FanStory.com - Living the Elusive Dream by BethShelby

Between the time we signed the contract to sell our house in Metairie and the closing dates, there was over a three-month period in which Christi and Connie were in an apartment near Connie’s school and Evan and I were living like gypsies in another Chattanooga location. Don was still living in New Orleans and working. Incidentally, the potential buyer looked at our house and signed the contract to buy it on my birthday. How’s that for a pleasant birthday surprise?

Don was left behind to continue his construction job, to look after our house and to water and feed the cat. Since he had a girlfriend, he was okay with this arrangement. He possibly got distracted and forgot all about the poor cat, because it seems the door was left open long enough for the cat to escape and go looking for more suitable living arrangements.

The fact that Carol and Glen lived in Chattanooga had been one of the factors that influenced our decision to move to the area. Maybe our new son-in-law wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. Shortly after our decision was made, he decided he wanted to move to Florida. Carol and Glen had moved long before our closing date.

In October of 1987, Evan and I were in a dorm room at the college which we were able to rent for several weeks until we were kicked out due to homecoming pre-paid rentals. After that we’d rented a house which was basically empty except for part of a sectional sofa, a couple of chairs and TV which we’d been able to get into our van. In the bedroom, we had a queen size mattress set without the frame which we purchased new, so we wouldn't have to sleep on the floor. The kitchen had a stove and a refrigerator.

I’d signed on with a temporary employment agency and taken a job at a local hospital as a file clerk. On Thanksgiving I had to work until two pm. Evan prepared a traditional Thanksgiving meal and invited Connie, Christi and Christi's roommate. Since we had no table, my resourceful husband took the hinges off a solid wood door and laid it on saw horses he’d found in the garage. I was impressed with his cooking ability.

Backtracking a bit as to how we came about choosing the house we would be buying in Chattanooga, Jane, the agent who hadn’t even gotten her license at the time, was an eager beaver. She started finding houses to show us. She could talk our ears off without giving us much opportunity to respond. She was determined she would sell us a house and maybe sell her daughter to our son as well. She’d met Don on the one time he happened to be in Chattanooga, and right away, began plotting ways to get him and her daughter together. She told us how beautiful, smart, and talented Kimberly was. She showed Evan and I pictures of an attractive auburn haired girl in her early twenties.

When we found the house on our own which we were interested in buying, we felt obligated to get Jane involved since she had put in so many hours showing us houses. She had to make an offer and several counteroffers before we finally agreed on a price. We set the closing for the day after the New Orleans closing.

For the first time ever, we were able to pay cash for a house. Our vehicles were already paid for and we never incurred credit card debt, so at last we were debt free. When the house closing papers had been signed and we got everything moved inside, it was only three days until Christmas.

With me working and Evan not being a shopper, we hadn’t had a chance to buy presents. Now that we had plenty of room, we were, once again reunited with our three children. They immediately insisted that we get a Christmas tree. Luckily there was a Christmas tree lot across from the front entrance to our subdivision. They had reduced their prices to get rid of the few remaining trees. The kids picked a 10- foot tree that looked great in our 27 foot vaulted great room, and spent the day decorating it.

It was a weird Christmas. Somehow, we were able to get a few presents together in the last two days. In the past, we always divided time at Christmas between my parents and Evan’s parents. This was the first year that wouldn’t happen. Carol and Glen would be spending Christmas with Glen's family and planning a trip back to Chattanooga in early January to see our new house.

Christmas morning, Christi threw a tantrum about not being at her grandparents house for Christmas. She insisted on someone taking her to the bus station, because it wasn’t like the holidays if we didn’t do it like we always had. Mother wasn’t expecting her, so I think she was a little disappointed in her Christmas there. For the rest of us, although there wasn't that much underneath the tree, we had our traditional Christmas meal and just enjoyed getting used to our new home.

A day or two later, we had a call from our agent, Jane, and she informed us her family tradition was to make quick visits to friend’s homes on that New Year’s Eve. She said she wanted to show her family the home she had sold. She asked if we minded them coming that night. She wanted us to meet her husband and Kimberly, especially. She hoped Don would be home, because she thought it would be great if our kids could get to know each other. Her younger son and daughter would be attending the same school as Connie.

