January 28, 1963: A four-page letter on political philosophy. "Socialism must grow 'upward,' expanding its reforms effectively with total support, instead of 'outward' expansion. By this course our progress will understandably be slow, but can failure be possible?"

Well, yes, it can. You never expect a Nixon/Reagan/Bush - much less the Spanish Inquisition. More recently known as the religious right. I digress from the past.

He thanks me for an article I sent on democracy, with notes on the margins which he liked as potential as future thought provokers. He also thanks me for the "above question." Looking back, I see at the top of the letter, underlined: "Is (sic) Economic Socialism and Intellectual freedom and Individuality Compatible?" "You really hit my weaak spot there," he continues. "Anytime I feel I might be able to sign up a follower of the way, look out."

I think he may have seen us as another Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Damn! Don't I just wish it could have been so. But it couldn't, as we well understand by now. Sometimes I think I am overstating my reasons for leaving him - that is, making them too intellectual, too understandable, too rational. Making myself continue to look good. Sometimes I think the truth is that I just left him for somebody tall, dark and handsome. Who lived in the city. Whose mother was Italian Catholic, not Lutheran. Who I divorced because, although he was a thoroughly nice guy, he bored me silly. So I have few illusions about my own depth of character - shallow as a mud puddle, I often say.

But this letter reminds me that there is a grain of truth in my rationalizations. I have a tiny grain of remembrance, reading this, that I feared I would never live up to his high expectations. And ever since then, I have chosen men who were, except for one, fairly well below my own intellectual level. I married the only other one I found. He was the second husband. But I left him too.

Movies: he goes with his buddy to see "A Pocketful of Miracles" - based on Damon Runyon stories, and when his buddy tells him he has never read Damon Runyon, my guy takes him to a library and gets a book of stories for him. He says he hasn't laughed so much since he saw "Music Man" - with me. I remember seeing "The Music Man," but I don't remember being with him. Which goes to show something, I suppose. Why is it that I remember HIM so vividly - his face, his self - but I remember almost nothing of what we did together. It's all in these letters. He IS these letters. In that sense, I have never lost him, never thrown him away.

"Write to me concerning motivation and its antecedent - self discipline. Please - "

1st of February 1963. Just a very few more letters to go - perhaps a couple of weeks worth. I've lost track of how many there have been. This one - well -

"My love, I have such high hopes for the two of us. Sounds petty sometimes but whenever I get to feeling, because of the way the Army operates, that nothing is for sure, nothing can really be counted on to happen as expected, I think of us and how 'pat' our futures seem to be."

Oh my dear, how I wish that could have been true. Reading it now, I so want to have been there for him, so want to have made his dreams come true - so wanted his dreams to have continued to be my dreams. I wonder sometimes if I would have been visited constantly by house dreams over the years. House dreams are supposed to be about looking for where you belong. I still have them once in awhile, but not like I used to have. I had so many house dreams over the years, and they were always about being in the wrong house. It was too small, or too big or not mine or something. Always something appearing desireable, but upon closer inspection would turn out to be houses of horror of one kind or another.

I fear it may have been letters like this one that impelled me to leave - that I knew I couldn't be counted on, and therefore left before things got worse, before I could prove myself unaccountable in even more hurtful ways. I know that I thought I had other reasons for leaving, none of which I was very proud of, but there they were anyway. I left school in the spring for Chicago and began an affair with a man I eventually did marry. I sent the fiancee' a "Dear Larry" letter, being too chicken-hearted to face him directly. Our engagement announcement had already appeared in the papers. My mother was already starting to be proud of me. I was the psychic equivalent of a suicide bomber later that summer. I blew the whole thing out of the water. Nothing quite as good was ever rebuilt.

I say again, I am not sorry about the life I have actually had, and I would have left soon anyway, I am convinced of that. After all, I left all the others. And it was years before I became anything like the person he thought he was writing to in 1963.

"...it has become foolish indeed to ask of each other 'Do you know what I mean?'...the answer...[is] simply a quiet appreciation of the fact that we have become one and of courre we know what WE mean...the question should rather be 'do you agree or disagree?'"

I miss that.

"You know how I like to have everything work like a plan. Not that I ever carry them out, but I like organization. Ideally, I'm a perfectionist."

This note on a copy of his Army office work schedule. He's a clerk, remember. So, I have to wonder if this statement made me a little - or more than a little - nervous. Ironically, now I know exactly what he means. I'm a little - or more than a little - OC myself. Now. In my old age. In those days, however, most of my personal belongings accumulated in a pile on my bed. When I went to bed to sleep, I picked up the bedspread by the four corners and lifted everything off the bed onto the floor. In the morning, I lifted it back on, and there everything was, exactly as I had left it. In a big pile in the middle of the bed.

It was organization, of a sort. I can still understand my reasoning and plan of attack. But did I see myself as "organized?" Did I see myself as a "perfectionist?" Well, yes - in a way, I was certainly the latter, but forever came up short in my perfectionist performance. When a potential husband announced himself as a "perfectionist," did I get nervous? Knowing how far short of the mark I always fell. Was this one of those letters that began to scare me away?