Category: Ties

At our BAMBARA brunch, Suzanne gave me a Valentine’s card, a birthday card, and an Easter card. This was her signal to me that our first real dining-out-fancy in a restaurant since the pandemic began was meant to celebrate more than just Easter. In my post this morning, I told you Suzanne called our 3-in-1 holiday “Valenbirtheaster.” But after we completely filled our tummies at brunch, Suzanne had yet a fourth “holiday” which we needed to acknowledge on her agenda.

Not only did we not venture out to a restaurant to celebrate our 7th Anniversary back in December, I had told Suzanne that in honor of our anniversary, I wanted us to go on a trek to re-visit the three places we had lived in Salt Lake City when we first got together way back in the ancient 80’s. Due to the pandemic and life’s busy-ness in general, we never got around to doing the anniversary abode trek—until Suzanne surprised me with just such a nostalgic drive after brunch yesterday.

Behind us in the first photo is a house which had been split into apartments, one of which was our first residence. Our apartment was on 8th East, near the 9th and 9th neighborhood. We lived on the 2nd floor, in a U-shaped apartment. Suzanne’s brother, James, lived with us in this apartment too. We enjoyed watching him eat pizza-sized pancakes whole. Most notably, our apartment had red popsicle-colored walls surrounding the bathtub. Also, we had a neighbor across the hall who had the jaunty name of Sadie Cowboy. She was probably not much older than us, but she had lost most of her teeth—likely to violence. She did have a young daughter whose laughter brightened Sadie’s otherwise dire situation. One of our downstairs neighbors was a Goliath of a U of U football player named Kyle who took a liking to us, and made sure nobody gave us any trouble.

Our second apartment was in a big complex on 9th East, around 3rd South. We had a lot more room there, and the apartment was closer to the U of U where I had a teaching fellowship. But the apartment’s plastic yellow carpet was sharp to bare feet, so we wore shoes in the apartment all the time. If we wanted to sit on the floor to read the Sunday paper or watch a movie, we had to lay down a thick blanket over the carpet first. I kid you not, if your skin directly touched the carpet, it gave you a carpet burn even if you were completely still. We named that apartment The Kingdom of Scary Yellow Carpet. We had another U of U football player living right next door to us there too, but he wasn’t protective like the football guy from our first apartment building. On more than one occasion this guy threw his wife against the wall we shared, knocking out his wife, and knocking our pictures off the wall.

In the third photo here, you are seeing us in front of two houses on 10th Avenue, just off I Street. When we visited our third—and final—SLC apartment we once occupied, we couldn’t agree which house our garden apartment was in. Suzanne thinks we lived in the baby blue one, and I think the gray-blue one’s house numbers sounded like the right address. We aren’t sure which one housed us, but we are sure it was one of the two. It doesn’t surprise me we aren’t positive about it, because we didn’t live in this one very long.

And so, after revisiting our old SLC domiciles, the word Valenbirtheaster had to get longer. I have officially christened yesterday’s celebration of four different things to be “Valenbirtheastaversary.”