When I told Don he said, “Sorry Mom, it’s not happening. Some friends I went to school with when I was in college here are having an engagement party that night. I’ve already told them I would be there.”

Ironically, Kimberly told her mother the same thing. Fate has its own agenda. Sometimes the plots of parents go astray, and fate works things out with its own timing. Stay tuned.

Author Notes This will like be the first chapter in the third and final book in the Elusive Dream Series.

Chapter 2
New in the Neighborhood

By BethShelby

My husband, Evan took an early retirement. We left New Orleans after 17 years and moved to Chattanooga. We've bought a house and moved in. Our oldest daughter was married and living in Florida. The twins were around 22 and Connie was in early teens. This will be the second chapter in my third book which deals only with the Chattanooga years. I just publised the New Orleans years. It was called Grasping the Elusive Dream. This one will likely be called Enjoying the Elusive Dream. In the last chapter, our real estate lady is anxious for our son Don to meet her daughter, Kimberly.

January 1988

Those first few days in the new house were fun. We had always lived in smaller houses before. For the first time ever, we had all the room we needed and more. Unfortunately, during the move, we hadn’t managed to get rid of enough of our excess baggage from past moves, so we did what we always did and stacked it in unopened boxes in our oversized garage. No one had ever taught us how to declutter. We’d learned from past experience, if we tossed anything, we would need it the following week and would have to go buy it again.

That was our excuse, but of course, we’d long ago forgotten what was in those boxes. We were from a generation who believed in not throwing anything away unless it was falling apart and couldn’t be mended. We also thought styles recycled every twenty years but failed to take into consideration waist sizes sometimes change.

The one drawback to the garage was, although it would hold two cars and had enough extra room for a basketball game, using the left-behind goal attached to the ceiling, the driveway was up a steep hill and you couldn’t drive straight into the garage. At the top, there was a sharp right turn with inadequate turning room. This meant one of our cars would often be left sitting outside and we would have to back a long way down the drive to get to the street.

As I said before, Jane, our matchmaking real estate lady, hadn’t stayed long when she came to visit on New Year’s Eve. She had been so disappointed she didn’t get the chance to introduce her daughter to Don because both had accepted other invitations for that night.

It was an engagement party for one of Don’s best friends who he knew from when he’d attended college in Tennessee. Don had been asked to be the best man. Fate had to be working overtime, because the girl he was marrying had roomed with Jane’s daughter, Kimberly, when they were in an academy near Nashville. She had invited Kimberly to be her maid of honor. Without her being aware of it, Jane’s wish was coming true. Don went over to sit on the piano bench and sing along with the pretty auburn-haired girl playing the piano.

Later that evening, both Don and Kimberly went home to announce to their parents, they had met someone interesting. Chattanooga isn’t a village. It is a city. So we could only scratch our heads in disbelief over such a coincidence.

When the wedding took place later in the month, Don caught the garter tossed by the groom, and Kimberly caught the bride’s bouquet, but this is getting ahead of the story.

Back to the house, Don and Christi had downstairs bedrooms across from each other and shared a bath. Connie had an upstairs bedroom with its own bath and Evan and I had a huge master bedroom with a sitting area, real wood burning fireplace, and a balcony overlooking the neighborhood. The great room was sunken and featured a 27-foot vaulted ceiling and a rock fireplace with a chimney which reached the ceiling. A long balcony led from the top of the two-landing stairway, past Connie’s room and into our master suite. This was no cookie-cutter house. It had been designed by an architect. It was amazing we managed to pay a cash amount of $93,000 and we were finally debt free.

Our lot was large and right away my farm-raised husband started making plans to fence the backyard and make a garden. At that point, he had no idea how many rocks he would have to dig from the earth.

It took a while for us to get to know the neighbors. They may have assumed we were the Beverly Hillbillies moving in, since we’d rented a large U-Haul and moved ourselves rather than pay someone to do the work for us. The people next door were Mormons with six children and it didn’t take the little one long to come out of the woodwork and start using our steep drive as a ramp for skateboarding. They also played basketball in front of our drive because the family who sold the house left another basketball goal on our property.

The family in the house near the foot of our driveway, we wouldn’t meet until I’d backed down our drive and used their mailbox to stop my car. They were nice enough when Evan went over to tell them he would be recementing it into place. The couple both worked and the husband was an airline pilot and often slept days.

