A Challenge

That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves.

As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing.

We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy games like Risk. This created some tension as fathers would try to influence daughters’ strategies to defeat others.

A tropical storm came through one year, flooding the neighborhood. We made the most of it by adventuring into the thigh-high water. Sometimes, even if we could go to the beach, we couldn’t go into the water because it would be a red-flag day when the currents and surf were too strong. On a red-flag day, surfers and boogie boarders with fins and leashes are still allowed in but no one else. I had a boogie board but wasn’t exactly clear about the rule on needing fins. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. 

The water was rough so it was really hard to get out to the waves. When I finally did, I got dumped. If it was hard to get out, it was really easy to get back in. I quickly made my way to shore, only to have a policeman waiting for me. That’s when I got clarification on the fins rule. Laura had not wanted me to go out in the first place so she encouraged the policeman to give me a good talking to.

Soon after we moved into our new house, they changed the pay structure at work, and not for the better. It was a commission-based salary and they decided to cut our percentage. There was quite an uproar as others, like me, had also bought houses and made other big decisions based on the pay scale we had agreed on. After buying the house we were also, as they say, house-rich but cash poor.

We were renting out our townhome, which gave us a little income above its costs but the new projected pay scale concerned me. Some of the other techs decided to leave the company over it. We had all signed a non-compete contract but these other techs felt like since the company was reneging on the compensation, they could opt out of the non-compete. I was loath to try start something on my own.

Then it happened again – HAIL! The very same dealership we had fixed hail for down in North Carolina the year before got hit again. Me and the guy I trained with got the two highest pay periods that anyone in the company had ever had out of it.

Meanwhile, the housing market continued to heat up. One day some friends invited us to a party at their house. They had a fire going out in the back yard and there were some people standing around the fire that I didn’t really know. So I had to decide if I wanted to make the effort to break out of my introversion to go engage.

Then, as crystal clear as I had heard anything in my life, as clear as I heard that I was going to marry Laura, I heard, 

 “If you go and engage, you could have a conversation with someone at that fire that could  completely change your life.” 

There were times I really enjoyed the outcome of that conversation and other times I have wished that it had never happened. But how very true that challenge turned out to be.

Thomas doing board hurdles