THE RESORT YEARS - I

THE RESORT YEARS – or Why RESORT to another business in Strawberry CA  The Mile-High hamlet, population 163?

Life was churning along nicely two years after the Strawberry Inn.  Tom being the computer guru with customers/clients as diverse as his “Renaissance Man” personality – Title Companies, dental appliance fabricators, water companies, road builders, realtors, excavators, even a dry cleaner clamored for his genius.  Computer was his “native tongue.”

I was enjoying biding my time as opposed to every minute being devoted to some aspect of THE INN!  I took classes at the Community College – History from 1865 to the present, several creative writing courses, public speaking, argumentation, Community Chorus every Monday night.   I created Rolodex cards for a company that Tom and a friend had started to advertise local businesses to NEW businesses in our county – B2B, business to business (they should have copywrited the term as it is now everywhere!)  Lucky, the UPS driver, and I became good friends and I was able to work from home in Strawberry. 

When I snagged a job at the Tuolumne Medical Clinic as a medical transcriptionist I thought perhaps I’d found my “new niche;” even taking a course at the College thinking it might augment my Creative Writing.  My San Jose friends had been encouraging my writing efforts for years, even urging me to find a writers group locally.  The debts from the Inn to the IRS (forgiven debt is TAXABLE!) and the various venders were being paid off by my various part time jobs – waitress, hostess, medical transcriptionist, and two Sunday Organist jobs.  The Mountain Bible Study was providing spiritual support and stretching my scholarship with the occasional study written by me.  Life was good…I do love variety!

Then the phone rang one Friday evening just days before I was to talk to my boss at the Aladdin Motel where I had been working in the restaurant as a hostess.  He needed a desk clerk and knew of my experience at the Inn.  I had mused just a few weeks earlier about Carol Cole running the Alumni Camp in Pinecrest - “I could run a camp too!”  Then a few days later when I picked up our mail at the Strawberry Post Office and a neighbor - ten years older than I - handed me the mail saying that she and her husband were taking on the RESORT.  “They are too old for that” I mused as I trudged home still between jobs, between semesters, between yesterday and tomorrow.

The phone call was from our neighbors of fifteen years who had just had the second couple decide that managing the RESORT was more than they could handle.  We asked for the weekend to “think about it.”  I don’t remember asking the Mountain Bible Study to pray as well, I would hope that we did.  We decided that the price was very good, the guests of the RESORT were known to me as our daughter and I swam with them nearly every afternoon all summer long.  We had had a pool in San Jose and always said that we would NEVER have another pool – TOO MUCH WORK! – so for the fifteen years we had lived in Strawberry, a pool membership worked just fine, thank you!!  Did I want another “job” in Strawberry where I could walk to work, answer the reservation calls from home and still do the fun stuff that I had discovered AFTER the Strawberry Inn?  Well, we decided, I had been ASKING for it, in my thoughts at least, for several weeks and we didn’t have to get a loan from a bank, the owners were going to carry the papers.

Six years later when Tom had a stroke, a bleed in his brain, causing epilepsy I could see God’s Hand preparing a way for us to survive the loss of Tom’s computer wizardry.  Had we had anything BUT his and her businesses we never would have survived.  There were times when I had to “catch a ride” to the customer’s location where he had collapsed and drive him home.  We began setting Tuesdays and Thursdays as “ComputerVan days” so I could be his driver when the local neurologist reported him to DMV and my “primary driver” lost his license.  It took YEARS to pay for the helicopter ride to Modesto in 2000, but we did get a good neurologist who has helped him control his seizures, get his driver’s license back and enjoy a reasonable quality of life.  He has been on seizure meds for 20 years now, changing every couple of years when they seem to quit working properly.  The changing of meds also helps to preserve the kidneys / the liver as the neurologist attempted to alternate between the pills that required a quarterly liver enzyme report and the ones that did not!  The current, very expensive med has even given him thinking power again, but the short term memory is not so good after all these years of medication.