Christmas card from Andy. The Waites show was six months later.

"Winter, season of art serene..." embossed snow scene white on white.

"It's taken eleven years, but I finally came home from 'Nam.....I'd love to see ya..."

The things you wish had worked out.

This one must be sometime in 1979. "Say Goodbye to the Bay" party, given by friend Nancy. I say 1979, since that was graduation year. It was about five or six years later that she came to my rescue. Visiting "the Bay" once again, she called me the day after my head had gotten slammed into the ground about 25 times by the horrible NGB. She knew from my voice that something was wrong, and came over right away. I don't know if I could have opened up to anyone else right then. Turns out her ex NGB had beaten her. I had known him slightly. I knew nothing about it. But Nancy understood.
She took me out for a drink, once I got my face back into reasonable shape, with the help of some sunglasses. There were no bruises visible. My body hurt all over. We talked for hours. I left in the fall, and never went back.

The card has jars of canned pickles and peas, surrounded by crown molding. There's a map.

Another letter from Andy, dated 4.30.82. Inside this letter is a ticket stub for Tom Waites, at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. A ticket stub, because I did go. I was, um, er, unfaithful to my current s.o. We were a very few months from breaking up anyway. Still and all..unfaithful is the word all right.

Andy introduced me to Tom Waites (the music, not the man). It was part of our thrilling little affair back in the Victorian era. Before he ran off with the wonderful waitress.

I am not at all certain why he turned to me at this point in time. He talks in the letter as if he would entice me to stay if he could. I think I went, because I had to see if there was a chance. What I had was not working. What I had had, so to speak, was unfinished. For me, anyway. The wonderful waitress and all.

So when he sent me a ticket to Tom Waites at the Guthrie and an invitation to come with him and a bottle of Jack Daniels, I went ahead and went. As chance would have it, my s.o. was out of town that weekend, visiting his parents in Chicago, I think. I had the car. I don't remember why. This might be during the time when his parents had bought him a new truck, because they were embarrassed to see his old car pull into their condo by the golf course in a Chicago suburb. So he probably took the truck. I do remember trying to figure out if I could reset the odometer to erase a round trip to Minneapolis, but I couldn't and it never came up.

I went. It wasn't a complete disaster, but close to it. We disappointed each other mightily somehow. Tom disappointed us. The Guthrie Theatre was not the proper venue for the three of us. Our seats were in the back row. The Jack Daniels was in my bag. But the audience were all yuppies from cleancut Minneapolis, there to appreciate the art of the down and out. Andy and I were the only down-and-outers in the audience.

Earlier I had shown him a story I wrote. He didn't like it. He asked why I had written it. Before, he had liked my writing, but I think part of him was too conservative, and he didn't like my making a guy crying over his girlfriend's abortion a hero of sorts. He didn't like my defending the abortion. I think.

We got back from the concert, polished off the bottle of JD, probably opened another one, tried having drunken sex, and he fell asleep. I was dazed and confused, but I had to leave. I got up around 5 a.m., left him a note, and got in my car to drive back to Wisconsin. Had a copy of Terrapin Station on tape in the car, and pretty much played it all the way home. The shining light of Venus was there, rising first and shining best. I don't know if I was heartbroken or relieved. I know when I got home, I didn't want to go back. I called the waitress, and told her what had happened. Asked her how things had been with them, and what his state of mind had been when he left. She couldn't tell me much.

He suffered from delayed stress syndrome, which gave him occasional violent attacks. If you weren't careful when you woke him, you could get a black eye. He once smashed out all the mirrors in the women's department of a store, waiting for a girlfriend to come out of the dressing room. He said the first helicopter he was in in Viet Nam went down and caught fire, and they had to break the windows to get out. He said after that, the first thing he did when he got in any helicopter was to take his M-16 and break out all the windows.

He didn't like the Vietnam memorial. He wanted something like the Iwo Jima one. This was when it was first proposed, however, and had not been finished. I wonder if he ever visited it. I never saw him again. He never wrote back.

A letter from Anita. Must have been 1980, since my ex and I had just left Tacoma for Pittsburgh and grad school. I hardly know what or how much to write, knowing how it all came out in the end. Here she is still living on Salmon Beach, in a lovely little house, with a man I had known in Chicago, which is how I came to meet her. My ex and I had ridden from Green Bay to Tacoma on a Harley Sportster after our graduation from UWGB (just figure it out if it's that important to you), and Michael and Anita's place on Salmon Beach served for a destination. A year later, we left for Pittsburgh and grad school, and nothing worked out for any of us.

In the letter she is pregnant. "He's either Justin Munroe or she's Justine Rebecca..." She was Justine Rebecca, and suffered such severe birth defects, either in utero or through some kind of hospital malfeasance, no one is really certain, that she now lives and has lived for most of her life with a foster family who specializes in these children. Anita could not care for her. Luckily, they had another daughter, fine and healthy. My old friend Michael never seemed able to get his act together to live in the real world, and after several jobless years, during which Anita both worked and gave birth to their children, she split. I split.

I found him years later, but that's another sad story.

From Salmon Beach in 1980: "I can't tell you what a beautiful sunset I see this evening. Full, round and red. I miss you and miss sharing our lives as intimately as we had. I can still remember the day you two arrived here. Ah memories - They are good."

A card from my friend Marion, my surrogate mother from Door county, and wonder of wonders, I just checked on the net - she's listed at the same address in Chicago as the return address on the card, so I will send her a card tomorrow. She knew my daughter when my daughter was born. She sends me a clipping from the Door County paper about Ann's settlement from Bay Boat, saying it was "you who gave her the initial strength." No, it wasn't. Ann's strength was her own. I just sat on the sidelines and cheered!

She loves her life in Chicago, teaching adults to pass their GED and taking classes at the Art Institute. She was in her 60's then. The card is postmarked June 14, 1980. She would be well into her 80's now.

I was wondering before just how is it that we lose each other. Marion writes, "We had some good things going there for a while - and now we're all so scattered." "We" were a group of women in Door County, Wisconsin in the late 70's who formed a chapter of N.O.W. and tried to make a difference in the lives of the women who shared that beautiful peninsula with us. Some of them appreciated us. Many of them didn't. Doesn't matter so much now. But Marion was right. We did have some good things going for awhile. And I don't know how we lost each other. Or perhaps it's just me who's lost them all. All the naked women in the picture that Charles painted. None of us suited for Playboy. All of us beautiful.

I think I stopped writing when my life began to take a downturn. Maybe about the time I dropped out of grad school and took up with bikers that pounded my head into the ground one drunken night. I think I didn't want to write to anyone about that, so I stopped writing. And then everyone moved. Except Marion. She says, "You're so talented - what are you doing?" And, talented or not, I wasn't doing anything worth writing home about. I should have written anyway.

My brother lives in Chicago, and I go back there occasionally. Perhaps I can visit. I will write a card.

Another card from Mary, dated June 9, 1980 - more than 23 years ago. Time flies when you're having fun. Seems impossible that we could have lost touch. I did not hear from the "Mary" that I sent a card to a few weeks ago - the one I found with an address in Amherst, so I guess that's not her. No word from the gallery that handles Charles' paintings, although the e-mail did not get returned. No word from my past. It's forgotten me. Sigh.

The card is of a female figure flying over a landscape through a starry sky, the world of people, in the form of houses, trees and paths, carried on her back in the folds of her cape streaming behind her. It's called, "High Time to be Flying Home."