As I near my 50th birthday, which isn't this year but is coming up very soon, I have been thinking back on my past more and more often. This reflection was recently increased by a brief contact from an old friend through an account I have at Classmates.com, so I thought it prudent to share my reflections and conclusions with you, my Faithful Readers - especially as some of the darker reflections I have to share may save a young person a lot of grief even though they may cause me some embarrassment....

Please feel free to email me with any comments you may have, and if you would like me to, I will add your insight to this page. Just let me know in the email if your comments are private or public - and if the latter, whether or not you would like me to include your name.

The set-up: When I graduated from high school in 1979, I had dreams of being an actress, as I loved being on stage, pretending for a short time to be someone other than the person I perceived myself to be: which was shy, somewhat homely, and something of a geek because my love of reading gave me insights into life not common to those my age.

Having grown up in a small Maine town, I wanted to experience "the real world", so instead of starting college in the local area, I opted to begin my college experience in another state. Because my parents were worried about what might happen if I went to a state where I didn't know anyone and failed in my pursuit of my dream, I was limited to Florida, as my older sister happened to be living there. At the end of a summer in which I worked hard and saved up every penny, I bought my ticket and was off....

FLORIDA, HERE I COME! (or so I was thinking)

Although I've never really discussed the reasons with my sister (and don't want to try to get into it here, as that would be a LONG exposition instead of a brief summary), things didn't work out in Florida, so I got shipped back home after only 8 weeks - unfortunately just late enough in the semester to not be able to transfer directly to the local community college. I ended up cooling my heels at home until January of 1980, when I finally was able to move into the dorms and begin my college career back at Square One.....

I had started smoking cigarettes as something to do when I was nervous when I was 16. By the time I hit the dorms at 18, it had gone from something I did only before a show to something I did on a daily basis - so I naturally had put in for a "smoking allowed" dorm room. Unfortunately, the college didn't seem to notice that the two girls assigned to the same room had both requested a "non smoking" room.

Always having been the peacemaker at home, I did the nice thing: I would go outside when I felt the urge to smoke even though smoking outside in a Maine winter wasn't exactly a picnic. They could still smell it on my clothes, however, so my dorm room was always filled with tension - at least until a couple of people a couple of dorms over dropped out, allowing my roomies to move together to another dorm.

By the time another roomie was found for me, I'd had a revelation during a long night of studying for a test while I had the room to myself. I was so nervous, I was chain smoking, and even with a window open, the room had filled with smoke to the point that I could no longer see my book to continue to study. Telling myself what a stupid habit it was, I went to my Dad that weekend to find out how he had quit cold turkey and never picked up a cigarette again. He gave me this piece of advice:

"Buy yourself a pack of cigarettes and lay out newspapers a couple of layers thick on a table. Take every cigarette out of the pack and slice each one open, dumping the tobacco out onto the newspaper and tossing out the filter and all the other wrappings. Then play with the tobacco, rubbing it against your fingers and between your palms. I'm sure you'll know when to stop. As you clean things up, think about this fact: THAT is what you've been breathing into your lungs."

Taking his advice, I did so - and never in my life had I ever been so disturbed. As I "played", the tobacco consistency struck me. It wasn't loose and leafy as I had expected, it was sticky with little rough pieces that almost felt like fiberglass. By the time I had "played" for a while, both hands were thickly coated with a sticky black substance similar to the tar I had often seen used to patch holes on the road. Lifting my hands to my face out of curiosity, wanting a closer look at this gooey black stuff, I found the smell was absolutely disgusting.

After disposing of the newspaper full of now very nasty looking black goo that looked nothing like the tobacco I had dumped onto it, I tried to wash my hands. Regular soap didn't work, so I turned to Lava. The pumice helped somewhat, but it still took several rounds of lather to get all the black off my hands, and I could still see every line in my palms because some of that evil substance remained there - plus the smell stayed with me for almost a week. Ever since then, whenever I've even thought about taking a puff off a cigarette, I remember that nasty black gunk on my hands and how the inside of my lungs would look with it stuck to them.

