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    My Twin: The Story of My Life and My Deep Love for My Wife
    My Twin: The Story of My Life and My Deep Love for My Wife
    My Twin: The Story of My Life and My Deep Love for My Wife
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    My Twin: The Story of My Life and My Deep Love for My Wife

    By Gilbert Ruley Smith

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    About this ebook

    The story opens by describing my life in Baltimore before meeting my wife Ruth. In mid-adolescence, I become aware of a strong inner feeling that tells me that the right girl is waiting for me and all I have to do is find her. As an only child, I am really very lonely and anxious for the companionship of the right girl. I spend a lot of time searching for her and getting mixed up with the wrong girls. I do indeed find her and discover that she is a twin. I begin to date her and court her. I find that I am not at all attracted to her twin sister. Thus begins my education on the unusual world of twins and the difficulty of getting along with them. My relationship with Ruth rapidly develops into true love. I develop a very close relationship with Ruth's family. Our love is tested when I am drafted into the Korean War. After the war, it takes a few years for our lives to settle down. We get married in 1957 and live with her twin sister and mother. Having always lived with her twin sister and family, our married life cannot be described as normal. Ruth's twin sister gets married and also lives with us. Then, Ruth and I have two children. Our household is crowded! The story describes the many changes and adjustments necessary over the years to survive our unusual life with emphasis on the enduring true love between Ruth and I. It is our enduring true love that enabled us to not only survive, but to lead a life of happiness that was far above and beyond normal.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateJun 22, 2004
    ISBN9781426940477
    My Twin: The Story of My Life and My Deep Love for My Wife
    Author

    Gilbert Ruley Smith

    I am a retired engineer that worked for NOAA and NASA. Part of my expertise is technical writing and I have many scientific and technical publications. In writing My Twin I had to make the difficult transition from technical writing to writing in conversational English. I find it difficult to generate fiction since my career has been all about writing facts in precise and accurate terms. However, I find it easy to write non-fiction as my own or other people's actual experiences. I still work part time at NASA. I enjoy writing and find it relaxing.

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      Book preview

      My Twin - Gilbert Ruley Smith

      My Twin

      The story of my life

      and my deep love

      for my wife

      glyph.jpg

      By

      Gilbert Ruley Smith

      © Copyright 2004 Gilbert Ruley Smith.

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

      Printed in Victoria, Canada

      National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A cataloguing record for this book that includes the U.S. Library of Congress Classification number, the Library of Congress Call number and the Dewey Decimal cataloguing code is available from the National Library of Canada. The complete cataloguing record can be obtained from the National Library’s online database at: www.nlc-bnc.ca/amicus/index-e.html

      ISBN 1-4120-3210-5

      ISBN 9-7814-2694-047-7

      This book was published on-demand in cooperation with

      Trafford Publishing.

      Suite 6E, 2333 Government St., Victoria, B.C. V8T 4P4, CANADA

      Phone 250-383-6864 Toll-free 1-888-232-4444 (Canada & US)

      Fax 250-383-6804 E-mail [email protected]

      Web site www.trafford.com

      trafford publishing is a division of trafford holdings ltd.

      Trafford Catalogue #04-1037

      www.trafford.com/robots/04-1037.html

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

      glyph.jpg

      This story is dedicated to

      my wonderful wife, Ruth

      her twin sister, Ann

      my two children

      Tom and Judy

      and my grandson

      Ruhley

      glyph.jpg

      Acknowledgements

      The Author wishes to acknowledge Karen Knitkin for her service in editing and my good wife Ruth for her patience in providing continuous review and editing.

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      Chapter One

      My Life Before Ruth

      Chapter Two

      Searching

      Chapter Three

      Meeting Ruth

      Chapter Four

      Dating Ruth

      Chapter Five

      Poverty and Depravation

      Chapter Six

      Getting To Know Her

      Chapter Seven

      Our Relationship

      Chapter Eight

      The Learning Curve

      Chapter Nine

      Separation

      Chapter Ten

      More Problems

      Chapter Eleven

      Marriage

      Chapter Twelve

      The Honeymoon

      Chapter Thirteen

      Life and Love At Home

      Chapter Fourteen

      Children

      Chapter Fifteen

      Our Home

      A House of Love and

      Marital Bliss

      Chapter Sixteen

      Raising the Children

      Chapter Seventeen

      The Other Twin

      Chapter Eighteen

      Reflections

      Introduction

      … my life with my wife has been a story of chapter after chapter of unfolding love…

      In the early part of the second quarter of the twentieth century, on a typically warm mid-August day in Baltimore, Effie Moore unexpectedly gave birth to identical twin girls. She’d had no clue, no idea that she was going to have twins. She had a terrible time because it was a double breech birth and they were both full term. She claimed that she barely survived the experience.

      In those days, twins were so unusual that they were the talk of the hospital. In fact, they were the first set of twins born at that hospital in ten years. Just about everyone that worked at the hospital came by to see them and gush. This event was almost newsworthy. At the time, I was only a little three-year-old boy and I didn’t know it, but this is where it all started for me.

