Coffee with Mike (Part 3)

My daughters were good girls, very special. Debby and I took such joy in them! Watching them learn to walk and talk and potty train. We enjoyed every minute with them. They liked to wake up early in the morning, before Debby and I. They would get all their baby dolls and stuffed animals out and put them in a circle, sit in the middle, and watch Care Bears and My Little Pony’s on TV. They were only two years old at the time. They wouldn’t come in in the mornings and wake us up and bother us. They would just wait until we got up. And vacations were always special with them. We got to see the Giant Red Woods, and went to places like Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios, the beach…everywhere.

When the girls were about three, every couple weeks on a Saturday morning, Debby and I would fill up their bedroom with balloons and just watch them have fun all day long. It took us about half a day to blow up all the balloons by mouth, but it was fun for us all. They would go in and pop em’, play in em’, and jump in ‘em. Those were good times!

I was eventually laid off from Goldworthy and we decided to move to San Bernardino, CA where Debby’s two sisters and kids lived. There wasn’t much manufacturing going on there at the time, but we still had some savings left so I started working on bikes again doing welding. I would weld the frames and my friend would put them together. I was good at it from my high school days. I got to know a lot of the “hard core” bikers from different clubs and some of us actually became good friends. Actually the major biker gangs all started in San Bernardino back in 1950s, so I knew a lot of the hard core, old school bikers and became good friends with a lot of them. I never did get in a club though, at that time. A bunch of us just started hanging out together and riding together. I never got the tattoos like they all get…I just wasn’t into the tattoo thing. So everything was going good. I had my wife, two beautiful girls, and a nice little place we were living in. Everything was wonderful especially the holiday season. The girls loved Halloween. They wanted to have the perfect costume, and when we got home from a long night of going door to door dad had to go through the candy and make sure it was “good”. Thanksgiving was a big, fat feast, but of course the girls and I always fell asleep on the couch after dinner. Christmas was our special holiday, just like every other family, watching the kids open their presents, screaming in delight.

Adriana was the shy one. She had a little bit of a speech impediment and couldn’t say her “L’s” or “S’s”, and I think she was shy because of that. But Adrian was very outgoing, but not wild. She would just come up to you before Adriana would. Those girls were so close! They were always together.