Slippery Slopes and Slipping Haloes

Backing up a bit, there had been a comment near the end of June of 1987, “Lois acting up again.” I had noticed certain changes in Lois that worried me. They actually seemed to be improvements because they interrupted her depressions and she took on a more energetic persona. She was getting up in the night, when normally everyone in the house was asleep. During these sessions she would be cleaning the house and doing other projects. She was also doing a lot of decorating in the house. New additions regularly appeared and not just the usual changing of curtains and pictures.

You may be wondering why have I used an illustration showing three faces of the same person

to head this chapter. Although they labeled it Bipolar, which tends to make us think of two, "bi", there are three major faces of the disorder, Depression, Mania and Hypomania. Depression is the easiest to spot. A person is sad, suffers anxiety and panic attacks, cries a lot for no apparent reason and sees little in the way of hope. This is represented by the face on the left.

Mania, represented on the right of the three faces is sometimes shown as a person in a rage of angry acting out in some violent way. This is one possible aspect of Mania and it is the behavor that often finds the person causing trouble or getting injured. It is the Manic that ends up institutionalized. It is the face most associated in the public mind with the disorder, the face that makes the news. “They were Bipolar, you know,” and people nod their heads and the word "maniac" automatically comes to mind. 

The third face, shown somewhat blankly staring in that first photo, looking rather natural, is Hypomanic. Hypo

comes from the Greek and means under, kind of like understated. Hypomania is really a milder form of Mania. Characteristic behaviors are extremely energetic, talkative, and confident commonly exhibited with a flight of creative ideas. This is more the state Lois experience. The difficulty is that to the sufferer in a hypomanic state it feels normal and they feel happy. It is also a state difficult to recognize unless you have been around the person for a long time. Even then you might dismiss it because they seem happy and you feel happy because it isn't that constant woeful state of depression.

(I would say there is a fourth, but face as well, one the Bipolar individual can put on to hide the other faces. The Bipolar Person is quite capable of holding a mask before her, a kind of smiley face on a stick, like in a certain TV ad for an antidepressant medication. They can present themselves as very normal to those around them when in a social environment; but they have trouble holding on to the mask when out of public sight. We have to remember Bipolar is what they have, not who they are. Somewhere behind all the faces is the real person and they are hurting horribly.

Her Hypomanic behavior swelled most of the year, but along with it our bank account was shrinking. By the fall we were beginning to struggle and fall behind in our bills even though we didn’t seem to be doing anything much different that would account for our financial downturn.

One day, I spotted some strange bills in a drawere from stores we didn’t frequent, such as Bloomingdales. Here were several statements from them addressed to my wife for credit card purchases. When I asked about this she admitted to having  several credit cards from different places in her own name. When she was awake in the middle of the night she was just cleaning, she was also buying stuff from QVC and the Home Shopping Network (HSN). QVC, which recently bought out HSN) is a 24/7 shopping channel founded nearby to North Delaware in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1986. Much of her decorating purchases purchases were from QVC, but there were also clothes and other merchandise from stores where she had obtained credit cards. We were headed for real disaster.

I discussed this with my assistant, we had become close enough we discussed everything in our lives. Linda suggested Lois see a psychiatrist. Meanwhile, I managed to talk Lois into going to a State Funded Debt Help Agency. They cut up her cards and put us on a strict budget. They also contacted our creditors and made arrangements for us to clear our debts by making a single payment each month through this agency until all our debts were clear. This was not a loan and there was no fee to us for the agency’s services. They were part of a government consumer department..

As a result, Lois plunged back into her depressive side. She struggled with not being able to spend money freely. The restrictions weren’t easy for me either. It took quite some time until we were out from under this debt load, but we managed it.

            If Lois had her complaints about the agency and the budget; she really resisted the idea of a

psychiatrist. She finally and grudgingly gave in and we went to see a Doctor in Wilmington. He met with her several times and diagnosed her as being a Manic-Depressive (The term Bipolar was not yet generally used). He explained she was heavily toward the depressive side, but not purely clinically depressed. This, though, was something more easily spotted since she suffered such deep depressions and complained about them to others and when she saw doctors. She did have Manic periods, but these tended to be ignored because she felt good when in a manic state and did not consider them abnormal.
     The spending sprees were not an uncommon symptom for a Manic-Depressive nor was her youthful sexual exhibitionism and tendencies toward sexual risk taking. Since these had fitted well with my own sexual fantasies and desires, I had seen her behavior as a benefit. I did not see her spending sprees as a benefit.