Of course, my new roomie was a smoker, but when told I had just quit, she was kind enough to not smoke while I was in the room. Ever since that first full semester of college, I've never been able to stand the smell of stale cigarette smoke.....

[Basically, kiddies, smoking robs your health and isn't really cool or sexy or anything like that. And I was one of the lucky ones - I got away from it before I was too hooked and before I got something nasty like cancer.....]

In February of 1979, my Dad was diagnosed with benign Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma - meaning he had cancerous cells forming a tumor in his stomach the size of a volleyball, but tests on the cells showed they weren't actively growing at the time they were removed. Because the initial tumor was wrapped around his intestines, they were unable to remove it all, so he underwent several months of chemotherapy and radiation. By mid-summer of 1979, he was proclaimed to be "in remission", as there were no other tumors forming and the original manifestation had disappeared. By the time I moved into the dorms, life at home had pretty much returned to normal.

But then, a couple of weeks into my college experience, there was an unexpected call that hit me like a ton of bricks. Mom's voice at the other end was subdued, not her normal vibrant tones. Solemnly, she said "Dad is out of remission."

I know that I held it together long enough to ask all the right questions and get myself back to my dorm room, but I remember it all as if through a fog. I remember that I left my door open and was just sitting and staring at nothing, still stunned, when a smiling face appeared in the hallway and the person the face belonged to cheerfully introduced herself with "Hi, my name's _____" - and I took one look at her and burst into hysterical tears. (I won't reveal her name, but will call her "Sissy" to refer to her as this story progresses to protect her identity....*grin*)

She came in and wrapped her arms around me, letting me cry until I could regain enough control to give her my name and tell her why I had reacted that way. She promised not to tell anyone - and became my closest confidante through that first semester, often providing things to do to distract me from what was going on at home.

My life then basically consisted of this: I would be dropped off at the dorm every Sunday evening by my parents or another family member and would put on the "coping mask", smiling to hide my pain, allowing the tears just behind the smile to surface only in the darkest hours of night. Throughout the week's classes and other activities, I would pretend that nothing unusual was going on. I was just your average college kid trying to get by.

But then Friday night would roll around and I would generally get a ride home with my uncle, who worked in the town where I was going to college and lived within just a few miles of my home. At first, the weekends weren't that bad. Dad was still Dad, but often in pain or ill from the chemotherapy and radiation treatments that had started up again. I would do what I could to help out.

As the disease progressed and he started to slowly lose his mind, things got harder to deal with. He was still 5' 11" and was slowly losing weight, but he was very strong. Often, it was like trying to keep an extra-large three year old out of mischief - and it didn't help that he was very stubborn at times! One day in particular sticks out, because he was determined that he wanted to go for a drive in the car. Problem was, he couldn't remember how the doors opened. He circled around and around the car, thumping on the windows, kicking the doors, all the time babbling about "going for a drive". At first, we tried to stop him, but after Mom, my bro and I all being knocked to the ground repeatedly by hi without him really meaning to do more than push us out of his way, we couldn't help but look at each other and laugh. I mean, we couldn't seem to do anything else to stop him, so why not laugh and just watch him until he wore himself out? Eventually, he got exhausted by all the activity and we were able to get him inside...

But it got worse....

As his mind faded more and more and he needed more and more care, he stopped recognizing his own children. The blue eyes that used to look at me with such love would now look at me as a stranger - and one who couldn't be trusted at that. It became harder and harder to maintain my "coping mask" at school, and my roomie became aware of what was going on when she would awake in the middle of the night to find me weeping as quietly as I could manage.

Luckily, the college semester ended well before Dad succumbed to his cancer in July of 1980, and I was able to drop the "coping mask" for a while. I was babysitting for a neighbor at their camp, and since they knew what was going on, I no longer had to pretend that nothing horrible was happening at home. I was at their camp, still awake and talking with one of the neighbor's relatives, when the call came through that Dad had passed on - and I was so prepared for the call that I was already searching for my sneakers to put on for the trip home as the relative was picking up the phone and saying "Hello"....

