Things were beginning to change. Eva’s biological clock was ticking and we started having concerns about that. I had never given a thought to having children in this marriage; after all, I had been sterilized by a vasectomy almost twenty years before. It was becoming an issue. I did not know how we were going to resolve the problem and we thought about a number of solutions.

I knew that if we were to have children I was sure that there was only one proper way to raise a child and that was within the influence of the Mormon faith. It was a great responsibility to raise a child and I had checked out of the program and burned some bridges.

We got some unexpected help.

It was a dream like no other dream. It was a vision. It had loud sound, bright flashes, swords, and voices like thunder. It was in color and three dimensions and I was not going to forget this one when I awoke in the morning. This was the real thing…pay attention...it’s not going to be repeated.

I awoke in a strange house with my wife. The Landlord somewhere up high, with a voice like thunder, was driving someone out with a great sword. I ran to the door and threw it open just in time to see someone in white clothes escaping out the door and into an open space like a desert. Young females were coming out of bedrooms down the hall in their night clothes. Were these daughters? No, they were guests, seeking protection in my home. Then a voice, still like thunder, but not shouting, says, “It’s alright, he is safe. He will return.”

I didn’t have a clue what it meant, but I knew I must remember all the details for further valuable information. It was meant to give me comfort, but in my heart I knew I did not deserve it. Later, after giving it some thought, I concluded that the man who escaped in white garments was the me I might have been. In some strange way, I was two characters in the drama.

The bank had been planning to build a new data center 30 miles away in Concord, California. The BART line had just been completed and the data center was adjacent to the end terminal. Soon I would be commuting an extra two hours to work. The commute starts and ends like it did for work in San Francisco but now it was a longer ride each way. This didn’t seem to be much of a problem, it was a reverse commute with the majority of people going the opposite direction so seating was never an issue, and it worked okay for a couple of years.

The biological clock was still ticking.

We investigated and found there was a doctor that had some success in reversing a vasectomy. It was very costly, not covered by insurance, and had no guarantees. After some soul searching I agreed to try it.

Things did not go well. This doctor had a bad toupee. He should have been aware of that. The location of his office was geographically undesirable. We still lived in San Francisco and he was about forty miles southeast of the city requiring an intricate route back home across the bay. On the day of the surgery, it was stormy, reminding me of some Frankenstein movie. I asked if he had battery backup for his heart monitor and anesthesia controls. He assured me he did. We had already decided to recover after the surgery in a hotel close by his office.

I was given a pre-operative sedative and then the person came in to shave my private parts. It surprised me that he would use a straight razor and a cup of shaving soap, but what really startled me was that he was big and black. This was getting more like a Frankenstein movie than I had bargained for. I was rolled into the operating theatre; which had glass walls and ceiling; which would normally be bright and airy. As I mentioned, it was stormy and dark and the lightning flashed. I asked if he had the backup batteries and closed my eyes.

He didn’t have backup batteries for the lights, only the heart monitor. After I was cut open and my tubes were pulled out the power went off. The surgery is done under a microscope but had to wait for the power to come on again. There was no power to illuminate the microscope. The surgery lasted over five hours.

When I came to I was not a happy camper. I do not take to general anesthesia well, especially when the process calls for a heavy paralytic to immobilize me completely for five hours.

I was not pleased that the surgery had been compromised by the failure to have lights. I am not sure just what happened. I felt lucky to survive and really wondered whether the surgery could be successful considering the pain and swelling and nausea I had.

After a few weeks they began to try to find sperm. Eventually some showed up.

After a year we had no results; so we started to refine our technique using a variety of infertility programs.

Meanwhile, we decided to move out of San Francisco to be nearer to my work. Now it was Eva’s turn to commute to the city. Our original equity in the house grew from $16,000 to $150,000 and we continued to search for a new house in Concord. There was a very peculiar house that we had seen with a ‘For Sale’ sign but had not actually been inside. We did not seriously start looking with a realtor until we sold our San Francisco house and went to Mexico on a planned vacation. When we got back, we asked the realtor about the house and he dismissed the idea, saying it had already been sold. After driving through the neighborhood, we noticed the for sale sign was still up. We asked the realtor to check it out again. “Looks like the deal fell through,” he said, “but it has two new offers.” We asked to see it anyway. It was a house on a hill, near the edge of the subdivision and had undeveloped open space on two sides. When we stepped in, it looked familiar. I walked in and looked up the staircase to the bedroom level. I went to the bedroom and turned around to look. This was the house I had seen in my vision. The man in white had gone down the short stairway and out the front door to the open space at the front of the house. This was the only house in Concord that faced an open space. It did not face a street. The view down the hallway where the girls slept was identical to the vision. Eva had a strong impression also and so we checked out the rest of the property and made an offer. The other two offers fell through. We got the house.

It was not the perfect house, there is no such thing for us. Even before we moved in we were buying a Viking gas range and hood. We gutted the kitchen and rebuilt a larger version with two sink areas and restaurant quality fixtures to our taste. We had been successful in creating a new kitchen in San Francisco and this was just a bigger version.

Six months before our move out of San Francisco, at an office Christmas party held after work in a local sports tavern, I experienced the first of three life challenging experiences that I believe to be related to my vision experience. After what I thought were two drinks, I became wildly intoxicated and was acting strangely enough that my good friend, Cliff Reeves, who I had known from SynerGraphics days took me to the emergency room of the local hospital. I was completely helpless and panicked that I thought I would die. I thought of stroke or heart attack. The diagnosis was ‘Acute Alcohol Poisoning’.

A week later I experienced heart palpitations and sought a doctor’s opinion. There was no clear cause. The third item was sudden stabbing pains in the back of my head that would drop me to my knees. By this time, I had moved from the city and a new set of doctors examined me and could find nothing except that I had osteoporosis and the bones of a 100-year-old man.

There was nothing left but to admit that I had been warned. I thought it best not to wait any longer. I did not have any success in staying away from alcohol. I was able to rationalize that it was under control, but it was still there.