The psychiatrist prescribed some new medications to address the Manic-Depressive problem, and she took these for a brief period, but then refused them. She also terminated any more visits with the psychiatrist. She refused to accept his diagnosis that she was Manic-Depressive. Depressive, yes, manic, no; and she went back to her old medication, which really wasn’t helping her much, and as we learned years later, made her worse. Depression, she argued, was something everyone had from time to time and her mother had suffered bouts of it. She saw it as more or less a common disorder. Manic-Depression was something else, a mental disease, something people were institutionalize for. She was not crazy!

The spending sprees ended, but her other mixes of behavior continued, rising up and down like an out of control roller coaster she couldn’t get off.

My psoriasis was spreading again. My skin had been fairly well cleared a few years earlier after taking some lightbox treatments and then visiting tanning booths. After I ceased those visits It had gradually returned, going even further than it had ever been and it had been at times extensive. But it had always confined the scales and rash to those parts of my body hidden beneath clothing, plus some in my scalp. Suddenly it crossed these boundaries. Not only did flare ups appear on the backs of my hands, the white patches and redness was showing up on my face.

I went back to a dermatologist. I was first referred to a female dermatologist, Fanny Berg, a

young doctor and really beginning her own practice. My family physician referred me to her. However, when I went there I was a immediately put off by her style. She burst into the examining room and her first words were, “Okay, drop them”. The “them” referenced to my pants. This seemed rather abrupt. Why we hardly knew each other. Shouldn’t we have at least had dinner before she demanded I get nude?

I disliked her brusque manner and did not return after that first visit. It was not really shyness about my body. I had been through enough by then that showing my skin didn’t upset me. It was her style. She could have greeted me a bit more gently before demanding I take off my lower garments.

I then went to another doctor, Maurice Thew, a male this time, and him I liked. (In this more recent photo, he is on the left. The woman on the right is his wife, Dr. Maugurita Thew.) He came across more professional. He prescribed not light treatments, but a bunch of salves and oils, as I described in my previous chapter, as well as taking three (not one, not two, but THREE) baths daily. After each bath with a special oil added to the water, I was to smear moisturizer all over my body, then sit for 20 minutes before dressing. Certainly this was an easy assignment for someone with a busy job to accomplish. Yeah, right!

I could easily take a bath and comply before going to work in the morning despite this forcing me to rise earlier. I could also have a more relaxing bath and slippery sitting sometime in the evening. But what about that third soak?

It proved not a problem.

As I mentioned, Linda, my assistant lived in an apartment about a 15-minute walk from the

office. She had an Apple Macintosh and since it was better at graphics than the Compaqs now on the desks of Deposit Services (my project push for PCs had come to full bloom by now), we spent a lot of time in her apartment working on our newsletter and training manuals for the Action Concept Teams. I was there so much that she gave me my own key so I could come and go as needed.

So there I went every day for that third bath routine, usually during my lunch hour.

Perhaps I should note here that my lunch hour was more an expression than an actuality. As an exempt position, my job was very flexible. I generally took more than an hour for lunch because I would go for long walks through Wilmington and these often took me longer than the officially alotted time.  At this point in my career I had no boundaries as long as I did my job, which I did very well. I generally put in more than the hours stated on my job description. I didn’t like staying overtime, something I never enjoyed, but I generally came to work very early, like close to 6 o’clock AM. I got a lot of work done that early because I was usually the only one there until about 8:30. No one to bother me, no ringing telephone, no meetings. I was on salary, so I didn’t get paid for the extra hours I put in, and I put in a lot, but I didn’t get docked in any way for taking some extra minutes at lunch or occasionally slipping out early.

