In case you are just joining us: My wife, Sherrill, and I were married 52 years, during which we visited more than 60 countries.  This is number three of a series about our lives and travels.  If you scroll down, you'll come to the previous posts all the way to number one, when we were married en route to Mexico.  I plan to post a new chapter every Monday.
          "This is where you'll write," Sherrill told me, hand on a small blue table with a portable typewriter by the single window in the tiny dining room of the one bedroom apartment we'd rented in Oakland. 
            The tall nineteen-twenties building, embroidered on the front with stucco flowers and leafy scrolls, faced Lake Merritt, but our two and a half rooms plus bath and kitchenette were tucked into a back corner.  Still, it seemed luxurious after Sherrill's studio apartment and my one room in Berkeley (across the street from each other—this was 1964, after all).  For some reason I couldn't figure out, she cared about me and my writing.  She'd proved this the year before when she typed an entire novel for me (pre-computers). 
            We soon established a routine: I was up early three mornings a week to watch lectures on classic Russian fiction on our black and white television and every morning by eight was at my Royal machine alternately working on a novel or a short story, both set in San Francisco's North Beach.  Sherrill was back at the Oakland library,  ordering children's books and telling stories.  In the evenings and on weekends, we read or watched television.  Sometimes, she posed while I drew or painted her.    
            Then, one day as we returned from shopping, she announced that she was pregnant.
            Sherrill had medical coverage for both of us through the city of Oakland and would be able to take maternity leave with pay. As far as we could see all was well with the world.
            Flash forward six or seven months: Sherrill was ostentatiously, gorgeously pregnant, I had more or less finished both the story and the novel, and we were going shopping.  Our objective: buy her a handsome, business-like dress to wear to an interview for senior librarian.  Not so easy, we discovered, for a young woman so very pregnant.  Maternity dresses came in cute, charming, fussy, sweet, but not business-like, not simple and sophisticated enough to inspire confidence in a woman's management abilities.  Apparently, a woman wasn't supposed to aspire to such realms when she was with child.
            At last, after exploring almost every likely shop in the East Bay, we found the perfect outfit, a white under-dress with long full sleeves and a business-like bow, with discreet black polka dots, and black tunic that covered it except for the sleeves and bow.  It definitely  gave her the needed executive look.  And she still had a week before the interview.  I even took a photo of her wearing it in the park by Lake Merritt.     Good thing I did, because that was only time she wore it. 
            The night before the interview, she woke me up.  The baby was about to be born.  I called a taxi and we were off to Kaiser hospital.  All night and into the morning, Sherrill, the doctor, and the baby maneuvered while I waited below.  In those distant days, fathers were not allowed upstairs.  I had nothing to do but read most of the 600 pages of the Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Finally, a nurse took me up to meet Sherrill and the baby coming out of the delivery room.  Sherrill looked exhausted, but well.  The tiny infant cuddled next to her was beautiful, although it seemed to have fringe growing on its ears.
            "We got our girl," Sherrill told me as I kissed her.
            Back at our apartment, I called the Oakland library department, to tell them why Sherrill wasn't at the interview.
            "When can she have a make up interview?" I asked.
            "She can't." 
            "But the baby was two weeks early.  That's not Sherrill's fault.  It's only fair that you let her have the interview later."
            "We never do that.  There's only one interview."  The woman's voice suggested Inspector Javert with a southern drawl. "We pull a panel together once.   Candidates all have to be there."
            I argued, but the woman was stubborn.  No second chances.  No apology. 
            "Then when's the next scheduled interview for Senior Librarian?  Six months?  A year?"
            "Never.  It  won't be necessary."
            More arguing, more stubbornness.  Another message that pregnant women shouldn't have career aspirations?  Today, I might threaten to sue, but in 1965 it didn't occur to me.  
            Sherrill decided to name the little girl after Simone de Beauvoir.  Looking out the hospital room window as we were leaving, she saw a giant rainbow—it was only the Rainbow Car Wash across the street, but she was sure that it was a good omen.
 
I plan to add a new installment to this blog every Monday.  I hope you'll check back.

