Leaving Winnipeg

Let me summarize our situation in mid August of 1968:

I was between my sophomore and junior years of high school and was actually enjoying life for the first time since I was 8 years old... That didn't last long :-)

Mom had lost her job and couldn't find another one. She had just signed the divorce papers severing all remaining ties with my father... And she was ready for a change (she thrived on change)...

Karina had quit high school - then quit her job - then got engaged to a college professor - and desperately wanted out of the relationship...

We had an apartment full of furniture, a color TV, and lots of musical instruments that we still owed a bunch of money on... Our credit cards were almost all maxed out.. There was no income... The rent was due... And we were pretty much broke...

So what to do???

Easy... Sell everything for cash and buy first class plane tickets to Denver... Problem solved...

Yeah - apparently there's no such thing as a problem you can't run away from. At least that's what my mom and sister spent the next 3 years trying to prove... Unfortunately, I was along for the ride :-)

BTW - I no longer recall how we decided on Denver - but once the decision was made everything happened very quickly - just like it did when we had left Germany 2 years earlier ...

OK - this is really bad - I was definitely not OK with it:

In the late 1960s department store credit card accounts were not instantly updated like they are now. There was a bit of a lag between the time when a purchase was made and when it was credited to your account... So, if you made another purchase in the interim at a different checkout the clerk would have no way of knowing that you were going over your limit...

We needed three shipping trunks to put stuff in to be sent to us later (by a friend). And we had just enough credit remaining at one of the department stores to pay for one trunk... So Karina had worked out an intricate plan to pay for each trunk at a different checkout in a short period of time without arousing any suspicions... It's not as easy as it sounds - shipping trunks tend to draw attention - so everything we did and said had to be carefully choreographed... And it worked... We were %20 over our limit and on our way home with the three trunks before the store figured out what happened...

Aside: Ever since I started this blog I've been wrestling with whether I should talk about how Karina used to avoid "paying for things"... She was never caught - and I simply can't reveal the details in good conscience... I can't even hint at her techniques - the retail sector simply couldn't handle the losses :-)
You know - as much as I was in awe of Karina's ability to "think outside of the box" I could never fathom how she rationalized some of the things she did. She didn't believe in rules - they existed merely to challenge her creativity... She tried to explain it all to me once - but I didn't get it - it still seemed just plain wrong. And I think she eventually realized that... But at the time it was just one the things that made being around her so "interesting"... And I digress :-)

We spent the night of August 31st in a motel near the airport and in the morning the temperature was below freezing... Kind of like Winnipeg's "parting shot" :-)

Since we were flying first class we were dressed to the teeth - I was in my best suit. And I ended up in a window seat in a row all by myself. (It was an Air Canada DC-9).
So during takeoff a young stewardess (that was the proper term back then) decided to keep me company. I was obviously nervous - so she assumed I was afraid of flying... But that wasn't it at all... I was nervous because there was a smokin' hot brunette stewardess sitting next to me in a skirt so short it should have been illegal - and her efforts to comfort me were having the opposite effect :-) Yeah - that's the only part of the flight I remember - no surprise there.

So that's how we left Winnipeg... And if I had know what lay ahead I would have been kicking and screaming the whole way.