I also did a lot of work at home. I had been given a special gizmo that allowed me to access the bank’s computer files from remote places. It had an ever changing password you had to enter very quickly before it changed. Once in I was connected between my home computer and those at Wilmington Trust. I did much, much work at home. (I probably should note that I also had the highest security clearance one could be given. I could get into everything, including customers’ accounts and payroll records. It is a good thing I am a honest person.)

So going to Linda’s and staying there was not a problem for me. My guess is that it did probably cause some rumors and gossip with fellow employees just my going there so much. I wonder what they would have thought if they knew I was sitting naked in her bathtub?

I would go and take my oil infused bath. Afterward I would dry off and smear myself with the moisturizer. Once all buttered up and slippery, I would sit in a chair in her bedroom for the required 20 minutes before dressing. Early on I had tried sitting in the living room, wrapped in a towel, but she felt a bit uncomfortable with that and I was thus relegated to her bedroom. We would discuss anything we were discussing through the walls.

Something we discussed was our childhoods. Linda told me about her growing up in North Dakota. It was a familiar story of both isolation and bullying. The boys, and for that matter the girls, would tell her she was homely and she had a hard time overcoming her lowered self-image. It didn’t help that she was also quite a bit smarter than the average young Dakita bear. I knew the feeling and something about growing up in a small town. I could have written a novel on the order of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis from my own experiences.

Certainly I did not see her as homely at all. I thought she was attractive. In fact, I was developing a deeper feeling toward her than just a business partnership. Part of this was fueled by

how much our minds worked alike. One day in the late Spring 1988 we walked along the river talking. I snapped a picture of her on a bridge. We talked about Madonna’s nudes, of all things. She had expressed some curiosity and I had brought the infamous magazines for her to see. I don’t know exactly why I had them; they were hardly new. They had hit the magazine stands back in 1985 and stirred up a lot of controversy and comments.  I think I bought them out of curiosity of what all the fuss was and simply kept them. I am a packrat. I have a hard time throwing anything away.

The first had been in “Penthouse” and were photos of a young Madonna before fame. What caused most of the commotion wasn’t her nudity so much as her unshaven armpits. “Playboy” had quickly brought out their own photo spread, but of a more groomed woman. Back in the 1950’s “Playboy” caused a stir by publishing a nude Marilyn Monroe. “Penthouse” won the Battle of '85.

I though on that balmy day that something might happen between us. The air was ripe with romance and maybe the erotic magazines would trigger something. Do not think I wasn’t hoping. I’m no saint. I don’t claim to be immune from earthly temptations.

Sorry to disappoint, but nothing ever happened. She went back to her apartment building and I took a long walk through Wilmington’s Brandywine Park. I then went home and told Lois what I had felt and what I had wanted to happen. They say confession is good for the soul. It’s also a little risky and Lois was angry at first, but I wanted no secrets between us. From this world’s perspective I had stayed true to my wife. I could still say I never cheated on her and still never have, but I wonder if Linda had asked me back to her apartment that afternoon whether I would have continued in my fidelity.

I am grateful nothing happened. Can you imagine the trouble I'd been in, not only committing adultery, but with a priest as well. What layer of Dante's Inferno would that have put me in?

That spring the new operation center was completed. Deposit Services and Data Preparation moved into the building called the Plaza by late June, as did the other operations departments such as the Computer Center and mailing. I had a roomy office on the upper floor with a view across the front entry drives to the New Castle Airport.

On July 10 my parents came down and joined the kids and me at the open house and tour of the new Wilmington Trust Plaza at New Castle Corporate Commons. Lois didn’t come due to her problems. The Plaza erected a large tent out front and served food from beneath it, hot dogs, hamburgers, BBQ chicken and salads. They had a giant cake.

Out front was an island between the driveways with a flagpole in its center. Every morning the flag was raised and every evening it was lowered. Set in concreate near the base of the pole were footprints and a signature. This was in honor of Etta Harper.

Etta was an Assistant Vice-President and Section Manager for Data Preparations. She was a

petite and gentle lady and her and I had become friends over the years. In the photo she is the lady toward the front.  Etta would eventually become Wilmington Trust’s longest serving employee. She was already such a legend in Data preparation that they dedicated the new Operation Center to her and put her footprints into a cement block at the base of the flagpole (I wonder if it is still there?) At that time, she was 60 years old and had been employed there for 43 years.  I was 47 and it amazed me that I was only 4 years old when she came to WTC. I was just entering kindergarten and she was entering Data Preparation. That was shocking to think about, too. She had never worked anywhere else except in that department of Wilmington Trust. It was quite a different place in 1945 and she worked her way up from the bottom to run the place.

