To Have and To Hold... a Long, Long Poem

In 1997, five years after my first husband David Goins had died from a sudden heart attack (brought on by 40+ years of 2+ packs a day of Camels without filters), I spent the summer writing a history of our life together. I was basically living alone that summer in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego, while Beth vacationed back in Alaska with her brother Jon. Even though I was working full time, I had plenty of solitude to write... and to remember.

I broke our history into five-year sections, and found that it fell naturally into rhythm and rhyme. Much of this very long poem requires some explanation, so I am going to break it into the five-year segments and add the explanations. The poem is far too long to post at one time...

TO HAVE AND TO HOLD...

At first...

I found you when I'd flown, a new adult, away from home;

And you were caring, confident, comfortable, and so different from all I'd known.

We talked, and laughed, and shared, and daily drove your T-Bird home from work till you became my heart. 

In those days thought we'd never part.

"So easy, easy," you would say, "to love you more each day, each day ... "

That was you at first, my heart, my dear and daily, driving, man ...

To have and to hold I married you then.

And then ...
Five years for just us two, so much to learn together
and of each other, so much to do.
Baby Daniel, his life so brief, little grave never visited, and my grief... 

But you held me, and we went on. Though I was to adoption drawn,
you always said you wanted another, a child of your own,
you purposeful lover...
That was you then, my holding, hoping, loving, man.

Always moving where was work until the work had waned so much
you changed from lath to iron, but still used nippers, did things your way,
built the bridges, but you'd say you never did it right at first...
Too tired at night, you fell asleep. I understood.
But when, when could... when did we make a baby 

and get started down that bumpy beat of parenthood?
You were so good to Rachel and me, my moving, changing, tired, daddy-man... 

Explanation:
Dave had a 1955 T-Bird when we met in January, 1964. Each day after he got off work from his construction job in Culver City, he picked me up from Goodyear Tire & Rubber where I worked on Central Avenue in L.A. and drove me home to Bell where I lived with my cousin, Katherine Farrer. Usually we would stop and eat, and spend most of the evening together.

We fell head-over-heels in love. Both of us were talkers, and had long conversations about many things. We seemed to have the same values; we both wanted the same things, a family, a home. We both had grown up in large families; we alternated weekends spending time with my family in Bakersfield and then his in San Diego. Mama was still in the Bakersfield hospital in traction because of the injuries she had sustained in the auto accident early that year. She was still in the hospital when we married in their home on May 16, 1964. Immediately after the ceremony we drove to the hospital to see her.

We moved into our small apartment in Inglewood. I continued to work at Goodyear, and he continued his construction job. He was a lather; they put up a metal mesh "lath" in high rise buildings. Plaster was then smeared on the lath and dried in place to make plaster walls. (This was not the same kind of lath Daddy had put in houses before he started his mattress company, but the workers were called lathers.)

We later bought a house in Compton, but when I began to be very sick, and learned I was pregnant, I had to quit my job at Goodyear. At the same time Dave's job was finished and he heard there was plenty of lathing work in Dallas, Texas. So we rented the house out and moved to Dallas. At five feet seven inches tall, I weighed ninety-eight pounds, soaking wet with rocks in my pocket.

The lathing job in Texas didn't suit Dave. When I was five months pregnant and feeling quite a bit better, we returned to California, and lived in Spring Valley, a mile or so from where I live right now, forty-seven years and many, many moves later. Our baby Daniel was born June 28, 1965. He had a diaphragmatic hernia, a condition which today can be seen and corrected in-utero, but there was no such thing as sonograms in 1965, at least not available to regular people like us. Daniel was operated on the next day but though he "pinked" up a bit, he only lived another day after the operation.

Devastated, I wanted to have another baby as soon as possible. The Lord didn't agree with that. It was four years and two days before Rachel was born, June 30, 1969. When I didn't get pregnant within the first two years, I wanted to adopt. It seemed every family of our friends were having children, except us. I even knew girls who were not married who were having children. I would look at those babies and blink back tears. I would look at those pregnant bellies with admiration and longing for it to happen in me again. Finally I convinced Dave to sign up for adoption, though we heard it might take years.

During those years we moved back and forth between San Diego and Los Angeles, following large construction jobs. Dave changed from lathing, which he called a dying trade, to ironwork, which was booming for many years. He continued to use a lathing tool, knippers, instead of the equivalent ironworking tool. He was very stubborn in his way of doing things, but also very smart. He could get things done. He worked on the Coronado Bridge being built between San Diego and Coronado Island. He would come home at night bone tired and fall across the bed in his work clothes and fall asleep. Without any dinner.

So how did I get pregnant? (Shrugging shoulders...) After Rachel was born, Dave visited Alaska where the word was a Pipeline was going to be built from the North Slope to Valdez, and he decided we were going up there. They would be employing thousands of ironworkers. He was going to be one of them. We were going to move to Alaska...

But that is another story...