I've got a letter from his mom - to him - don't know why it is in my possession. I should send all of these letters back to him - not the ones from me - but the ones from his aunt and mother. She encloses $10 for "the overcoat." No, the ten bucks isn't in here. Back in the day, that might have been about half the cost of a good overcoat. Maybe less, but not insignificant. Today, of course, a pittance.

I just got a call this morning from another good friend who told me straight out that she has cancer of the cervix - or was it ovarian cancer - in the whirlwind of conversation after that announcement, I seem to have forgotten the details - and is going in for surgery on Tuesday. It's getting hard to take. I have another friend who is terminal - but she is still having her Seafair Blue Angels party in August. I put my yearly party off for a week so I can attend hers. I will also be at the hospital on Tuesday with the other women in the waiting room while we await results. In the meantime, I have sciatica, and I am beginning to imagine some kind of tumor there, wrapped around the sciatic nerve and squishing it. So I'm shopping for an MRI.

But what am I worried about? My friend the palm reader was here the other day, and she tells me I will be a very old lady with just a tuft of hair growing out of the top of my head. And that my hands are full of healing energy. So if anyone spots me walking around patting my own ass, don't think weird thoughts. That's where the sciatic nerve begins its journey to the base of my ankle. That's where the pain is. A real pain in the ass.

Ommmmmmmm...........

Finally, a letter that sounds familiar. It sounds like me. I'm not depressed and needy (although that is sometimes me). I'm not promising things I can't deliver (something I tried and have mostly succeeded in giving up over the years). There is no desperation or preaching or pleading. There is just me, telling a story about how I missed a zoology mid-term. One whole page of various all-nighters (no party, this is exam time in the early 60's). I am listening to Ramsey Lewis playing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," which I say "gives me chills." As I recall, it did give me chills, and I am filled with a wish to hear it once again. It is on an album (Down to Earth) borrowed from my old friend Merrilie Johnson, who came to my first wedding (not to Larry, who I didn't marry, of course, but to this other, very nice but not quite right guy who, when he asked me to marry him, I said "let's do it quick before I change my mind"). Merrilie gave me a funereal condolences card as a wedding gift. There may have been a toaster or somethiing similar involved, but the card is the only gift I remember. From anybody.

"I hate Carthage," I say on December 3, 1962. So of course, I can only be nostalgic for it now. I don't even know if there was actual ivy (the scourge of Northwest gardens), but I can almost remember ivy-covered gothic halls and picturesque walks and a library with sunny windows and leather seats. I don't think it had those either, but it did have an approximation.

His "signature" signature to me is "I am fine and very much in love with you." Mine to him is "I love you, now and forever."

We already know what a mish I made of that one. I wish there were something here from the "transition period." How and when did I change my mind? Was it something so simple as wanting to live in Chicago? Or was it something deeper? Do those other letters of mine - the ones where I sound almost certifiable - indicate the true nature of things? Did I run from one I considered my equal, "perfect for me" - I say that very thing in this letter - and pick men from then on in to whom I always felt just a shade superior? Did that make me more comfortable?

Here, he seems to have apologized to me for something over Thanksgiving weekend - how he didn't do right by me somehow, and I spend one long gushy page telling him that he was just the ticket for me, that I was "not going to fool around and settle for second best."

And then, that's exactly what I did.

How brave do we have to be to choose the right one?

Obviously, I wasn't brave enough.

Another one of those crazy "I'm all fucked up" letters - from me to him - I HOPE I didn't send these, but have a nasty feeling that he did not entirely escape the horrid self-negating tirades with which I plagued the husbands I actually did marry.

As I later figured out - I fought the fight I should have had with my father using them as substitutes - and this went on until sometime in my mid-thirties. By that time, I was divorcing the second husband, but I don't think I actually found a center for myself until 10 years later. Even now, I have those moments - but I banish them rather quickly. Life goes on.

Here, I hint that perhaps there is reason for him to be jealous, and talk about a trip I made to the University of Illinois and then on down to the Southern Illinois University with my roommate and two of her friends. Two guy friends. I tell him that I am very tired of "love in the front seat of a car," which was what, except for our time in Louisville, we were condemned to by our times - but I may also have been hinting at that trip, when I made out with one of Anne's friends in the front seat of the car on the way down south.

Did I feel guilty about that? Yes, I did. Did I want to do it? No, not really. What made me do it? Constant need for male approval and affirmation that I was sexually attractive. Did I feel good afterwards?

No.

Still planning the Thanksgiving getaway - a bus schedule from Ft. Knox to Louisville.

I have little to say about it - no great insights, no more memories - but as it happens, I read a review in yesterday's paper about a book called "On Chesil Beach," by Ian McEwan.

"'They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.'

"The year was 1962..."

We weren't virgins - exactly - but "conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." I gather from the letters that we enjoyed ourselves immensely in bed, but I know now that I was in it for the acceptance, for the validation it gave me that, skinny as I was, I was still sexually exciting to somebody. That somebody loved me.

I know that I would not learn to fully enjoy myself for another 15 years or more.

The review ends with a poem by Philip Larkin:

"Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -

...

Up till then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything."

Ok, this is much better. It is before Thanksgiving - still looking forward to Louisville - not so much the dark side.

A cultural note: It's 1962. We were not married, but we were planning to spend the weekend together in a hotel. In 1962, unless you were in a dive of some sort, this is hard to do. The letter is full of all kinds of ruses and strategems for getting away with it. From registering under a false single name (I picked "Laura Wyndham" of all things. I don't know why I didn't turn out to be a romance writer! But "Barbara Bates - which was my maiden name - simply wasn't my cup of tea. As a small child, in my father's grocery store in Badger, Iowa, before he took up making concrete steps in Decatur, Illinois, I used to steal dates from the barrel[yes, there was a date barrel - this was the 40's] and there was a little chant that went around the local kiddom - "Barbara Bates is full of dates." - Finally - that confession is out in the open! Oh, the humiliation!)

Anyway - it's either Laura Wyndham - obviously a refugee from some remote castle in England somewhere - or I register under his name and we say we're married. I go into this thing about different identities or realities for three pages of detail. At some point I mention that I used to work in a motel, so "I know what the personnel notice." I don't remember working in a motel.

I'm looking forward to turning 20 in "three months and 13 days," but apparently still feel 18. "Gee, honey, you're 22. You seem so old."

Today he'd look like a puppy.

I knew this would get difficult, but I didn't know how difficult until I read this letter I wrote on December 4, 1962. It seems to be a prologue to a frame of mind I would be wrestling with for much of the rest of my life. It certainly forecasts a frame of mind which would succeed in making the lives of two husbands in a row miserable - and one for which I can almost forgive myself for breaking one very deserving-of-better heart. I wonder if I even sent this, since it's not signed and there is no accompanying envelope. I hope I didn't.

I begin with "I'm beginning to feel lost." I go on about becoming hardened, disillusioned, afraid of life and what it does to people, to me." I finish (one entire typed page) with "I need you...when I'm with you, I'm alive again...I care!" Yadda, yadda, yadda.

This could be written off as the usual "coming of age angst drivel" - in this case, coming of 19 or so - and I wish I could laugh at myself, except for the fact that I still felt that way years later, and put future husbands and boyfriends through the wringer, wanting to depend on them to "save" me in some undefined way.

I still have those moments, but I don't confuse them with reality or reach out for savior anymore. Some things do eventually pass.