Etta passed away on October 22, 2007 around the age of 81. She worked at Wilmington Trust for 62 years, which meant she was still there the year she died. I didn’t particularly like the way they treated her in her last years. (I didn’t much care for the way I was treated either, but my treatment will come later in our story. I am just jumping ahead some here to tell about Etta.) They finally moved her from being the Section Manager. She got placed back in a corner somewhere and given busy work. There was no way that they would have terminated her outright. She was too much an institution. Stories had been written about her in the News Journal, for Pete’s sake. She had to be kept around and sometimes shown off for public relations reasons, then they would dust her off and display her. She finally did them the convenience of dying.

I loved Etta.

There was a hard year a-comin'.

From the Crest of the Hill...

My mother was unable to get into Phoenixville Hospital to visit my grandmother all the way through the Fifth of January 1986. A nurse called and said my grandmother was confused and in some pain. My mother was finally able to visit on the sixth. Grandmother looked terrible and my mother felt very bad; she feared she might have to put her in a nursing home.

On Wednesday my dad came home without his truck. he had left it on route.  He had pneumonia. Around 10:00 AM the hospital called and said my grandmother wasn’t good, so mom and dad went in to see her. She died about 10 minutes after they arrived. Mother was grateful the suffering was over. Lois and I gathered up the kids and we drove down to the hospital.

Esther Wilson Brown died at 10:00 Am on January 8, 1986 at the age of 86 years 7 months.

The undertaker came the next morning to pick up her clothes and the viewing was held on the tenth at Grove Methodist Church and the funeral was performed there the next day. She was interred next to my grandfather, Francis Fizz Brown and my infant son, Michael, who had been buried atop his great grandfather in 1967. A luncheon was held back in the church fellowship.

This is the last photograph taken of my grandmother, Christmas 1985, just a day over two-weeks before her passing. Despite over a year of pain and suffering she still looked like the strong farm girl she was. She had been born at the family farm called Marchwood on June 11, 1899, the youngest of six children born to William and Anna Wilson, all of whom she outlived. She married a carpenter, Francis Brown in February 26,1920 (yeah, do the math and you’ll see my mother was born a little less than 4 months later). My grandfather preceded her to the grave on February 6, 1957, leaving her almost 30 years a widow.

My graandmother’s family, 1900. From left to right: standing – Heber, Clare, Evans, Billy and Helen. Seated – William Frederick Wilson and Anna Margaret Dunlap Wilson holding Esther Wilson Brown. Helen and Esther were named for their grandmother Esther Helen Bicking.

The day after the funeral, my father went into Phoenixville Hospital with double pneumonia on the 12^th. He was not discharged until the 18^th. In the meantime, Lois, the kids and I came up to Bucktown and stayed with my mother. She was having a difficult time coping with all this death and sickness and she missed my grandmother so much.

Four days after dad was released from the hospital he went in for x-rays. They found his one lung was not completely cleared and he was immediately readmitted for another week. This must have been a concerning time for him given his family history. His own father, Benjamin Franklin Meredith (left); his Maternal Grandfather, William Elsworth Townsley and his Grand Uncle, James Hunter Townsley all died within a three-week period in 1937 of pneumonia. (In this photo James is standing on the log wagon to the far left. William Townsley is to the far right on the ground., 1931. Others in the photo are James Ivan Townsley, one of William's children; his son-in-law, James Skiles; and two of William's grandchildren: Charles Richard Johnson, Jr., and Charlotte Jean Johnson [Their mother was William’s first child, Clara Susanna Townsley.]

I headed down to Miami, Florida on January 25 to another of the BAI Productivity Conferences. Perhaps it would be good to escape all the drama and winter for a time. It snowed off and on all week and the temperatures were beginning to drop. Everything was going into the bleak time of winter now that the Christmas lights had come down. The trees were bare and forelorn and the snow along the streets were black with dirt and turned to slush. Miami should be worlds away from all the dreariness…as long as there was no gun fighting in our street this year.