After he passed and Social Security benefits kicked in to cover the costs of college, I talked to several friends and relatives about whether or not to continue, as I had lost all desire to get a degree in acting. When my favorite cousin told me that "any degree is better than no degree" when it came to finding work, I made the decision to go back and try to finish at least the Associate of Arts, hoping that by having something to occupy my mind, I wouldn't keep thinking about the horror of watching my beloved father die a slow, painful death....

[No real moral for this section short of something I've heard often of late: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger!]

While I was so distracted by what was going on at home, I met someone at college through one of my cousins - a young man whom I'll refer to as "Jo-Jo" here, but not to protect the innocent. As you will see, Jo-Jo is anything BUT innocent - however, I believe that Karma would spin around and drop-kick me to the curb if something happened to him because of something I've written here, especially if Karma has already repaid him for his behavior.....

Jo-Jo, like me, wanted to go into acting - and he would tell anyone who would listen that he was the greatest actor who ever lived. When my cousin introduced us, my initial reaction to his touch was the same as if I'd touched a snake, but I trusted that my cousin wouldn't introduce me to anyone evil, so I ignored my instinctual feelings and accepted him at his word - that he had attended the fall session of college and would "show me the ropes" in the acting department so that I wouldn't have to struggle to catch up to the rest of the people who had a full semester's head start on me. Since I was the type who would have done such a thing for another actor, I wanted to trust him - but a small voice kept whispering that there was something not quite right going on....

For those who didn't attend high school or college during the 70's and 80's, the view of drugs was much more lax that what it is these days. Most of the people I knew were smoking "whoopie weed" and there was a lot of underage drinking going on, but there weren't a lot of people who would call the cops the moment they smelled or heard something strange. Oddly enough, I was of legal age to drink in Florida, and so I rebelled about being sent back to Maine, where I was still two years shy of legal, but drinking every chance I got. It didn't take very long for Jo-Jo to realize this, and after an evening of feeding me drink after drink and making sure to keep the "funny cigarettes" coming, he convinced me to ignore the small voice whispering not to let him touch me and allow for a consensual intimacy. Despite all his bragging about what a wonderful lover he was, he was extremely disappointing - and highly disappointed that he hadn't been the first. (I had lost my virginity at 16 to a 21-year-old who convinced me I was beautiful, we were going to get married, etc. but the moment he got what he wanted, he bolted - and I was so humiliated by it all that I hadn't been with another man until Jo-Jo.)

Brutal in his disappointment that he was put into the place of being "Number 2", Jo-Jo lashed out verbally and I went back to my room angry and humiliated. Writing off the experience as being a drunk/drugged mistake, I swore to never let him get that close to me again - but Jo-Jo had other ideas.

He showed up at my dorm room the next evening to take me to dinner so he could apologize and we could "talk", all the time insisting that he hadn't meant anything he said, he was just angry at the time and that I should give him another chance. He convinced me to go to a party with him where he introduced me to all his friends as his "girlfriend" even though I hadn't agreed to any form of a relationship. When I brought up this fact to him, he insisted that he was "protecting" me from his friends who would have gone after an "innocent young woman" like me "like sharks in a feeding frenzy" - and he eventually convinced me that the reason I hadn't enjoyed sex either of the two times I had tried it was because no one had hit my "g-spot" (which he knew all about because he read about it in Playboy!)

Wanting a distraction from the situation with my Dad, I allowed a second encounter - which, if anything, was even worse than the first for reasons I'd rather not share publicly, but suffice to say left me with serious trust issues for many years afterward. Obviously, it was a better experience for him, because he proposed marriage when he came by the next day to apologize for the behavior that broke my trust - and I turned him down! Unfortunately for me, Jo-Jo wasn't the type to take "No" for an answer, and was convinced that I was the one who was destined to be his bride!!

