Back to the fiancee'. I get a list of names and addresses. A list of community. My new community, should I decided to accept it. Of course we know, I don't, but I did try for awhile.

These are addresses of his aunts, his brothers (three of them), and his best friends. To whom I am supposed to write, I think. Did I request them? I don't remember. Did I write to them? Probably not. Or maybe I did. Where was that hypnotherapists's number anyway? Would that help? Would I remember all the answers to the unanswered questions these letters bring to mind?

What struck me, immediately, on reading this list was that this was a community of people who would have been part of my life for the rest of my life, had I been able to accept it. I suppose the aunts are long gone, but the brothers must still be kicking it somewhere. The friends. Did they remain friends? Are they still close? Did they drift? Larry was not a drifter. Larry was a forever kind of guy. I just wasn't a forever kind of girl. But I didn't know it yet. I didn't know it for another forty years. I'm a slow learner. I have community of my own now. I even have my own family. But there was never another forever kind of guy offering me his community.

Back to the fiancee'. I get a list of names and addresses. A list of community. My new community, should I decided to accept it. Of course we know, I don't, but I did try for awhile.

These are addresses of his aunts, his brothers (three of them), and his best friends. To whom I am supposed to write, I think. Did I request them? I don't remember. Did I write to them? Probably not. Or maybe I did. Where was that hypnotherapists's number anyway? Would that help? Would I remember all the answers to the unanswered questions these letters bring to mind?

What struck me, immediately, on reading this list was that this was a community of people who would have been part of my life for the rest of my life, had I been able to accept it. I suppose the aunts are long gone, but the brothers must still be kicking it somewhere. The friends. Did they remain friends? Are they still close? Did they drift? Larry was not a drifter. Larry was a forever kind of guy. I just wasn't a forever kind of girl. But I didn't know it yet. I didn't know it for another forty years. I'm a slow learner. I have community of my own now. I even have my own family. But there was never another forever kind of guy offering me his community.

Just a little item today - another Valentine. Another one of the kiddie ones. A little smiling vacuum cleaner (in a vacuum cleaner shape) saying "You fill the vacuum in my heart." Toot sweet. On the back..."From Dennis I miss your voice."

Now that's strange. Dennis, my little brother - 10 years younger, so maybe about 8 or 9 at this point? Wait - if it's 1963, then he's 10. His birthday is just before mine. And mine is Valentine's Day. Which explains all the family Valentines.

But - "miss my voice"? See, I have no voice to speak of. I can't sing. Three-note range, when the cords (vocal, that is) work at all. The choir director once had me sing the solo for church choir - I don't remember the song. I remember my mother being kind afterwards. I don't know what got into him - the choir director, I mean.

I love to sing. So I do it around the house, when no one is around. I have "The Best of the Three Tenors" on the CD changer in my car, and I sing along with that. When those CD's are over, I sing along with the Grateful Dead. Nothing if not eclectic, me. I have decided that if I were to have been born a boy, the man I would choose to grow up to be would be Placido Domingo. Jerry Garcia - too much karma, too much responsibility. Much as people love Domingo's voice, no one confuses him with god. So it's Placido Domingo for me. He's sexier than Pavarotti (to me), more substantial than Carreras (to me), and the sound of that voice rising up and over those high notes in the arias makes me feel almost as happy as LSD at a Dead show. I don't think he can sing them without smiling. I think he must feel as joyful singing them as I do hearing them. And air-singing along in the car.

Dennis can't miss my dulcet tones - I didn't have any. I had a midwestern twang. Maybe he misses me yelling at him. People miss the weirdest things.

Just a little item today - another Valentine. Another one of the kiddie ones. A little smiling vacuum cleaner (in a vacuum cleaner shape) saying "You fill the vacuum in my heart." Toot sweet. On the back..."From Dennis I miss your voice."

Now that's strange. Dennis, my little brother - 10 years younger, so maybe about 8 or 9 at this point? Wait - if it's 1963, then he's 10. His birthday is just before mine. And mine is Valentine's Day. Which explains all the family Valentines.

But - "miss my voice"? See, I have no voice to speak of. I can't sing. Three-note range, when the cords (vocal, that is) work at all. The choir director once had me sing the solo for church choir - I don't remember the song. I remember my mother being kind afterwards. I don't know what got into him - the choir director, I mean.

I love to sing. So I do it around the house, when no one is around. I have "The Best of the Three Tenors" on the CD changer in my car, and I sing along with that. When those CD's are over, I sing along with the Grateful Dead. Nothing if not eclectic, me. I have decided that if I were to have been born a boy, the man I would choose to grow up to be would be Placido Domingo. Jerry Garcia - too much karma, too much responsibility. Much as people love Domingo's voice, no one confuses him with god. So it's Placido Domingo for me. He's sexier than Pavarotti (to me), more substantial than Carreras (to me), and the sound of that voice rising up and over those high notes in the arias makes me feel almost as happy as LSD at a Dead show. I don't think he can sing them without smiling. I think he must feel as joyful singing them as I do hearing them. And air-singing along in the car.