We were one of four houses in a cul-de-sac and the house across the street was a rental and it would be years before we met any of the people who lived there. We were right on the edge of Tennessee. The subdivision behind us was in Georgia. When we realized kids from Georgia were using our yard for a shortcut, Evan was more determined than ever to build a fence.

We had only been moved in a week when we had what Chattanooga thought of as a ‘once in a century’ snowstorm complete with lightning and thunder. It was then we learned that people who live on steep hills need plenty of bread and water in emergency reserve, because you won’t be going to the grocery store and you’ll likely be without power. Luckily the power outage lasted less than a day. It was five days later, when a sand truck made it into our neighborhood, and the mail finally came through.

The kids and I were delighted with the snow. The snow was six or seven inches deep, and it was beautiful. To Evan’s embarrassment, we took garbage lids and slid from the top of the hill in our backyard all the way down the drive and into the street. I’m sure this kind of undignified activity from someone old enough to retire like my husband must have confirmed we were indeed hillbillies. Of course, to us we were actually flatlanders from New Orleans having just moved in to hillbilly country, and we were only trying to fit in with our new peers.

Christi and I both had jobs and we had to let them know we wouldn’t be there. We weren’t the only ones who couldn’t make it to work. Like I said, it was a rare storm.

Jane, the realtor, in order to make sure this new relationship didn’t falter, had invited us all to lunch the following weekend. She seemed impressed she had sold her first house to people who were able to pay in cash. They lived further down in the country so there was still snow everywhere when we made the visit. It was pleasant enough and it seemed Don and Kimberly were getting acquainted at a rapid pace.

The next thing on our agenda would be to get Don enrolled in Life Chiropractic College in Georgia and to make arrangements for Evan to drive Connie to school each day.

There would also be an assortment of pets in our near future, but I’ll leave these animal adventures for another chapter.

Chapter 3
Problems with New Beginnings

By BethShelby

After a few weeks in our house, Evan was ready to start making changes. His first project was the construction of a chain link fence around our backyard. He didn’t care for the open look where you couldn’t tell where your property ended and someone else’s yard started.

He bought the chain link fencing and started to work. This didn’t set well with the kids next door, who had apparently considered the whole side of the mountain as their playground. They started pelting him with rocks, until their father saw them and made them come over and apologize.

We discovered we had an alarm system, which didn’t call anyone, but made enough noise to wake the dead. I found this out when I saw a panic button in the closet and decided to see what that was all about. We panicked all right, until we figured out how to turn it off. Then, we discovered the alarm was on all of our doors and windows as well.

After Don and Kimberly met at the New Year’s Eve party, she became a regular at our house. They were together every chance they got. Kimberly was a live wire. She was bubbly and extraverted and up for most anything. She and Christi clashed from the beginning. Christi resented her spending so much time with her twin, and Kimberly resented Christi as well.

Kimberly was an RN, and she got off her shift late at night. She started coming over after we were in bed. Evan heard a noise in the night and went downstairs to investigate. He found Don’s door locked. It took a while for Don to open it, while he allowed Kimberly to escape through his window, from which he’d deactivated the alarm. Evan’s outrage put a temporary halt to the nightly visits.

Connie was at the age she was starting to give us those typical problems young teens sometimes exhibit. The move from New Orleans and her being allowed to live with Christi and her roommate until we could get more settled had resulted in Connie having too much unsupervised freedom.

We were blissfully unaware she’d been skipping out of school and rushing to the post office in time to intercept the letters being sent to us from her teachers. She was even changing her grades on reports, so it was a big shock when we found out. She wasn’t at all happy when we started demanding more of her. We now had mail coming to our house and a phone where we could communicate with her teachers. We realized she was in over her head with some of her schoolwork.

I’d gotten a job putting a catalog together for a shooting supply company, so it was Evan’s responsibility to take Connie to school and back each day. Evan had been busy working up until now and hadn’t had that much input into child rearing. He was having to feel his way into his new role and control his temper and try not to get too upset with her. He was pleased if he could even get her to talk to him.

It seemed as our three older children matured, we had a lot of new problems to deal with that we hadn’t had in the past.

