Letter from Mum. And just figuring out that the 1962 letters are from my sophomore year - I graduated high school in 1961. Ah, well. Mathematics and me never did get along.

My mother was a farm bred Lutheran woman, and it's all here in the letter. The first paragraphs about sewing clothes for me (Bermuda shorts!) and baking cooking. The last paragraph about planting bulbs (it's October in central Illinois). In between she tells of attending a class on "Faith and Wholeness" by a clinical psychologist from the University of Illinois, and disagrees with in some undefined way about Luther's "Justification by Faith."

In the middle is a paragraph that breaks my heart. Or would, if that were any longer possible. "Yes, I know how lucky you feel to have Larry for a boyfriend - I can remember how it was when I met daddy. And I still feel that way - so may your 'lucky' feeling continue!" Now, I know when I start writing like this, one might get the feeling that I regret my life. That's not exactly true. What I do regret is not being able to live two parallel lives. I like being the woman I've become. I wish I could have been the woman he wanted to marry. Make any sense? Thought not.

A letter from the old Luther League flame, who now, apparently, is in the Air Force at Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi. Hard to fathom now, among my group of friends, very very few of whom were ever in the "service" as it was known in those days. For most guys, back in the 50's or 60's, it was something you did when you got out of high school, or college or whatever. You put in two years, and that was it. There was a draft??? I don't remember. I just know that's what the guys did. My first "fiancee'" from high school joined the Navy. I think he became a druggist.

Here David writes about taking some kind of electronics test. We haven't seen each other since 1969, and this is postmarked November of 1962. I am a freshman at Carthage. He writes a five-page letter. Guys did that then, too. Amazing.

Near the end, he mentions that his sister is getting a divorce, and makes this comment: "It really is a bad black mark on a 24-year-old girls word to have a divorce. She's so sweet and THIS has to happen to her."

As I read history and archaeology, I see so much and read so much that makes me think and feel that the people living then were not so different. You can see by the artifacts they used, the poetry they left - they were people like you and me. But I read statements like this from 40 years ago, and I think, maybe not. Is the ME of 40 years ago incomprehensible to the ME of today? I don't have the letters I sent, so I can't begin to know. I do remember, being home shortly after my first divorce in 1968, hearing my mother and aunt discussing me in the kitchen, and when they used the word "divorce", their voices dropped to a whisper.

A letter from Dorothy, October, 1962. She is in nursing school in Springfield, IL, I think. I'm wondering now if this is the same person we were so concerned about in our freshman year. She sounds just fine in this letter. Looking forward to getting "capped" - a nursing school thing. Since so few nurses actually wear caps now, I wonder if they still do it.

She congratulates me on being "pinned." I don't know if fraternities have these little ceremonies anymore either. Somewhere, they probably do. It was the highlight of my freshman year. He was the love of my life - if there was ever one of those. He introduced me to jazz, and sour cream on baked potatos. He was smart and funny and kind and wonderful, and I later ditched him, because I simply could not see myself as a nice married woman. I couldn't cook. I wasn't socially ept. Oh, never mind. I've gone on about this before.

But sometime in the spring of my freshman year, I was the centerpiece of a "pinning ceremony," in a beautiful dress of some kind (vague memory, but no specifics), candlelight, all the guys in the frat lined up on the walk, as (I think) I was escorted up to him (other way around???), and had a fraternity pin placed somewhere on my less than ample bosom. For about six months, I felt like a real girl.

A Christmas card from Dorothy, and this opens a can of worms. If she is who I think I remember her to be. I think she was a fellow freshmanm, in1961, who began to act very strangely as the year progressed (at least to our more "normal" very young and naive college freshman minds). She had a make-believe boyfriend, and an entire make-believe life, or so it seemed to us. I believe we finally wrote a letter of concern to someone in the college about her, an act I don't know whether to applaud or kick myself for. Sometimes, in retrospect, it seems as if we were overtaken by gossip, carried away by our own imaginations, to think perhaps she posed a threat to herself and/or others. I do remember she sometimes seemed a little scary. I don't know what happened to her. I do not think she returned the following year. I did get this Christmas card from her in 1962, asking me to write. I don't remember if I did. I do remember I don't think I was very brave about any of this incident. I may have just brushed her aside. I sometimes wonder if we helped or hurt. Some part of me is very much afraid we may have hurt.