            Bravely, Sherrill drove south from Nogales into the hilly semi-desert that has become the chief battleground of Mexico's drug wars. Using Arthur Frommer's $1.95 paperback, "Mexico on $5 a Day" as our only guide, we had no idea then that wandering alone into this picturesque, bug-ridden part of North America could be risky.  We were kids, naive, optimistic, and happy.  Like the heroine of her beloved Alice in Wonderland​, Sherrill coped with whatever adventure presented itself, this Mad Hatter at her side. 
            Frommer's maps were hand-drawn, simplified, and not always to scale, but we charged ahead, a two gallon can of gasoline in the trunk, which was in the front of the car. When we needed it a week later, we discovered that the gas had leaked out and apparently evaporated.  We hadn't known that so much of Mexico was mountainous or that the dusty roads were full of potholes and worse, not to mention animals ranging from cows and donkeys to buzzards to porcupines, monster spiders, and unidentifiable dead creatures.
            Sherrill never complained, but she did look forward to when we'd pull into a town and seek out one of Arthur's cheap hotels. After spending the night in boring Ciudad Obregon, we took a side trip to the colorful colonial city of Alamos.
            "Let's stay here," I suggested, eying a small yellow and white colonnaded inn. "You need a rest."
            "Can't afford it," she countered.
            But when we reached sticky, tropical Culiacan, she was happy to splurge with an air-conditioned hillside hotel overlooking the old town. The big glass windows soon were crawling with a vast assortment of large, many-legged, horned insects, but at least they were outside. Later, on our way back north, we had to be satisfied with a much cheaper place below, where the creepy crawly beasts shared the room with us. We discovered, though, if we kept the light on all night, they didn't get in bed with us.  As far as we knew.
            Finally, Mexico City: the mile-high capital city, where Sherrill experienced her first roundabout, a vast whirlwind of traffic forever circling, nobody making room for anybody else to maneuver in or out.
            I tried to make helpful suggestions so we wouldn't spend our young lives going in circles.
            "Shut up!"
            Our first raised voice.
            On top of everything else, the altitude was giving her a terrible headache. When we reached our hotel and third floor room, she headed straight to the bathroom, where the inside knob came off in her hand as she closed the door, the rest of it falling at my feet outside.  Then I heard her break down in tears, sobbing in misery.  The tears went on and on—I'd never felt more helpless. I couldn't even take her in my arms.
            "Don't cry, baby.  It'll be okay."
            Louder sobs.
            I tried to put the pieces from the floor back in place, but nothing would connect to anything else.  Eventually, I made a call and somebody came up to get the door open.
            A city of a mere four million then, the sky above it was still blue, the parks were green, and the people friendly, except in traffic roundabouts.  To us, this city seemed elegant and civilized.  We ricocheted among the usual sights, the University City's great mural-covered buildings, the new Museo Nacional de Antropologia. the sinking Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Basilica of Guadalupe with pilgrims on bleeding knees, the great pre-Aztec pyramids which seemed to have been colonized by hairy orange tarantulas. 
            Crossing the park after coming out of the archeological museum, Sherrill tripped me and I fell on the grass.  I grabbed her ankle, pulling her down, and began tickling her. 
            "Stop!" she laughed.
            "You started it!"
            For that moment, we weren't tourists using our time wisely, just twenty-four year-old newlyweds.
            Then it was time to turn the Corvair northward.  The road back to Berkeley was at least twice as long as it been driving south.  After counting our cash one evening, dinner was a jar of grayish-pink strawberry jam and a small loaf of bread in our room.
            Years later, Sherrill and I agreed that any two people thinking of marriage should travel together first.  We didn't quite follow that rule, but we discovered on that road trip that we both were flexible and together could cope with anything.
​
To be continued....

    Fifty-two years ago this past September, I managed to persuade a beautiful young lady named Sherrill (unconventional spelling, but nothing about this girl was conventional) to walk into the Cupid Drive-In Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas and marry me.  We actually were on our way to Mexico City, but when we made a stop at Hoover Dam, as we gazed down at the distant foam below us, I found myself proposing to her.  She stared at me for a minute with an "are you crazy?" expression, then to my surprise agreed. We drove into Las Vegas, found the drive-in chapel, and told the middle-aged man inside, who claimed to be an ordained minister, our decision.
            "Congratulations," he said, his pompadour wobbling above his forehead.  "Do you have a license?"
            Of course, we hadn't thought that far ahead.  It turned out that the county bureau closed in thirty minutes, so we hurried there and returned with the license.  Sherrill, a children's librarian at the time, happened to be wearing the dress she usually wore to tell the kids stories at the library, covered with pink and purple animals.  I was wearing a shirt with purple stripes.  Later we incorporated both into a quilt for our baby girl.  The man, rather sleazy looking we thought later, married us.  We always remembered that he wore a pinky ring and smelled of alcohol.  Maybe he really did. The witnesses were two teenage girls reading comics on the sidelines.  For a wedding ring, Sherrill took her grandmother's ring which she usually wore on the middle finger of her hand, putting chewing gum inside it so it would stay on the fourth finger.  After the ceremony, such as it was, the man produced a net bag full of cleaning supplies, detergent, scrub brushes, a sponge or two, Dutch Cleanser, and what back then what still was called a Chore Girl for pots.
            "To get you off on a clean start," he told us.
            The next day, we continued on our way to Mexico, Sherrill driving a cute little red and white two-door Corvair, the car that Ralph Nader labeled "Unsafe at any speed" in his book of the same name.  I didn't have a driver's license and, in fact, have never had one in all these years.  As we crossed the southwest, we stayed in three and four dollar a night motels, with one splurge at Motel 6. At the border, of course, our I.D.s still had different names, but we displayed our marriage license. The luxuriantly mustached Mexican official at the border looked skeptical, but with a bored nod let us into his country.  We didn't realize, of course, that this was the first of more than sixty countries we would explore together during our fifty-two year marriage.
            Later, when I mentioned to friends our honeymoon at Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, and Mexico, Sherrill looked at me quizzically and asked: "Oh, is that what that was?