I have often said that my life has no meaning until I tell it to at least two of my friends. These are some of the people who give my life meaning. Because I haven't permission from all (or any, actually) of them to use their full names, I shall refer to them (and everything else I can) as I do in my journal: by their initials. Some of those pesky married women who now have four initials (or five; you know who you are)....
PSAASZRHZAfter I took my PSATs, small (and minor; my scores didn't break the land-speed record) liberal arts colleges began to shower me with brochures either for application or for pre-application programs. I remember Slippery Rock, which I think let you skip twelfth grade to start there, and University of Puget Sound, because the brochure said something like, "How does the University of Puget Sound?" and that caught my eye. One of them came from Lynchburg College in an eponymous town, which didn't sound very appealing, in Virginia, altogether too Southern for me. So I pitched it. My mother rescued it from the trash. She came to PGN, where I worked. She actually came inside, which was rare for her (on the unusual occasions she picked me up, she'd wait in the car by the curb). She was that excited. I think she noticed this offer because the name was familiar; the daughter of a friend had been accepted (also she probably envisioned carpooling). She encouraged me to apply; I don't know why I did other than I had no reason not to. And I went.
In one week I earned my first credit of college coursework, made the first friends my own age I had made in years (including a boyfriend), and decided that suicide maybe wasn't my only option. Almost twelve years later I am still friends with three of the people I met there and have corresponded with a fourth. Early on in college, SEM asked me if anything else had ever happened to me besides Lynchburg; I talked about it that much. The people I met there and the (my first) experience of getting out of the small-town New England confines of my life did change my life; in fact I more than once have credited that one week with saving the rest of my life. And my mother made me go.
PSAOf course when I went, I knew I would meet friends and possibly a boyfriend. I didn't plan and I didn't plot but I did realize the possibilities. By the time I got there, unpacked, and played a few camp games to learn names, all in the inland Virginia humidity, I was more ready than usual for a swim. So when someone suggested we go find the pool, thither I scurried.
The swimming group consisted of about seven girls and a boy, and in minutes that one boy was lounging against the wall of the pool, encircled by six girls. One girl just swam, because even if she hadn't recognized that six to one looked extremely foolish for all involved, she wanted to swim. And that odd girl out was the one whom the lone boy wished to meet.
Twelve years later (1997), PSA and I have had our ups and downs, but I count him as a continual guiding influence, a heavy person sine qua non.
My favorite memories of PSA are of his expressions of surprise and delight. He left Lynchburg early Saturday morning--at five--and I was there; I hope I never forget that face. I visited him in New York City three years later, I spotted him leaning over the escalator wall looking for me amidst the Grand Central throng, and so I was able to see his face change from concern to pleasure when he recognized me. Another four years later he visited me and I met his train. There was some confusion about platforms (there was but one, and PSA is an urban creature) and he was relieved, there in the boonies of Norwalk, finally to see me and my friends.
ASZWriting this now, I have to say I don't have a distinct memory of ASZ from Lynchburg. How embarrassing. (I would if I dug out that diary.) I visited him in Long Island the next summer and we went to the Moody Blues; he visited me in Boston two years after that and I think was bored silly. It's funny: I have not seen or even spoken to him in nine years, yet we still correspond. Actually there was a gap of some years until Christmas of 1995, when I sent a card to his mother's house in Long Island, which she forwarded to him in Reno just in time for him to re-address to Denver the card he was about to send to my mother's house in Old Lyme. Now he has email, hooray! and is going to marry someone who studies orangutans in Borneo, hooray! Actually they're getting married in New York, not Borneo, on 21 June 1997.
RHZAnother friend with a gap of years recently closed is RHZ. In the fall of '96 my mother forwarded me a postcard from him, the first correspondence in something like five years. Friendship expands to fill the space available. He still reads and so do I, so we have as much in common as we ever had. Let me say that when I met him, I was quite the naïf. One of his letters had a stain on it that he labeled "pizza sauce" so when elsewhere in the letter he griped that he'd looked all over the city for shrooms, I thought he meant the pizza topping. He introduced me to Douglas Adams (I think) and to Hunter S. Thompson (I know) and has recently lent me a book called Practical Demon-Keeping.
When I got home from Lynchburg, in the first week I wrote to everyone I'd met. I'd made friends, damn it, and I was going to keep them. The first letter I received from RHZ was a ransom note: cut out letters on legal paper announcing that if I ever wanted to talk to the Hobbit again, I'd have to write to this address. I responded with a letter written on a blown-up balloon. He sent me letters in codes from the Ballantine Hobbit (which sent me thumbing through pages, counting line and word numbers) and with black and red digits and letters A, K, Q, and J. I responded tamely with the first twenty-six elements and by typing with my fingers one letter over on the keyboard (swapping left-hand for right-hand letters would've been much more challenging, or ,g;ssivevh). The epigrams on the backs of his envelopes sent me on regular literary scavenger hunts. I'm glad we're back in touch.
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Last modified 20 November 1997
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