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I’ve got my week completed. Yeah! But Poppy will be going out of town Tuesday night for a meeting, I can never sleep when I’m home and he’s not. You would think that I’d be past that by now, but I think it gets worse every year. I remember being up all night when he had to travel to Fort Chaffee, Ar back when they brought the boat people there after the end of the Viet Nam War. We lived in Memphis and although we’d both grown up Arkansas, neither of us had ever been to Fort Chaffee. He drove over there during the night and got there very early in the morning. I stayed up all that night. Back then he had a mobile phone that he could call Memphis at no charge from anywhere so we were on the phone most of the night, just to stay in touch. It was the first night we had spent apart since we had gotten married. Poppy and I have always been phone talkers to each other.
We lived about 2 hours apart, he in Tennessee and I in Arkansas, when we first started dating. We would talk on the phone for hours and hours. Well, we’d be connected but usually one of us would fall asleep. I’d wake up in the morning and hang up the phone and not remember what we said or how long we talked before I had fallen asleep. One of the reasons we decided to get married was the phone,. Keeping the line connected all night was breaking us both. I’ll never forget telling him I had a $175 phone bill, all the calls to him. It was much cheaper to get married than to pay those bills. Now we have cell phones and the internet and we stay in touch all the time. I don’t think there has been a day in over 33 years that I have not talked to Poppy at least once. I have friends who have been married as long as or longer than we have who go days without hearing their spouse’s voice. I can’t understand how they can do it. Sometimes I think it’s not healthy to be so dependent on our relationship, but it surely would be unhealthy to not hear Poppy’s voice daily.
By the way, he has a very handsome voice. Poppy worked in radio for about 20 years before leaving the profession to work with juvenile offenders and law enforcement. He was pretty well known back in the hey-day of radio news in the 70’s. My family was pretty impressed that I’d married a “celebrity”. Growing up our kids, however, weren’t very impressed. They listened to him on the radio because I listened every hour I could. The only thing they cared about was what voice he used when he got home. Now Poppy wasn’t a disciplinarian by no means, but they knew his mood by the voice he used. If he was in a good mood, he would use his “Daddy voice” but if he was in a bad mood or if they had done something they shouldn’t have, he would use his “radio voice”. When they were little, the “radio voice” would usually settle them down and they would be on very good behavior. They knew that he was pretty upset about something. But as they grew older and knew what a pushover Poppy was, they began to tease him about it. Now they tell their children stories about things they did when they were young and let the grandkids know how much trouble they got in by telling them that “Poppy was so mad that he used his radio voice”. The grandkids are awed by the thought that their Poppy would be mad or upset for any reason.