My time at college after that second "consensual encounter" became as much of a nightmare as my home life, as Jo-Jo seemed to be following me everywhere. When I left a class, there he was, waiting to walk me to my next class, to my dorm, or to the cafeteria - whether I wanted to be escorted or not! If I was wearing a t-shirt or a sweater, I was lectured the whole way that it was too tight - and therefore too revealing. If I was wearing a shirt that buttoned up and had the top two buttons undone (mostly because I hated the feeling of having a shirt buttoned up against my neck), I was lectured that I was showing too much skin - and he would attempt to button my collar all the way up, usually resulting in a full-blown rebellion on my part....

I took to wearing a leotard without a bra on underneath just because it seemed to annoy him beyond anything else I could possibly wear - to the point that he was so incensed about it, he would spit and sputter without being able to speak well enough to give a lecture. But heaven help me if someone from class stopped to ask me about an assignment, because, male or female, they were after my body in his mind, and that jealousy always turned into a truly impressive verbal battle!!

I grew up in farm country with a grandfather who owned a dairy farm, so I was used to drinking milk straight from the cow. Since the cafeteria only offered the pasteurized, homogenized version that tasted to me like colored water, I would usually drink chocolate milk, juice or soda - and since I took my meals with Sissy whenever possible, it was usually whatever she might be drinking.

Jo-Jo, insisting that "all women need to drink LOTS of milk to prevent osteoporosis", would go and get a glass of plain white milk - and INSIST that I had to drink it. If I refused, I would make it to my dorm room feeling perfectly fine. If I gave in and drank his offering to shut him up, I would feel lightheaded before reaching my dorm room - and would often awaken in odd places, like the night I woke at 2 a.m. tied to Jo-Jo's bed....

I was alone in the room, stark naked and with no memory of ever leaving my own dorm, but could recognize my surroundings because he had left a light burning. Needing to use the restroom, but unable to get free, I had severe rope burns around my wrists and was in tears when his roomie opened the door and cut me loose, apologizing profusely. For the next couple of weeks, I went into a rage every time I set eyes on Jo-Jo. Jo-Jo seemed oblivious to my fury over that night, and continued to try to force his will on me.

Unknown to me, Sissy had taken note that, the times that I would drink the milk Jo-Jo brought, I would act strangely before getting back to my room and, when she would stop in later, I would be nowhere to be found. Suspecting he was somehow drugging me - and having overheard me yelling at him about that particular night when I'd awakened in bondage - she had come to the determination that she wasn't going to let him force me to drink milk any more.

Two nights before spring break, when he was being even more belligerent than normal about the matter of my drinking the milk, and I was on the verge of giving in just to shut him up, Sissy took matters into her own hands by "accidentally" knocking the glass out of my hand in such a way that the spilling milk hit him directly, coating him from chest to knees. Never before had I seen anyone so angry! Yelling at Sissy that she was "a clumsy cow" and promising that he would be back before we finished eating, he went off to his dorm to change - and Sissy insisted that we leave as soon as he was out of sight even though it was our common practice to clean our plates before returning to our dorm, as neither one of us had any money to spend on snacks.

Taking care of our trays and making sure that he had entered his dorm and would therefore be unaware of our "escape", Sissy insisted that we weren't going back to our own dorm. She took me to a room in another dorm where there were people who would "hide" us from Jo-Jo even though I don't recall her actually explaining to them that we WERE "in hiding".

Although it was only about 6 p.m., the people in the room she chose to take me to were looking for a good reason to party - and being males, having two females show up at the door was reason enough to PARTY!! They broke out some bottles of cheap wine they had purchased at various points and had been storing in a drawer "until the time was right", mixed them all together into a pitcher, and we started to drink.