With Connie being ten years behind the others in age and not having grown up with a sibling she could easily relate to, it was like starting over with parenting. She didn’t take well to being disciplined. She declared she hated us and couldn’t wait to leave home. The older children had reacted with tears, but had never been so openly expressive as Connie. Yet, we understood she was frustrated and saying things she didn’t really mean.

Evan thought he would be more relaxed now that he had retired, but he was finding all problems aren’t work related. Christi felt she was grown and had the right to stay out until two or three in the morning with her dates, but Evan worried about her and couldn’t sleep until she was home. It seemed every night he was walking the floor when she came in and saying, “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll have to deal with my rules.

All of this was creating stress for everyone. We had hoped life in Chattanooga would be less stressful than life in the big city, but so far it seemed we were still in for a rocky ride.

The Shelby family has recently moved from the New Orleans area after Evan took an early retirement. Carol, the oldest child is married and living in Florida. Don and Christi are adult twins still living at home. Connie is in her teens and a freshman in High school.
The chapters usually deal with multiple incidents involving activities of all the family members and don't follow any story to a conclusion.They deal with whatever is happening during a certain time period.
This takes place in near the beginning of 1988.

Chapter 4
Teenager and Pet Problems

By BethShelby

Teen troubles involving our youngest daughter continued for a while and got worse before they started to improve. Because Connie didn’t seem to be getting a handle on her classes, we decided to enroll her in a learning center to give her a chance to catch up. For $25 an hour, we were given glowing reports and told she was highly intelligent. Her grades with them were all A’s. Then her instructor told us we needed to have her tested by a psychologist because she suspected she had ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

We agreed to the testing and another large expense. The man interviewed both Evan and I separately, and then did a testing session and interview with her. His verdict was that she had no learning disability, but instead she was a juvenile delinquent and that she would likely soon be in trouble with the law. Everything a parent wants to hear, right? In order to make sure we hadn't spent all that money for this diagnosis in vain, she and a friend, managed to get themselves picked up on Halloween night in our neighborhood, because the cruising cop said he saw one of them toss a beer can into the grass behind them as he drove by.

This little incident got her community service at a local church. She actually enjoyed helping clean the church, so much so that when the penalty was worked off, she thought of volunteering to continue. Her supervisor was someone she admired and enjoyed working with.

Connie seemed angry much of the time. I was absorbing all kinds of books on adolescent behavior problems, and Dr. James Dobson’s advice was to tread carefully and not make things worse by overreacting.

During the period before we moved to Chattanooga, Connie’s pet cat had gone missing while Don was still in New Orleans. She begged us to get her another kitten. I wasn’t able to locate any kittens, and I made the mistake of adopting a couple of year-old Himalayan cats. They were a persnickety pair that seemed to feel their pedigree allowed them to look down their aristocratic noses on us. They never really made friends with any of us.

We made a trip back to Mississippi, and I learned about a litter of pups that were for sale. I thought perhaps a puppy would be something to produce some pleasant vibes and calm our daughter’s sour attitude. Evan wasn’t easily persuaded but, once again, he was overruled. Those Eskimo Spitz puppies were adorable. We ignored the grown dog’s aggressive behavior assuming it had nothing to do with the younger generation. Wrong again.

We had barely gotten home when Evan got a severe bite on his hand while trying to save the pup from running out on the top deck and doing a kamikaze dive. We had only had Kokomo for a couple of weeks when he got deathly ill. We took him to the vet who diagnosed him with canine parvo. He wasn’t expected to live, but after spending a week in the clinic, he was able to come back home. When he recovered, his displeasing disposition far outweighed that of our teenage daughter. We were never sure if he had developed a mental problem from the illness or his parent’s bad attitude had come full circle.

At any rate, Evan decided to build him a really nice dog house and enclose the back deck so the family wouldn’t be in such grave danger. Once all that was accomplished, if Evan’s displeasure hadn’t managed keeping Kimberly from our back yard to sneak in Don’s window, having Kokomo back there cemented the deal. She told us on more than one occasion ‘that dog needs to be put down.’

Kokomo was still teething, and he destroyed the roof of his house, one wall and all of the lights around the edge of the deck. There was a sliding glass door going out onto the deck. As he grew, he was able to leap up to the top of the glass, snarling and gnashing his teeth and traumatizing any visitor in our home.