It was a quick trip down the coast line to Florida compared to the 6-hour plus flight and St. Louis layover out to Los Angeles the year before. It felt as soon as we reached cruising altitude we were beginning our decent for landing. Once again I was greeted by the sight of palm trees as I left the airport to catch a taxi, but man, it was cold. The chill was to remain my whole trip.

I felt sorry for the Floridians and other southerners who were there. The temperatures were dipping down into the thirties. I was lucky because I had my winter coat that I had started my trip wearing. The natives of that area were not equipped for this and they were walking about shivering with chattering teeth. This cold snap had hit the whole country and this unusual weather was long before Al Gore could make up scare stories about Global Warming. Up in Pennsylvania and Delaware the thermometers got down into the low teens, dropping to 12 degrees, while the wind increased. With two weeks-worth of snow on the ground it wasn’t likely to warm up quickly.

I was staying in the St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort, in those boom times Wilmington Trust always booked me into first class lodging. (By the way, if they spell harbor with a u, it is the same as adding extra dollar signs to everything around.) I found Florida exceedingly boring. There wasn’t much to do in Bal Harbor beyond the conference. I tried walking, but you couldn’t go anywhere. There was like a wide highway and it curved off around a bend and disappeared.

Across this wide highway was a mall, the Bar Harbour Shops. I wandered over to it. Although I could enter the Mall proper, nothing was open. It was as dead as everything else in the area. Very few people were out on the beach. There were half-dozen surfers paddling out off a jetty. They wore those rubber scuba outfits. One couple walked the sand hand and hand, but they were dressed more for skiing than swimming.

On Monday the 28^th, when we broke for lunch, I took another little hike along the beach. This was just before noon. When I came back into the lobby there was a great deal of activity. Groups of people had formed around some of the TV monitors in the lounge. I saw a lot of downcast faces and asked a man hurrying by me what was going on.

“The space shuttle blew up,” he said and hurried away. This was to be a very historic launch, one of great anticipation and interest. This was the tenth Challenger shuttle flight and for many these count downs and launches had become rather routine. What had drawn so much excitement to this particular one was the inclusion of school teacher Christa McAuliffe as one of the two payload specialists. Fo this reason many school kids were watching the launch in their classroom, including McAuliffe’s students. 73 seconds into the flight there was this snake-like pattern of smoke across the sky and everyone froze in stunned horror. All seven crew on board were killed. It was decided the O-ring seal on the right rocket booster failed due to the unusual cold.

Tragedy and death appeared to be stalking me.

On Wednesday, right after the closing session, I was going back to my room. As I approached the elevator bank I saw only one man waiting by the buttons. As I came near his eyes grew large and he backed up a couple steps, holding his hands out in a stay-away gesture.

He began screaming, “What’d you got! What’d you got! And he ran down the corridor and disappeared.

I felt like running after him and shouting, “I’ve got The Rot and it’s highly contagious.” However I didn’t.

I was diagnosed with psoriasis when I was 15 and probably had it long before that, but in all the past years I had never had anyone act in such a way. Very, very few ever even commented on my scales or rash. Those who did usually mistook it for Poison Ivy, especially children. Of course, last summer with a combination of tanning salons and summer sun I had lost most of the signs of the disease. I had ceased going to the tanning salons as the skin cleared up, but now summer was months over and winter is a bad time to have this thing. There is far less exposure to sun and even when it is sunny one is hardly ambling about in shorts. Winter tends to bring physical discomfort. The flare ups are larger and more often. You have periods of annoying itching. The rash hurts, feeling like a bad sunburn at times, the kind where your clothes hurt as the material moves with your movement. Even the bed covers can hurt and make sleep difficult. I knew my condition had worsened. I could see the scales and redness form on the back of my hands. It had never seen that before, showing up on generally sun-exposed areas. Something else to think about when I returned home. It was certain I wasn’t going to get much relief on Miami’s beaches, even in my Speedo

It was also a fact that my psoriasis was going to get worse.

