially compensate for. I wasn’t lonely but I was still usually alone.