Along with all the trauma involving animals and a teenager, Don found he needed a couple more courses before he could enroll in the Chiropractic college. This meant he would be with us at least through one more semester. Since he was only taking two classes, he had some extra time on his hands and Evan got him involved in yet another building project.

Our house which was on the peak of a very high hill had windows on the front and back, but the best view was in the direction of Lookout Mountain. We discovered there was a large area of wasted space above the garage. There was no access to it, but it would make a big extra room if it could be opened up. Don enjoyed building projects and decided he was up for the challenge as long as the new room would be his bedroom. The project involved cutting through the wall from the second landing of the stairway.

It presented a lot of challenges and the ceiling of the room had to be v shaped since the roof had to be used in order to have ample height. We designed it in such a way that we had a great view of the mountains through large windows. It worked out well for Connie, because one of her greatest interests was interior design. She got involved in planning the colors and carpeting for the room. It was a family project which we all had some part in bringing together.

Connie’s escapades didn’t end yet for a while. She would soon bring a bit more drama into our lives, but we had a temporary reprieve while we worked together as a family.

The Shelby family has recently moved from the New Orleans area after Evan took an early retirement. Carol, the oldest child is married and living in Florida. Don and Christi are adult twins still living at home. Connie is in her teens and a freshman in High school.

The chapters usually deal with multiple incidents involving activities of all the family members and don't follow any story to a conclusion.They deal with whatever is happening during a certain time period.
This takes place in near the beginning of 1988.

Chapter 5
Christi and the Cats.

By BethShelby

Since Connie seemed to be having trouble with her schoolwork at the Academy, she begged to go to the public school for her second year in high school. We agreed it might be a good idea. I was concerned that her main friend seemed to be on the wild side and more prone to get her into trouble. I think Evan was a little embarrassed with Connie’s taste in clothing. He claimed she didn’t dress like the other girls, who wore more conservative dresses. It did appear her grades improved after we let her change schools. For a little while things ran smoother. It gave us a break money-wise, and the public school had a bus that picked up students near our house.

I had gotten a permanent job with a printing company which was more like the work I’d done in New Orleans and the pay was better. The only problem was I had to drive further and it was in a section near the projects. Also, the work often involved overtime hours.

Don was still attending college at UTC and working part time. The rest of the time he was with Kimberly or many of the other friends he had in the area. A lot of his friends from his earlier year in college, still lived here.

Christi was also working and still living with us. Which was a constant source of problems. She was really pretty and never without a date. She also had a girlfriend she liked to visit on weekends. One weekend, she brought home a stray cat which her friend had found.

“Christi, we don’t need another cat. We’ve got two weird Himalayan cats and a lunatic dog here already. No one ever pays any attention to any of them. There is cat hair everywhere, and now, they don’t want to use their litter box. One of them has been going behind the television, and I think one may have peed on the couch. It smells funky. We don’t need another animal. What we’ve got is about to drive your daddy bananas.

“Mama, look how cute she is. She’s a sweet cat. My friend can’t keep her. They can’t afford a pet deposit. Those other cats hate us. I’ll keep her in my room and put a litter box in my bathroom for her. You won’t know she’s here.”

“So, you’re just going to leave her locked up in your room all day while everyone is at work or school. You go out practically every evening and stay out most of the night. Besides she is awfully fat. She looks pregnant. You know your dad isn’t going to want to deal with another cat while we’re at work. If you want her, you’re going to have to take care of her.”

It so happened that I was right. The cat was pregnant. She had nine kittens. Christi swore she would find homes for all of them. In the meantime, the cat ripped the paper on the bathroom wall. She got diarrhea from something Christi fed her. Christi’s bathroom stunk to high heaven.

In the end, cats were only a part of the reason we would have to ask Christi to find another place to live. She continued living with us for a while longer. We made a new home for the cat and her litter in the garage and Christi ran an ad in the local paper looking for a home for the cats.

Halloween came around, and as the front doorbell would ring, Christi would walk out dressed as a witch holding two baskets. One would be filled with candy and the other with kittens. She got rid of two of them that way. I can imagine what those parents might have had to say when their children came home with a kitten. ‘You got that kitten where? Do you remember which house? There ought to be a law against people pawning kittens off on kids.’