      The Moore twins were given the names Ann and Ruth, Ann being the oldest by a mere six minutes. The parents, Effie and John Moore, were justly proud of their new offspring. What do you do with twins? Well, you work twice as hard and you spend twice as much money! And, oh yes, you spend twice as much time attending to them! On the up side, they are twice the pleasure. On the down side, they are twice the trouble and worry.

      Personally, I had no idea what a profound effect these twin girls were to have on my life. It was nearly sixteen years later that I met them. The Moore twins lived in the western side of Baltimore in a two-story row house with a very small front lawn and equally small back yard. I lived in the south-central, downtown area in a fourth-floor walk-up. Baltimore is a relatively large city and our paths never crossed.

      It has been said that if you have love, you have no other needs. I am here to testify that this is absolutely true. From the practical standpoint, we should re-state this to mean, if you have love and happiness, your other needs will come easily. My life with my wife has been a story of chapter after chapter of unfolding love. Love is the coincident harmony of the minds and bodies of members of the opposite sex.

      The advent of our fortieth wedding anniversary in 1997 attests to the fact that our life together has been one of enduring love. Nearly coincident with this is the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. It is the advent of these anniversaries and, more importantly, my recovery from open-heart by-pass surgery that inspired me to write this relatively brief account. My open-heart surgery was an immediate result of an almost but not quite heart attack in August of 1996. The circumstances of the moments that I have recalled are just a few of many that I consider as important, significant or interesting.

      This story is an account of the never-ending romance and great love between my wife and I, as seen through my eyes. Because she is a twin, it is also a treatise on the subject of twins. My wife, Ruth, and her sister, Ann, are identical twins and therefore, they have always been very close to each other. However, they have different personalities and were not at all inclined, as many twins are, to switch places with one another just for the entertainment of it. For this reason, you will not find the usual twin pranks and colorful stories in my experience.

      They were visibly identical, but one can easily tell them apart just by talking to them. On select subjects, their reactions and behavior are totally different. My Twin, Ruth is beautiful, outwardly shy as a result of her upbringing, very feminine, very tolerant, curious and adventurous. Ann is not quite as feminine, less tolerant, very much a conservative introvert and not at all curious or adventurous. My relationship with Ann has always been that of sister-brother, never anything more and never anything less.

      By definition, a story of love must address the very personal elements of the lives of two people. I can only describe the reality of the moments that I have recalled with the editorial viewpoint of an individual that was deeply involved. There is very little, if any, fiction in what I have written. We inescapably suffer from short perspective if we write only a few years after the events have occurred. I feel that it has been more advantageous to chronicle these events quite a while after the fact. This provides us with a sort of filter on the emotions of the immediate happenings and thus renders a view with a long term, in depth perception.

      As for myself, I am a very independent loner that somehow, through the grace of God and my flexible personality, was able to make the adjustment to being constantly around twins and living in a world and culture that was quite foreign to me. When I first met Ruth, I had a full head of hair. For unknown physiological reasons, over the next four years, I lost all of the hair on the top of my head. I became bald at a very young age. I was disappointed at this but it didn’t deeply disturb me. I am happy to say that Ruth felt the same way. She has never expressed any negative feelings concerning my lack of hair.

      I must state that an account such as this, on the subject of our love, would not be complete without an occasional reference to our private life and the quality of the love and joy expressed in our physical union.

      Gilbert Ruley Smith

      Baltimore, Maryland

      August 2003

      Chapter One

      My Life Before Ruth

      …"things were very different in my day

      and age" …

      I was born in the late 1920’s. I had no siblings. Normally, this would mean that I became a spoiled brat. I am proud to say that this did not happen to me. It is true that life back then had many things in common with today. There were the community things like schools, churches, stores, banks, theaters and, of course, farms, sports and swimming at the beach. However, if you made a list of things of the 1990’s that did not exist in the beginning of the century, it would be quite long.

      In order to fully understand what life was like at any given point in time, you must have lived every detail of the everyday life of an individual in that time. This information, in its entirety, is not in any book and is not recorded in any movie. It is in the memory of the people who lived through that period. I have tapped my memory for the information included in these pages.

      My parents and I lived in Baltimore. It seems that it has always been plagued with the usual big city problems. City people must deal with the problems and try to enjoy their life. In retrospect, I succeeded in doing just that, enjoying my life.

      For the first three years of my life I lived in the western part of the city in the house next door to my mother’s parents. Grandmother and Grandfather Cook were right next-door. It was the time of the Great Depression. No one had any money to speak of. The trade and barter system were universally in use. My father was a carpenter and handyman. He managed to support his family on just seven dollars a week. Think about that, seven dollars a week! During those awful years, we always had a roof over our head and food on the table. For this, I give my father a great deal of credit. He was not alone. Every husband and father in those years faced the same

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