Chapter 33 I Learn to Cope Let's go on a while with the letters. I wrote on the 25th. Mostly it was a love letter. I still assuming she would go to her sister's and then spend a few days with me before we went back to Valpo. I really wish it had turned out that way since the way it did go I learned several things about myself I'd rather not have known. I tell her that my dad and I are going car shopping the next day. I wrote again the next day, the 27th. I had gotten her letter of the 23rd ...

Chapter 32 A Tentative Restart Isn’t it interesting how we both remember the phone call? The details differ, but the main points are there in both recollections. When I hung up  I just stood in the phone booth staring at the phone for at least ten minutes. I only left then because another student wanted to use the it. I walked back to my room, stretched out on my bed, and looked at the cracks in the ceiling. In my mind I replayed the conversation over and over. A hundred times I w...

#53 Poems and Phones I spent the last few days trying to get my act together. I'm trying to find out how and why Donna and I fell in love and got married. In looking back over what I've written I'm not sure I'm doing that. Still, I think there is something here worth going on about. As sometimes happens, while I'm thinking about one writing problem I get ideas for another piece of writing all together. I'm including this poem here because it came to me over the weekend. It really belongs back...

 Chapter 30 Crisis Coming I vividly remember that day, July 23, 1962. I sat in my chair for maybe an hour reading and rereading that letter. Then I got up, dropped the letter on my desk and walked to the registrar to withdraw from Kent. I next called my parents to tell them I wasn't going to stay at Kent. Dad couldn't come to pick me up until the next day so I went back to my room and read the letter another ten or twelve times. I was cold and numb and very very scared. I didn't have a clue ...

Chapter 29  We Go Thud (Note I wrote a lot of this before reading what Donna wrote so some will be repetitious, but it does show the view from the other side.). And on we go. I wrote a rather nice love letter on the 16th. I do start by saying I've only gotten two letters from her in the last 12 days. I ask if she is mad at me and if she is for her to please tell me why. I tell her I miss her so much it hurts and recall a wedding she attended last year where the minister said "Pick ...

Chapter 28 Things Get Worse Picking up where I left off, Donna also wrote on the 9th of July. She starts by saying she has tried to write to me three times that day bit she's in such a nasty mood she didn't think I'd appreciate the things she said. So she changes the subject and tells me about taking a different way home from the library and ending up in the mountains. The drive was beautiful when she could see through the smog and it twisted and turned so much she had to concentrate and for...

I guess I've put off July as long as I can though actually July 1962 started off very well. I wrote her a letter mailed on the 1st in which I tell her I'd heard from LBS and they will not take me since I am 21 units short. I first tell her there is nothing more I can do, but then change my mind and say I can get to LBS if I do well at both this summer's classes and next year at Valpo. I ask her to come with me. That is, come back to Valpo for one more year then we will both go to LBS. I come ...

Chapter 26 On the Brink of a Fall (Aside) Darling, when you read this don't be offended by what comes next, or in the next few entries. Donna is a high maintenance woman. She was a high maintenance girl. She needed, if not constant, then frequent support and affirmation. She needed people to talk to and socialize with. She needed to feel useful and appreciated. I could go on but you get the idea. I was 2400 miles away and letters and an occasional phone call can only do so much. Her parents ...

Chapter 25 We begin to lose our footing. Well, here we go. The summer of 1962. By far the worst summer of my life. And, to a great extent it was my own fault. Remember I said there were heroes, villains, and fools? Well, the fool was almost always me. Donna's first letter was written June 2nd, right after she reached her new home in Whittier California. Basically she says she is tired, she hurts and she misses me. Her second letter, written June 5th hit me like a punch in the stomach. She wr...

  I am Cain, the firstborn. My parents lost everything Everything which would have been mine. I was firstborn so I was the heir. I learned about farming. I knew the soil and the plants. But the garden was closed to me. The Lord seldom talked to me, Nor I to Him. My younger brother Abel was a Shepard. He talked to the Lord often. His offerings pleased the Lord. Mine did not. We argued. Then, somehow, I had a rock in my hands. Abel stopped arguing forever. The Lord marked me. He forced me...