I was shocked when I learned what she had done and even more surprised those kittens weren’t returned by irate parents. Those kids must have been extremely persuasive, or else forgot which house they came from.

The ads Christi ran had some interesting results. I think two of the kittens might have gotten legitimate homes that way. The third person who called was another story, which would make all of us a little uneasy.

The third man who called wanted two cats. He said he lived on a boat on the river. When he came for his cats, he was a sight to behold. He had a long stringy ponytail, a bushy beard and strange looking dark garments. He was riding a beat-up looking motorcycle with a basket in which he planned to carry the kittens. He was friendly enough. Too friendly. He and Christi chatted at least a half an hour. I’m sure he was attracted to her. Most men were. Christi was just trying to make certain the kittens would fare all right in the bike basket and would be safe on a boat. He left promising he would call and let her know.

He didn’t even wait until the next day to start calling with what he called kitty reports. He assured her the kittens were fit and happy which would have been enough to know, but for the next few weeks we were getting daily reports. If I happened to be the one who answered the phone when he called, he’d say, “Hey Mom, how are you doing? I’m just calling with the daily kitty report.” He would proceed to tell me something the kittens had done. I’d try to get Christi to the phone if she was home, but she’d refuse to talk. I tried to be polite but brief. He would ask, “How’s Dad, and Connie?” He’s only seen them in passing or else Christi mentioned them.

I wasn’t too worried since the river was on the other side of the city and a long way from us, but he did mention he might take some more of the kittens if she still had some left.

One weekend the family planned a trip to Mississippi to visit our parents. Connie had a report due for school or some reason she needed to stay behind. She insisted she was old enough to stay alone. We were reluctant to leave her, but she promised to keep the doors locked and not go anywhere. Our neighborhood seemed safe, but we were reluctant to trust her. At any rate, we left without her.

Evidently, we hadn’t gotten very far when Connie heard the sound of that motorcycle. By the time he turned into our driveway, she was in a panic. When he got to our front door, she’d made sure everything was securely locked, and had picked up something to use as a weapon in case she needed it. Her throat was dry and she was shaking with fear.

Getting control of herself, she went out onto the upper deck over the front door and proceeded to yell at him. At that time, Connie had a mouth on her, and her vocabulary wasn’t the purest. I only remember her saying she cursed him out and told him he wasn’t a part of our family, and we all thought he was a nut case. She told him to leave and not to ever call us again, or we would have him arrested.

I felt sorry for the guy when we returned and she told us what happened. He might have been just a lonely guy looking for someone to befriend him. He must have taken her message seriously, because we never got another kitty report.

The chapters usually deal with multiple incidents involving activities of all the family members and don't follow any story to a conclusion.They deal with whatever is happening during a certain time period.
This takes place in near the beginning of 1988.

Chapter 6
Tale of Two Daughters

By BethShelby

After Connie changed schools and was able to ride the school bus every day, Evan had more time to do things he was interested in like yard and garden work. Now, he had another project on his mind. There had been several bad storms lately. Right after we moved into the area, a severe tornado struck near us. We had a wood frame house which was three stories tall and on top of a high hill. On a windy day, the house groaned and creaked and the wind howled around its corners with a fury.

I found it strange that I was the one who had been carried aloft in a tornado as a child, but Evan was the one more concerned about storms. He decided he’d found the perfect spot by our back deck which would make a great tornado shelter. Before I quite knew what was happening, he had started digging. Building the shelter would take a lot of hard work and time, but it was definitely something he wanted to do, and it kept him busy while I was at work.

Before one of the holidays, Carol, our married daughter, who was now living and working at Florida Hospital in Orlando, called to say she planned to come for a visit over a four-day weekend, and she was flying from Orlando into Atlanta. That meant Evan would need to go to Atlanta to pick her up.

Of all days for Connie to need a ride home from school, this was the day. She said she and some other kids had to stay after school and pick up trash. She never told me why they were being punished, and I didn’t pursue the issue. Sometimes you’d rather not know. She was grounded most of the time like it was.