With the knowledge that the men were probably trying to get us drunk, Sissy and I started off barely sipping out of the "community glass of wines" before passing it on. Because she had chosen to bring us to a room where a lot of other people stopped in on a regular basis, there were soon others to share in the "wines", and by the time the pitcher was empty, the RA had stopped by to tell us we were getting too loud and that the party would have to break up. Since no one really wanted to stop partying, it was voted that we should go somewhere else to continue, so we switched dorms and continued.

That's the way the whole night went. Whenever the RA from the section of the dorms we were in came and told us to "break it up", we'd change venues and continue. More than once, the person whose room we changed the party to was awakened with *knock, knock* "The party's at YOUR place!" All that mattered to Sissy and I throughout that long night was that we stayed away from our own dorm, as she was positive that Jo-Jo was watching the place and wasn't about to let him find me - and of course, we avoided the one section of the dorm he was in just in case he might be taking a stroll in the hall.

With a lot of drinking, "funny cigarettes" - and eventually, exhaustion - taking their toll, there were portions of the night that became a blur, so I wouldn't be able to tell you how many rooms we visited or how many dorms were involved in our "roving party". All I know for sure is that, somewhere toward morning, we slipped into a room where we were told we had to keep it down because there was someone sleeping in a bunk....

Imagine my surprise when that person woke up - and I recognized a guy whom I had been admiring in my gym class! Even more surprising was the fact that he began flirting with me!! Sissy, meanwhile, was flirting with the guy's friend.....

At some point in the night, it had snowed, so even though Sissy and I returned to our dorm to shower and change in time for a class we shared, the classes were canceled. Thinking I would be on campus until my uncle arrived that evening as always - and still wanting to avoid the unwanted attentions of Jo-Jo - we returned to the last room we'd been partying in to continue our flirtations. I won't go into detail, but suffice to say that the "flirtations" eventually became an "encounter" - and for the first time in my life, I discovered why everyone was so gung-ho about sex!

Unfortunately, my parents had made the decision to come to town and collect me themselves, so I arrived back at my dorm room to prepare for going home for the week of spring break to find them waiting for me.......Oops!

I had been having some odd cramps for a good part of the semester, so on the Monday of spring break, I went to see the family doctor to find out what was going on. Imagine my surprise to have him tell me I was pregnant - and that the cramps were my body's way of telling me I was having a miscarriage! Within a couple of days, I miscarried a badly deformed fetus - and because I wanted to know such details as how far along I was so that I could identify the father (though I was pretty sure who it was) and why the child was so deformed so that I could know if it was something genetic I should be aware of, tests were run.

The timing was inconclusive, as the infant would have been spawned at some point between my last consensual contact with Jo-Jo and the most recent indiscretion, but the blood work found something interesting: The fetus had heavy concentrations of a drug the doctor identified as Rohypnol. Further questions to the doctor confirmed that the drug didn't occur in alcohol or marijuana, which were the only foreign substances I had knowingly ingested. In fact, the drug was used as a short-term treatment for insomnia in Latin America and Europe - but was illegal in the US. He even explained to me that my blood work hadn't found the drug in my system because it was metabolized within 72 hours - but that it would have stayed longer in the placenta and fetus. He also went so far as to state that he suspected it was the reason for the deformaties even though it hadn't been shown to do so when given under a doctor's care as it was a good possibility that, if it was being slipped into something like food or a drink by someone with nefarious reasons for doing so, they may have been overdosing me.....

That was all I needed to hear to come to the conclusion that Sissy's suspicions were correct! Jo-Jo had been drugging the milk he insisted on having me drink so that I wouldn't resist his demands!

By the time I got back to college, I was livid. As soon as I unpacked my bags, I went to Jo-Jo's room and knocked, calling out "We need to talk". Soft giggles and someone hissing "Shh" were the only response, and by placing my ear against the door for a second knock, I was able to confirm it was Jo-Jo behind the door, as he whispered to his female companion not to make any noise.

