First Challenges, Wicho the Cat, and Our First Christmas Together
In which Teófilo talks about his first challenges and the arrival of his first animal companion.
Thus, I got into a routine, which turned into a rut. I started deploying with the Flights for “camping duty.” I assure you if I had been your run-of-the-mill outdoorsy American, I would’ve had a blast. But I wasn’t. I just had lots of time for myself in irregular turns, and the weather started its march toward the typical Dakota winter. I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but there was a mismatch between my expectations and where I’d wanted to be. The mismatch starting worming into my unconscious mind. The result were headaches which would soon develop into migraines, the firsts in my life. My uppity college attitude also didn’t lead me to develop any friendships with my military colleagues at first, as I came off often as an insufferable jackass.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was to be the coldest day of the season so far, with -14℉ air temperature alone. We heard a cat meowing pitifully outside and we let him in. He had a bluish-gray color the likes we’d never seen before. We thought he belong to someone as it didn’t look uncared for. Besides, once we got to buy him food, he would meow at the top of his lungs when he heard the can-opener whirr. Against the explicit directives of the park owners, we kept him. We called him Wicho (WEEH-choh). We don’t remember why. He often slept between us on bed, gasping a silent meow softly when Mercie and I pressed against each other, forgetting he was there.
One day in the spring of ’87 he left us, but a few days later he reappeared, gaunt, smelly, sick. We put had to put him down. Wicho was the first animal companion I cried for, bawling, so much so Mercie was very concerned. We tried having other cats, but it never worked out. There was no one like Wicho and never would be.
I spent my Thanksgiving Day in 1985 at some missile site. Mercie spent the holiday watching A Christmas Story on our first color TV, gifted to us by Sgt. D. It was tube-powered, the heaviest set I’d ever owned. We had no cable, so she watched the show using the TVs rabbit-ear antennas and surfing the three channels we could see with minimal haze.
By Christmas, maintenance crews worked hard to clear all the sites so that there were no camper teams guarding them. The maintenance cycle also decreased to give down time to everyone between Christmas a New Year’s.
We purchased our first Christmas tree from a lot nearby. It was famished, with very few branches, one step up from Charlie Brown’s famed Christmas tree. We called it our Christmas “Tumbleweed,” also a new phenomenon we’d never seen until we’d moved to South Dakota. It didn’t matter, we had a great holiday season, our first Christmas season as a married couple. Thus passed the 20th year of our lives.