Another One Bites the Dust

Before I talk about driving a delivery truck in Dallas in the summer of 1972 I'm going to wrap up the story of my sister Karina's second marriage (hence the title of this post).

But  before I get to husband Mike's "demise" there's one more related story to tell:
As I mentioned in a prior post, Mike was legally blind (wore very thick glasses) but still drove regularly. And around the time we moved to the apartments on Verde Valley his Datsun 510 started having clutch problems... BTW: That was first time I had ever seen a hydraulic clutch setup. The Japanese car makers used them to avoid having different transmissions for the right and left hand drive versions of their cars. (Quite clever, actually.)
So we drove the Datsun up onto a pair of those metal ramps (a.k.a potential death traps) so I could crawl underneath to figure out what was going on while Mike stayed in the car to push the clutch pedal if needed. Of course, I gave him my standard lecture on listening carefully to my instructions and not doing anything unless told to, at which point I proceeded to disassemble the clutch linkage. After a couple of minutes it occurred to me that (with the linkage removed) if Mike inadvertently put his foot on the pedal it would cause the slave piston to pop out, so (just as a reminder) I said "Whatever you do, don't push the clutch!"... Mike said "OK!" - and I caught a face full of hydraulic fluid...
I was like "Mike! What the $$!$$?" and he responded with "Well, I didn't catch everything you said, but I'm sure I heard 'push the clutch' "... Yeah - that was Mike :-)

And back to the marriage:
As I've said before, there were two kinds of men Karina couldn't stand - men who didn't challenge her and men who did. Mike fell into the first category.  He was a nice enough guy, but not at all equipped to deal with her... (I swear... I don't know why guys like him were so attracted to Karina... Moths to the flame, I guess.)

It was pretty obvious from the "get go" that it wasn't going to work. Mike liked to spend his time at home (sitting around and watching TV), while Karina always wanted to be somewhere else doing something different. (It was her defining characteristic.) ... They didn't really fight - she just berated him and he got all teary... It wasn't pretty.

I'm not sure exactly when Karina told Mike it was over - probably less than a month after the wedding. Mike was quite distraught, and (like many of Karina's ex'es) turned to me for reassurance. ("No - I don't think you did anything wrong." ... "No - I don't think you could have done anything different".) It was a very uncomfortable position to be in - balancing my loyalty to my sister with my empathy for Mike.

So I spent the rest of the day commiserating with him. He had to make two trips to Ardmore to haul all his stuff back home and I ended up riding shotgun with him for the first round trip. (It was about two hours each way.) Despite being legally blind (and crying the whole time) he would not let me drive... Yeah - between the sheer terror of riding with a guy who couldn't see for sh*t and having to console him the whole time it was one of the worst road trips of my life :-)

Karina filed for an annulment the following week and thus ended her second marriage...