I knew this would get difficult, but I didn't know how difficult until I read this letter I wrote on December 4, 1962. It seems to be a prologue to a frame of mind I would be wrestling with for much of the rest of my life. It certainly forecasts a frame of mind which would succeed in making the lives of two husbands in a row miserable - and one for which I can almost forgive myself for breaking one very deserving-of-better heart. I wonder if I even sent this, since it's not signed and there is no accompanying envelope. I hope I didn't.

I begin with "I'm beginning to feel lost." I go on about becoming hardened, disillusioned, afraid of life and what it does to people, to me." I finish (one entire typed page) with "I need you...when I'm with you, I'm alive again...I care!" Yadda, yadda, yadda.

This could be written off as the usual "coming of age angst drivel" - in this case, coming of 19 or so - and I wish I could laugh at myself, except for the fact that I still felt that way years later, and put future husbands and boyfriends through the wringer, wanting to depend on them to "save" me in some undefined way.

I still have those moments, but I don't confuse them with reality or reach out for savior anymore. Some things do eventually pass.

It is, as I feared, even more difficult to read my thoughts from the past than it is to read his. It is here about a month before the meeting in Louisville, and I am very anxious to see him. I am so very much in love with him, that I cannot for the life of me figure out what/when things changed. It is less than a year until I run away. But here, I can't say I love him enough.

I wonder if I ever really felt this way again. Or if I kept trying to feel this way again. Or if I kept pretending to feel this way again. This sounds so fresh and new and sincere, I can feel my heart beating still across the years.

Okay. I read the first one. Apparently, I am totally in love with him (I even "darling" him). Much later in life, I had one boyfriend who had to put some thought into exactly which affectionate name he could bring himself to call me, and finally settled on "darlin'. Nobody "darliings" with a straight face anymore, not without a Country and Western accent, anyway.

My roommate is in love as well, and I say we are listening to Ferrante and Teicher, "Love Themes." I Googled them - barely remember the names - and can find almost no actual information except the hint that perhaps they were responsible for the recording of "Exodus."

A little later, I say I am listening to "Rhapsody in Blue." Probably still F&T. I do exclaim "Aaaargh!" as if this stuff is just too sentimental - but I probably liked it. This is November 10, 1962, 13 days before I meet him in Louisville, and I tease him about being a "sexretary." He's a clerk in the Army, remember? Pretty obvious what's on my mind. But I loved him, no doubt about it.

"Sometimes I think I'm going to wake up and find that you've been nothing but a wondeful dream! Please - don't ever forget I'm waiting for you."

I meant it, too.

Is it illegal to read someone else's mail? Even though it's been 45 years, already opened, and left somehow in your possession? Even though the sender is almost certainly dead? Even though the biggest news it contains are bowling scores?

Just asking.

I think I'm opening this peripheral stuff putting off the time that I deal with the small collection of my own letters - letters I wrote 45 years ago - of which there seem to be a small collection. Reading his letters, I have been able to invent states of mind that I don't really remember. Beginning tomorrow (or whenever I get around to it), I deal with snippets of my actual state of mind in 1962/63. 19/20 years old I was. Idealistically ignorant. How much, I cannot tell you. I wince to think of it.

But I will go there. Tomorrow.

An envelope on which he doodles Christmas thoughts: "Once upon a time, a long time ago, the son of god was born the son of man so that you and I should live happily ever after. Amen."

He was, I think, a good Christian. A good thoughtful Christian, that is. One who did truly try to walk the talk, but not in a stuffy way. I was, at the time, a practicing atheist (the Ayn Rand effect). I don't remember our discussions on this, but I know there were some. He loved me anyway.

These days I'm a little irritated by our current atheists, although I find myself still in basic agreement with them. Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens make wonderfully cogent arguments against the silliness and sometimes danger of organized religion, but there seems to be something else at work in the universe that they are missing. I would call it the basal formation, if it didn't start to sound so much like pesto. But there you have it. The secret of the universe is pesto. It's that thing of which everything else is a part, and it must be the reason why nearly everyone on the face of the planet has acknowledged it in some way, and then gone too far and tried to organize it to their own satisfaction. But it's there, all the same. And it isn't anything separate from anything else. It simply is everything. Nothing so mysterious about it, after all.

But maybe we need the mystery, if only to lay down the laws we make for ourselves. We won't take any guff from each other, but it seems we are all willing to take some guff from the pesto of the universe.

I wonder if he is still a good Christian. I just believe in pesto.

Next bunny from hat: a card sent to the fiancee' from a photographer who had taken a photo portrait, for what reason, I don't remember. It asks for the color of his eyes, hair, jacket and tie.

]I know we had color photography then. I don't remember why we had to have photos tinted. But I do remember that they were. Which accounts for the lovely, soft colors in the photos of my mother and myself at three, and even my high school graduation picture. These pictures look warm, inviting. We look like lovely people. I think I used to have that portrait of him. I thought I kept it, but I can't find it now.