At 1301 West 38^th Street in Indianapolis sits the Woodstock Club.  The West Fork of the White River is a stone’s throw away and that rivers meanders through Indiana and then falls into the Wabash River.  On the night they made me, my father took my mother to the Woodstock Club to a Holiday Dinner Dance for Wabash Men and their Ladies.  Besides dinner and dancing, there would be a raffle, a video highlight of the 1982 undefeated football season, and a presentation to honor the Wabash Man of the Year.  The invitation also mentioned “Dress Optional” and they certainly did dress before they undressed. 

On their way to their evening of dinner and dancing, Les stopped for his Lucky Strike cigarettes.  As she watched him walk across the parking lot, she was so in love and enamored by his handsome swagger.  He walked with the confidence of a man who knows he is handsome. 

They did not win the raffle or watch the video highlights—they dined and drank, danced and dashed.  From the Woodstock Club, they headed south to Route 40, a sleepy old highway that at one time went from coast to coast—Atlantic City to San Francisco—but now ends near Park City, Utah.  Annette soon discovered that she had a little too much fun, a little too much drink, and she got sick all over her black bouclé dress.  So they took a left at State Road 9 in Greenfield to Les’s house on Michigan Street, where he washed her dress for her.  

If they had taken a right, though, and then a left on Route 52 they would have come to the Bluebird Lounge in Morristown. Across the street from the Bluebird Lounge is the more-dressed-up Kopper Kettle Inn Restaurant, where they often had family meals as children and where they would one day take their own family and where, a day further on, Annette would host the bridal shower for the baby girl they were about to make. But, about twenty years earlier as young teenagers, it was the Bluebird Lounge they went to on a date.  

Their dinner had been pre-ordered for them by their parents, and it began with a fruit entree of watermelon. They joked about how far they had come from their playhouse days, remembering when Annette was ten and Les was nine, and she wrote a letter home while visiting her aunt on the East Coast. It began with a brief paragraph for her mother before instructing her mother to “give the letter to Les.” At the bottom, she wrote:

“Dear Les, I hope your [sic] getting along. The playhouse must be getting along. Love, Annette.” 

She ran a tight ship even then, and perhaps little Les ran out to check on the state of things. Or perhaps he didn’t, a sad foreshadowing of the mistakes they would both make that would cause their grown-up marriage to crumble.

They enjoyed their watermelon entree before life would take them different ways after high school and through their twenties.  Then they would find their way back to each other, all grown-up but not so different from the kids they were in the playhouse. 

After Les cleaned Annette’s dress, they made their way back to Route 40 and continued on through Knightstown and Lewisville and Straughn until they reached Dublin.  A right turn at Johnson Street which becomes South Street at the dogleg, and then (stay with me) a left on State Street which becomes Golay Road after Hunnicut, will bring you to the family farm Annette had known all her life.  That is where they were headed.  In case I lost you, here’s a map: 

It was a true homestead, made up of a farmhouse and a smaller adjacent house, as well as a barn and farmland.  Annette’s family had come up with quite clever names for the big farmhouse and the smaller house, names that they still go by to this day in our family—the Big House and the Little House. 

The Big House and barn:

The Little House (Polaroid photos from the 80s):

They made love in the Little House, and then sat naked outside on the screened-in back porch, smoking his Lucky Strikes.  In the morning, as she watched him leave from the window upstairs, she had a moment of her life, a moment of euphoria, where she thought, “I will never be this in love again.”  Perhaps she really knew or perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but either way she would come to know another type of love—the love between a mother and a daughter. 

An ultrasound was not commonplace in the 1980s, but one was not needed as she was sure she was having another boy. After four boys, she decided her fifth one would be named James. She did not even ponder names for a baby girl, except she knew she did not like Les’s suggestion of Aimée. It was not a baby boy, though, but a baby girl that arrived far too quickly for her to have an epidural.  After she recovered from both of these shocks, she held me in her arms and named me Jennifer.  A God-given name, she has suggested, as it came to her so suddenly, as if He sent an angel to whisper it into her ear. I don’t have the heart to tell her it was the most popular girl’s name of 1983. A new lifelong friendship began, and she took me home to the Little House.