Our first hot day here in Seattle. When I say "hot", I mean maybe somewhere in the 80's and excruciatingly lovely. Birds are singing (yes, I can hear them), the garden is blooming, and there is so much to be grateful for I won't even mention the sciatica.

All of this is simply to hold my place until I can get something more interesting to write about. The rabbit I pulled out of the Sorting Hat today is simply a stamped envelope (Head of Lincoln, 4 cent postage - has anyone else noticed that the "cent" mark no longer exists on keyboards?) addressed to the First Savings and Loan Ass'n. in Woodstock, IL, and even my fevered imagination can make absolutely nothing out of that. The stamp has not been cancelled.

Well, I could, if I had the time, I suppose. Each and every one of these items is a good beginning for a short story. This one, of course, would be more work. The letters already have a story in them. All they need is fleshing out of plot and dialog. This one calls for drawing a story out of thin air.

He loaned me some money, and sent me this envelope so I could repay the money directly into his account. I spent the money on a bottle of booze for another date. I still have the envelope, haunting me to this day.

No, no. That will never do. That never happened, and it's a boring story anyway.

It's too hot. Mo' later...

One more batch of mail in that envelope - and when I opened the 45-year-old envelope which holds them (and it's the exact same kind of 9x6 brown paper envelope that I use today) I find that they are letters sent TO him. Some of them from me. I don't know why I have them. I would think perhaps he sent all mine back to me, but I don't think so, and there's no reason that he would have sent me a letter from his Aunt Edith.

I'll start with them tomorrow. Perhaps there are some answers in my own writing to the questions I have today.

There aren't too many questions left, actually. The only question I can think of is perhaps what the question was all along. Who was I? And have I found me yet?

12 October 1962. He responds to a letter of mine about the attempt of some women to form a sorority on the Carthage College campus. I barely remember this, but it is important in trying to figure out where my head was at the time. Indeed, where it still is.

I believe some women wanted to form a sorority - there were none, although there were three fraternities. The fiancee' seems to think it improbable: "No shit now. Did they really think one might be formed?" I'm not certain how to read this, all these years later. Is it a "silly woman" statement? An anti-Greek statement? (But he was a member of the "coolest" frat on campus - the "Squires" - they had a Greek name, but I don't remember it. I may have mentioned that I had a "pinning ceremony," and it remains the crowning moment of my Carthage College career!)

However, there was a big to-do about it, since many of the women proposing it were the "popular" clique, and there were many other women, probably nascent feminists, proto-civil rights participants, and sparkles in the eye of yet to be formed environmentalists, who were against the sororities and the class structure which they embodied and preserved.

I confused everyone by two actions, which I now believe came directly from my Ayn Randian logical positivism (was that it?) and which was, perhaps, the only action I ever took which embodied those ideals.

1. I wrote a letter to the school newspaper supporting the sororities, citing freedom and the rights of people to organize in which ever way they found comfortable for themselves. This is a far cry from Bread and Roses, I know, but I think I was asserting similar principles.

2. As a consequence of the letter, I was invited to join the new sorority (a position I would not otherwise have been offered). I turned it down, believing it would lessen the impact of my position if I benefited from it.

In retrospect, I think I was pretty fucked up.

My daughter was over here yesterday. I told her about my adventures with sciatica, and my visits to both chiropractor and acupuncturist. "I feel like I've let them down," I told her. "I think they believe they can fix me and I'm disappointing them."

"You're fucked up, Mom," she told me. "It's the other way around."