Pretending to give up, I went over to the campus pub to waste a little time before a second attempt at confronting him and spent the time speaking with his roomie, who happened to be there having a glass of beer. When I stopped by again on the way back to my dorm, the companion was gone and Jo-Jo was trying to act as if he had only just arrived moments earlier, but the odor in his room of "funny cigarettes" was telling. When I brought up the smells, he insisted it must have been his roomie - the one I had been speaking to at the pub wh hadn't had the odor about him.....

Before I could begin my tirade about his deception, he actually had the nerve to look at me smugly and ask if I had come to tell him I was pregnant and willing to accept his marriage proposal in order to avoid giving my parents a bad name. Just as smug, I informed him that, had that been the intention when drugging me, he had failed: his child had been deformed and I had miscarried it! Before I knew what he was planning to do, he slapped me across the face, screaming me it was a sin for a Catholic to have an abortion and even more so, to lie about it....

I saw red and, without thinking, hit him back - though whether I hit him with my fist or something I grabbed from his desk, I can't really say. As he sat looking up at me in shock with blood running down his face, I reiterated that I had solid proof from my doctor that he had been drugging me - which had caused both the deformaties and the miscarriage. Just before I stomped out the door, I warned him to not even THINK of approaching me again. He showed up at my dorm the next day wanting to tell me I had broken his nose, and my roomie wouldn't let him see me, threatening to break a few other body parts if he ever darkened our door again.......

Naturally, since he was denied what he wanted, he tried to make sure no one else would want me. He spread rumors about me and what a crazy little sex kitten I was; he tried to pick fights with anyone I had ever looked twice at; he still followed me everywhere, but didn't try to approach, seeming content to just glare at me from a distance - perhaps worried about what other violence my roomie or I might bring upon him?

[The moral to this whole section for BOTH men and women is this: ALWAYS obey your gut instincts, and if you find yourself suddenly feeling ill after eating or drinking something, ALWAYS go to a hospital and have yourself checked out! Had I done so within 72 hours of any of the times I found myself somewhere when I didn't remember how I'd got there, I could have had my "stalker" arrested, for that is exactly what Jo-Jo was - even if the term WASN'T well known in the early 80's. Of course, if I had been able to afford it, I could have also taken him to court for slander.......]

When I returned to the dorms in September of 1980, I'd had a little over a month to adjust to the loss of my Dad, but was still hurting badly inside. Sissy had switched to the larger "sister campus" of the college in pursuit of her degree, so I was pretty much on my own.

I was fairly content at first to be a loner, as I was looking at the world from a distance anyway, still interacting with the new people I was meeting, but feeling no sense of community. That lasted until the fateful day that I went into the cafeteria to eat and encountered a girl whom I had graduated with and who attended the same church I did. She was being visited that day by another girl who attended our church, and they both gave me a look that made me feel like a speck of bacteria under a microscope as I extended my meal card for her to swipe so that I could eat.

"You know," she said with a nasty tone meant to sting, ignoring my card, "if you'd been a GOOD Catholic, your father wouldn't have died!"

Without a word, I spun on my heel and left before she could see how badly she'd hurt me, but didn't make it far before tears clouded my vision and I had to stop to take a deep, cleansing breath. That was when a soft voice behind me said "THAT was extremely rude of her!"

I turned to find myself looking at a concerned young man in a wheelchair. He introduced himself as "a member of Section Eight" - and invited me to eat with him and the rest of the "Section" at the campus pub. As we made our way to the pub, he explained that "Section Eight" was the group of handicapped students in a special computer program who lived on the first floor of the same dorm I was in - and he admitted with a little smile that he knew I was in that dorm because I had smiled at him before. When we got the the pub, there was an amputee, two men with back injuries who were on permanent light duty and therefore were being re-trained for desk jobs, and two deaf gentlemen. When my companion explained why I had been invited along to share their meal, I was accepted into the group as if I belonged - and in real short order, they became my "family away from home". I would often go out with them to bars (getting slipped in as the "interpreter" for the deaf guys, who had taught me enough sign language so that I could order for them), which allowed me to get out of my room - and therefore away from my dark thoughts - while staying out of trouble.