Dennis can't miss my dulcet tones - I didn't have any. I had a midwestern twang. Maybe he misses me yelling at him. People miss the weirdest things.

January 1963. A letter from my mother. Two things she says.

"It's a gorgeous day. Hope it is there too and that you feel up to a lot of alert learning all week long! What fun to be learning, learning, learning. You should really h ave a sparkle these days!"

My mother didn't finish college. She went to a community college, I believe, for a short time before coming out west to work at Lockheed and meet my dad in 1942. I think she majored in "homemaking." I could be wrong. But that's what I remember.

"Why don't you buy a copy of that "Letters to New Churches. We're starting a series of Bible Study in our Circle and need it for that. It's only $1.25 I think."

Googling that book, I find nothing except what I thought it referred to: the Pauline letters.
For those of you not raised in the bosom of a church, Pauline here is not a girl's name. It is an adjective referring to the Apostle Paul, and the letters he wrote are books of the bible: Corinthians (letter to the church at Coriinth in Greece), Ephesians (letter to the church of Ephesus in what is now Turkey), etc.

I'm not certain if she wants me to buy it for her or for me. $1.25? We can only dream. But I can feel her longing for education in these pages. The only source she found to feed that longing was the Bible study classes at her church. There was a university in our town, and she could have taken some courses there. But I believe she would have preferred to study theology, if she studies anything. I think she read Karl Barth and Paul Tillich - or selected essays from them. I'm not certain if her Circle dipped into Reinhold Niebuhr. But I think she envied me, studying at a Lutheran college, and I'm certain sometimes she despaired that I would not take full advantage of this wonderful chance, and when I let the scholarship drop, she was appalled.

This particular daughter - this daughter who is so aglow with the thrill of learning, learning, learning - is a daughter I would liked to have been - even back then, I would like to have been that daughter. But the truth is that I found freedom too distracting, the boys, the social life, the letters from the fiancee' in the army, hanging out in the dorm, sneaking out at night to double date with my friend Char (even though I hated the guy they hooked me up with) - but it was all LIFE. I sometimes truly wanted it to be LEARNING. But instead I was falling too much in love with LIFE.

Not much inspiration today. The letter is from someone I don't remember and never really knew. Apparently she was someone who came to spend a weekend at Carthage, and was hostessed by Ann (my roommate) and I. It's a thank you note.

It's February 1, 1962, so perhaps we don't know yet that the college is moving to Kenosha, Wisconsin within a few short years. I was there for two years, and sometimes I think I appreciated it as much as I should have at the time. It was a lovely, traditional little campus. The buildings were midwestern gothic, built around a green commons. Girls dorms were on one side of the U. Boys were on the other. The boys side also housed the gymnasium and science wings - they were considered boyish, I suppose. I'm certain that when they were built, there was no thought that perhaps girls would use them often. The top of the U held the administrative buildings, and, I think, the chapel. Were the liberal arts classrooms there too? I think so. And the library. It was lovely, tree-embowered, ivy-covered. I remember Ann and I getting very excited our second year, when we got a fourth-floor dormer room looking out over the commons. We felt as if we lived in a castle. I remember scooping paper cups of snow from the windowsill, and putting fizzies in them.

Carthage College in Kenosha is a modern, steel and glass campus with all the other accoutrements of modernity. Probably has co-ed dorms, no dorm mothers, no curfew hours. We hated having hours, dorm mothers, boy-girl separation. When boys came to see us, we met them in the sitting room downstairs. No males were allowed above the first floor. Except fathers. Or brothers. On visiting days. I may be getting senile, but I think they had something there. There was intrigue. There was mystery. There was sneaking out and sneaking in. There was adventure.

I forgot to send in my National Honor scholarship renewal papers, so could not return for a third year. By then I was living in Chicago, dumping Larry and embarking on citylife.

A Valentine, of the old fashioned, grade-school kind. "Hi! It's no blarney, I'm lucky to be your Valentine." Little kid with four-leaved clover. From boyfriend? Nope. From brother. Brother Randy, to be precise, seeing as there are four of them. Wonder if there's a letter further down the pile. Can't remember communicating with him much, but do remember writing a letter - I think it was to him - about the time I was giving up on Ayn Rand and a life based on logic and reason. I still believed in it, I told him, but was finding I had insufficient capacity for either. Emotion kept rearing its ugly head. I couldn't keep up. Took me a long time to forgive myself. Sometimes I wonder if I ever did - if I don't still have that pinnacle of perceived perfection looming over my head. Wow! That's right up there with pusillanimous pussyfooting, of Spiro Agnew fame. No wonder I gave it all up as a bad job!