Jan Canty
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jan Canty’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They'd been dating about six months, and one morning over breakfast... He's very bashful, and I decided, you know, he's never going to ask me, so I better ask him. So I had a paper calendar in my pocket, and I pulled it out, put it on the table, and I said, I think it's about time that we get married. What do you think? And he goes, okay.
And I took my calendar out and I took a pen and I stabbed a date. It was a year calendar. And it landed on a Saturday in September. And I go, there's our date.
By the time we got married, I was finishing my bachelor's. And he encouraged me to go for my master's degree. When Jan doubted herself... He gave me the confidence to go into my master's program. And in the era, too, women did not go to graduate school at all.
I loved it so much. I did not even want to go home after class was over. I loved everything about it. I loved the old, old, old libraries. Oh, it was breathtaking.
He wanted to have us have our own house together. And I said, I have nothing to bring to the table. Nothing. I mean, you could put everything I had in my trunk.
And we moved into the six-bedroom, six-bathroom house.
It was like a public building. It was so big.
I said, what's important to me is if I can take one of the bedrooms and turn it into a dissertation room. He got me an electric typewriter with a little exchange ball so he could change the fonts. And he got me that. He got me a bookshelf and a lamp. And he bought me a coffee mug that he found someplace.
Where on the inside, if you look at it, down at the bottom, there's somebody looks like they're mountain climbing up the side of the cup on the inside. And he called it a struggle cup. And he goes, when you get discouraged, look in your struggle cup. And remind yourself, a day at a time, you're going to do it. You're going to finish. You have what it takes.
He liked rescuing damsels in distress, which I did not understand at the time. That's his pattern.
Oh my God, the hours you put in. I mean, 70-hour work weeks were not unheard of. And he was very considerate about me coming home and going right up to my room and just working on my dissertation.
I felt special. I felt lucky. I felt like I had gotten the jackpot. We had a routine. We'd either have breakfast together or go out to eat. He liked to order the newspaper and read it. At night, we would have dinner at a prompt time because he often worked in the evenings in his home office. and I would be doing homework.
We got to the point when I was finishing my doctorate, he said, you know, we really ought to furnish the living room. We've been in this house for years, and I go, oh yeah, that's a good idea. Like, I never noticed it. Alan took care of her. He took care of the bills, income taxes, etc., etc. He managed 100% of it, and I was fine with that.
I was just glad not to have one more thing on my plate, so we never argued over money. I never worried about it.
That coincidentally happened to fall on his 50th birthday. That night, I remember it was his birthday, and I felt like crap, and I had such a raging, raw, sore throat. But I set my alarm and got up and called him at 11 o'clock and thanked him, "'Happy birthday.'" And he started tearing up. I thought it was because he was worried about me and my health.
And he kept saying to me at the hospital when I was in the process of getting him hospitalized, you're pure as snow, pure as snow, pure as snow.
Throughout Alan's stay in the psych hospital... He kept repeating words, saying things like, pure as snow, I'm so bad, birthday, dawn.
And I went back there to trim the lilac bush. And this is after days of rain. And I noticed three dry cigarette butts on the ground in the mud near our kitchen window. And that set off a big red flag because they were dry, which meant they were recent.
He came home from work, and I was livid that he had never called me. And he was patronizing. And he said, well, what do we need to do? Do we need to get you a dog? Would that make you feel better? I said, what would make me feel better is if you returned my phone call. Something is amiss. Can't you feel it? You don't find cigarette butts out there. Something is amiss.
And he just started laughing like, oh, you're so cute. Oh, that infuriated me. You don't dismiss somebody who's got genuine reasons to be worried.
Showing 21–40 of 98 · page 2 of 5
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