 
As to my roomie that semester, she was a very "interesting" sort.

Unlike what you see on most of the shows about college, we didn't have a sock or a necktie on the doorknob or any such signal when she was "entertaining" and didn't want to be disturbed - she would simply lock the door and then pull a heavy piece of furniture in front of it! Sometimes, I would have enough studying to do on my person to keep me busy in the T.V. lounge up the hall until I heard the furniture move, or I would go find someone to visit for a bit and keep checking to see if the knob had been unlocked.

Most of the time, the "entertaining" was a temporary thing that ended around midnight, but there were several nights that I wasn't allowed back in until I had just enough time to change and grab my books before my class in the morning. It was on the all night "entertainment" nights that I would tend to get myself into trouble, because when it hit 1 or 2 a.m. and I still couldn't get into my room, I would go out looking for someplace else to sleep.

Many of these nights, I would wander into a "party in progress" somewhere - and sometimes I managed to stay enough in control of my intake that I slept alone in someone's chair or beanbag. Unfortunately, more than once I awoke in the wee hours of the morning with a fierce hangover in a room I didn't recognise with someone sleeping next to me that I didn't even remember meeting. On those mornings, I would slip out of bed, pull on my clothes, and slip out of the room - luckily managing not to wake the sleeping male. On the downside of this, I was always riddled with guilt and hoped the other party didn't remember me (which they usually didn't, as they were frequently as sauced as I for those encounters). On the upside, my experiences my first semester had taught me to always have a condom somewhere on my person - and the fact that it was always missing when I got back to my room made me feel it had at least been SAFE drunken sex that I didn't remember having.....

 
I was also doing some normal-type dating as well, sometimes seeing men I'd met through friends and sometimes seeing someone I shared a class with, but none of them what could be really termed "serious dating". Through those one-on-one dates with various men, I started to hone down the type of man I thought I might be able to spend my life with - and, having learned a little something from Jo-Jo the first semester, I carefully listened to my "inner voice" with the men I was seeing. Quite simply, if the guy was giving off "bad vibes", he was turned down flat before he even got his foot in the door. Those who weren't giving off "bad vibes" were carefully watched. If he was a little too clingy or got jealous when another man said "Hi" on the way by, he didn't get a second date. And of course, sometimes the man would decide I wasn't the right woman and HE wouldn't ask for another date. There were a couple of men out of my second and third semester in college who stood out in my mind as possible mates, but one of them took a giant step ahead of the pack in May of 1981.....

The man in question was someone I had met through Sissy during my first semester, but when we first met, he was dating another girl. In fact, he and his girlfriend had been "raided" at one point the night of the roving party. By the time we returned in the fall, he was living in an apartment off campus with his sister and that same girl, but they were no longer officially "together". He and I dated off and on, but then, in December of '80, he disappeared without explanation, so I pretty much wrote him off.

Then, on the morning of the first of May, which happened to fall on a Friday that year, I was hailed as I was leaving the cafeteria after breakfast on my way to a class. He told me he had returned to visit some friends in the dorms, but many of them had moved off campus or switched rooms after he left, so he had been up most of the night looking for a place to sleep. My "entertaining" roomie had moved out at the end of the fall semester and the other two roomies I had been assigned at the beginning of the spring session had both dropped out, so I had a room to myself - which I offered him use of do that he could get some sleep while I was busy.

When I slipped back into the room after my classes, he awoke enough to explain to me that things hadn't worked out for the degree he had been pursuing, as the college seemed to keep losing his paperwork. The ex whom he had been sharing an apartment with kept putting stress into the relationship by wanting to get back together. He had also been having a hard time making ends meet in the off campus housing because he couldn't find a decent job in the area. All three things together had made him decide to take some time off and return home for a bit when he disappeared in December.

While back home, his mother had convinced him that his ex really cared about him, so he had let his ex to move to his home town to live with him - at least until he caught her cheating on him! He had taken the weekend off to return her to her hometown and decided to stop at the campus for a visit, as the campus was about half-way between her home town and his - which was how he had come to be wandering around the campus looking for familiar faces when he spotted me coming out of the cafe.....