A few days after flying home from Miami, I had to drive back to the Philadelphia Airport with my dad. He was finally over his pneumonia and able to work again, but when he had taken sick he was in Buffalo and it was there he left his truck. He was flying back to pick it up.

Lois and I managed to get a couple days to ourselves during February by dropping the kids off at my parents. Lois was beginning to have what she referred to as panic attacks as well as her depressions. Of course the events at the beginning of this year were not helping with her problems. She was claiming it was inherited, that her mother suffered the same depressions, but would sometimes blame it on her father’s verbal abuse and indifference or on the bullying she had received in school. She was also beginning to complain about Bethel Baptist and claiming Pastor Ryle was her problem. Her resentments against churches would continue to grow.  (In the photo are Lois’s Godparents, John and Leona Gerhart to the left, and her parents, Harry and Dorothy Raab Heaney on the right.)

Misty, my parents Chihuahua, was ill. She was refusing to go to my dad, which was unusual since she liked him best of all. She had done nothing but bark, snarl and nip at me since my mother got her as a pup. One of my dad’s truck driver friends gave the dog to mom after my Chihuahua, Cindy, had died. Misty was nothing like Cindy. Misty was just mean to everyone except mom and dad. I always feared she’d bite the kids. Still, I didn’t want to see anything happen to her on top of my Grandmother’s passing and dad finding his dog, Greta, dead earlier in the year.

Things were rough on everyone. My mom came down for Laurel’s 8^th birthday in March, but all she could do was cry. She said she guessed my grandmother’s death finally hit her. 

On April 14, I spent Tax day in Washington. Nothing to do with the taxes, of course. I was there for another three-day seminar given by the AMA, a continuing credits course on Bank Operations Management.

In April, the day before my mom and dad’s 45^th wedding anniversary, my Uncle Bill was in a serious auto accident with a pickup just outside of Media. He was taken to Riddle Hospital. On June 22^nd my parents were down to our place and Lois made them a large turkey dinner. That evening they went to see Francy (my dad’s youngest brother) at the hospital. Uncle Francy was in a halo brace that ran down his back and screwed into the top of his head. He had fractured his neck and his back and had a concussion. He couldn’t remember anything at all about the accident. It would be a slow recovery.

Immediately after visiting Francy, they went to Coatesville to see my Uncle Ben, dad’s other brother (dad was the oldest). Ben was ailing and would require an operation on July 31. My Aunt Dot (right) had died just before Christmas 1985. Dot and Ben had separated by then and I believe she died of cancer, but both Ben and Dot were alcoholics. Most of their time together had been spent at bars. Even so, Ben was my favorite uncle. He always was in a good mood when we saw him, whether during a visit at the house or more often at the barroom of the Fraternal Order of Eagles in Coatesville.

During July and August, we took the kids several places, such as the circus, Dorney Park and the Philadelphia Zoo, plus the annual Wilson Family Reunion in late August. We also took them to the Brandywine Creek State Park for the first time, they explored the creek bank searching for frogs or tadpoles in the water.
Then on September 7, my parents surprised us with a big party at a restaurant called Yonglings between Pottstown and Boyertown. It was our 25^th wedding anniversary. We were taken totally by surprise and a little embarrassed by all the fuss. (Photo, me and Lois opening gifts as handed to us by Laurel, Noelle, Darryl and Kelli Ann, my Uncle Francy’s daughter.) But this was a joyous occasion in what had been a year of gloom in the family. Perhaps the drama was ending.

But one thing I have learned as a lifetime hiker is the trails you start out on lead uphill. That

is the draw and the challenge, to conquer the mounts and push through all obstacles, the rivers needing fording, the downed trees to clamber over, the hidden hornet nests that lead to stings upon the ankles; the bruises and scrapes and skinned knees as you force yourself to stand after a trip and fall. Then there is the other lesson learned after you have fought through all of that, endured the itch of poison ivy or the hurts from stinging thistle, and you have climbed the hill to the top; you stand looking from the crest at nothing but going down, and you discover that gravity on the descent is no more a friend that it was on the ascent.

I had conquered a lot of rocky country getting where I was and here I stood on the crest. I stepped out with confidence in my balance then on December First I hired Linda as my Assistant and my balance was thrown off.