She called home for her dad to pick her up, but then she remembered he had gone to Atlanta to get Carol. She didn’t bother calling me since I worked downtown in the opposite direction. Instead, she called a guy from our neighborhood who had a car. I have no idea where she met him, but she had brought him over once. He wasn’t someone I trusted, so I was glad I didn’t know she’d called him. He was a bit weird and acted spacy like he might be on drugs.

Connie got home late and was extremely drunk. She claimed one of the guys at school had Vodka and they told her she could drink it and there would be no liquor odor. When I got home from work, Carol and Evan were back from Atlanta and Connie was in bed trying to sleep off a bad hangover. According to Carol she had been extremely sick and had vomited several times.

We had never dealt with these kinds of problems with the older three. Connie often came home smelling of cigarettes, and she’d have a pack in her coat. She would assure me, she was holding them for someone else, thinking I would believe that.

I could always tell when the older three weren’t being truthful, but Connie, she was a master at lies. We got to the point we didn’t believe anything she said. Over time, she would change into someone more honest and pleasant to be around, but at that time, that was still in her future. Her brother used to say, “Connie is the perfect name for her because she is a con artist.”

My grandmother had a saying when I was growing up. She would say, “Everybody has to climb Fool’s Hill at some time in their life. It is better they do it while they are young, because it’s a lot worse when they are older.” Grandma had a son who kept divorcing and finding a new wife. He also drank heavily and had a lot of wrecks, so I guess she might have been thinking of him when she would say that. I tried to convince myself Connie was getting her Fool’s Hill out of the way, and things would get better.

On Sunday, Evan and I took Carol back to Atlanta to catch her flight. During the car ride, we were able to talk more. I got the feeling Carol wasn’t really happy. She was more introverted than the others and a melancholy personality type. She gave me a journal she had been keeping and told me I might understand her better if I read it. Carol was, at the time, very spiritual minded, and a lot of the journal consisted of prayers.

I got the impression she hadn’t been deeply in love with Glen when they got married. I think she felt sorry for him, because she felt he wasn’t being treated right by his family. He was an active person who wanted expensive toys, like cameras, guns and boats. He didn’t mind racking up debts, which she had to deal with. She paid his way through nursing school and tried to keep up with his credit card debts.

Another thing I learned from my daughter was that she was hurt by having to ask for a loan, and be turned down. She said she had felt like, if all else went wrong, she could always count on us if she needed anything. She and Glen wanted to buy a lot and build a house. She asked if she could borrow money for the down payment. Carol had never really asked us for anything before. The other kids were constantly asking to borrow money which they would never worry about paying back.

We had been hit up for money so often, my first inclination was always to tell them we didn’t have extra money to spare. Since that didn’t stop anyone else from pursuing the matter, I assumed we would be loaning her money by cashing in some of Evan’s retirement money which was tied up in CDs and we would pay a penalty for cashing early. Evan could never say no to anyone, whether it was his kids or his family. We played "good cop" and “bad cop”. I was the bad cop who said no before he could say yes. That only worked for us occasionally.

Carol apparently didn’t know my rule because she only asked once, and told Glen her family couldn’t loan them money. They got the loan from Glen’s older brother and were in the process of building the house. I felt terrible when I realized I had let my daughter down. Having grown up around us, Carol should have known she would have probably gotten the loan if she had pursued it.

We made plenty of mistakes as parents. My excuse was that kids didn’t come with instructions. The other two gave us plenty of problems as well, but there was always one of them whose needs seemed more urgent at the moment. We loved them all, but in 1989, we were starting to count the days, until we figured they would no longer be our problem.

How dumb is that? When you are a parent, you’ve taken on a lifetime commitment. Any time any one of them has a problem which we know about, we will suffer as much as they do.

Evan Shelhy, retired husband of Beth.

Beth Shelby, his wife working at printing company. (This is me)

Carol Shelby Egolf, Oldest daughter, married, lives and work as nurse in Orlando.

Glen Egolf, Carol's husband. Also a nurse in Orlando.

Author Notes Evan is retired, but I'm younger and I am still working. We have three children living at home and a married daughter in Orlando, We live in Chattanooga in 1989. This chapter in the 3rd "Elusive Dream" series is about the oldest and youngest daughters. Carol is about 26 and Connie is 14. Grown twins, Christi and Don, still live at home.

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