We spent the weekend together getting reaquainted, parting with the promise to write to each other when he had to return home. Over the course of the letters throughout that month, our bond grew, and he decided to move back to the area for the summer to pursue a relationship - arrived at my home a week ahead of the day he had told me he was coming, thining he was going to surprise me.

He turned out being the one surprised, because I was off visiting the coast with a girlfriend when he showed up at the door. He and my mom bonded while they waited for me to arrive, and at the end of the summer (with her blessing), we moved into an apartment together within walking distance of the campus, as I only had a few more classes to take to earn my A.A. before continuing on at Orono for my B.A. The only problem was that I still hadn't decided whether to chose Theater or English as my major, and the time was fast approaching for me to make that big decision if I wanted to finish college......

[The moral of this section is: Sometimes even the best of intentions fall by the wayside, but just because you misbehave doesn't mean you have to be stupid. If you MUST have sex, make it safe sex! But there's also that old saw that says: If you love something, set it free. In my case, a man I set free returned with a stronger belief that I was the right one for him....and gave me back a bit of the direction in my life that I had been lacking.]

September 1981.

I was living off campus with a man I was coming to understand and love more each day.

I was starting to look at my life to make the choice of whether to continue into a career in the theater - or change my major and perhaps continue into either journalism or a teaching degree in English.

Then my mother called to relay bad news again....

My favorite person among all my many relatives was my cousin, Tim, who was three weeks younger than I, but always seemed so much more worldly because he was a Navy brat. Whenever we were together, we behaved more like twins than cousins, almost having a psychic connection to one another. Mom's phone call was to tell me he had been killed in a car accident in the middle of the night.

I spent the day crying my eyes out.......

The wake was a total nightmare for me. The only major damage to Tim's body was a broken neck when the car he had been a passenger in slammed into a tree - and the undertaker had done such a fine job of laying him out, he looked like he might just sit up at any moment and start talking. As was expected of me, I went past the coffin and "paid my respects", but then got as far back in the room as I could, feeling like my heart was being torn out of my chest with every breath I took. Just a year prior, it had been Tim who had encouraged me to go back to college. Already knowing how difficult it had been to concentrate when I had watched Dad's end coming, slow but sure, how could I concentrate when my very soul had been torn out??

I still can't explain why I even bothered to return to college to finish out the semester. My heart simply wasn't in it. I had no desire to continue, no drive to succeed. If I had been drifting without a rudder after Dad's death, the loss of Timmy took all the wind out of my sails. I was in a lifeboat with no oars and without even the slightest inclination to attempt to move the boat anywhere.

When it came time at the end of the semester to make my decision as to which path to put myself on, I had to meet with the head of the English Department and the head of the Theater Department in separate interviews. Both basically told me the same thing. I had God-given talent, but no will to succeed. (Actually, in an attempt to break me out of my doldrums and try to fire me up, the Theater head put it that I was "just plain lazy".) When my boyfriend decided to return to his home town, where he could work as a nurse's aide at a local nursing home and make more than he could as a short order cook in a college town while saving money on an apartment by renting one of the ones belonging to his parents, I was given yet another choice - and opted to forget about my education and stay with him, especially since he had become my only reason for living by that point....

Although I've occasionally thought about finishing my degree, I don't regret my choice to follow the love of my life. We've been together 27 years - 25 of that married - and are still counting.....

[Sorry, I can't come up with a moral on this portion, as it's mostly just a closing to explain why I never finished college.....*grin*]

 
Blessed be to all of my Faithful Readers who have made it through to this point.

 
"May the Lord fill your sails with fair wind, support your hulls in inviting seas, guide your hands upon the tiller toward pleasant places and bring you home to a safe and loving harbor." (a variation on a blessing given for sailors)

 
And may all those in college find a smoother path to their degree than the one I had......*grin*.

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