I was talking to my friend Brenda the other day. She and I go way back to our days working together at The Houston Post. When The Post closed we both went to the Houston Chronicle.
She and her late husband had a change of life baby and I came up with a name for her: Vanessa Van Straten. Not too shabby in my opinion. Evidently both parents thought it was a good name because that’s what they named her.
We went to lunch one day and had a terrible car wreck. A man was stopped in the lane of traffic we were in because he’d had a flat tire. A lady from Sugar Land in a huge van didn’t notice we were stopped and hit us from behind without using her brakes.
The impact was so hard that both Brenda’s shoes and socks came off her feet and her earrings hit the windshield. Luckily no one was hurt badly. We were both just a little sore the following few days.
Something went crazy with the insurance company. My agent was evidently in the hospital for a long time and nobody in his office noticed that my claim hadn’t been taken care of. It was many phone calls and a few months later that he finally came back to work and settled everything.
He was really embarrassed about how long everything took and he sent me $12,000 and he sent Brenda $2,000 just for being in the car. Her husband told her that she could ride around with me anytime.
She lived life out in the suburbs of Houston in an area called Spring, while I lived in the lively neighborhood of Montrose close to downtown. She was often jealous of my stories of going out to the clubs and just being a 20-something in general even though she was only a couple of years older than me. So I used to invite her to sleepovers so she could get a taste of the nightlife. It was fun to see her living a very different life than she normally did. She had a good time.
Many years later, her husband developed serious heart problems. He eventually had to carry around one of those things that pumps blood into his heart. I’m sure I don’t understand it all, but he would be on the heart transplant list and then some thing would happen and he’d be taken off the list. Just a horrible time of waiting and being excited and then they’d be crestfallen when he was taken off the list. A long period of ups and downs because a new heart was the only thing that was going to cure him. He ended up dying before he could get the transplant and that was a very sad time.
Brenda still works for the Houston Chronicle and luckily she’s able to do so from home. So she ended up moving in with her daughter and her husband and kids in Seattle and can still do her job from there.
One of the funniest things we love to laugh about happened in the classified department of The Houston Post. She sat right in front of me and she was taking a car for sale ad from a customer. I could hear her saying a word over and over asking the man if she heard him correctly. Then I got a call and didn’t think anything more about it.
The next morning I got a call and it turned out to be the same man she talked to the day before. He said, “There’s a critter in my ad and I need to take him out.”
This was an odd request but I looked his ad up in the computer and sure enough there was a critter in it.
He had wanted to add the word “Awesome!” with an exclamation point at the end of his car description. Instead what I found was “Possom!”
We still laugh about that to this day. kyle@rockdalereporter.com
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