Page 24 - eBook Living Water 2

5 For Better or For Worse?

About three years later, when I was twenty nine years old, a
well-dressed guy came into my travel agency to purchase an airline
ticket to bring his brother in from California to attend their Dad’s
funeral. His parents had been long time customers of mine. His name
was Fred Huhn. He looked interesting and attractive to me.
However, after purchasing the tickets, it would be another five
months before we would meet again.

That following May, on a quiet Saturday afternoon in 1973,
the door to my travel agency opened and when I looked up, there was
Fred; this time dressed casually in jeans. He said that he had come to
get some information about taking a trip in September with his
girlfriend to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and renting a sailboat.

After giving him the information he needed, we spent several
hours sharing back and forth about ourselves. I already knew his
cousin who was my high school classmate and I knew that his parents
had owned one of the first drive-in restaurants on the New Jersey
shore back in the early 1940’s. He also shared how much he liked
dogs and that he had an Afghan. I had a Chesapeake Bay retriever
that I had in the office with me. We found out that we both were
planning to attend the same dog show on the following Saturday. We
ended our time by agreeing to meet each other there.

After the dog show the following week, he asked me out for
dinner. We went to a local Italian restaurant. Sitting at the bar for an
hour while waiting for a table, gave us time to share a bit more about
our lives. Fred had been married for three years to a girl he met while
he attended college in Cleveland, Ohio. He never finished school. He
was only a semester shy of graduation when his marriage failed.
They divorced and he moved back to New Jersey. He had been home
for a year and was working for his cousin as a heavy duty equipment
operator.