OMG I found a picture of the sport coat!

  That would be me in the middle between my wonderful first college roommate and "the asshole".  He is wearing the coat I bought him with my mother's money, the one that caused the blowup and engendered  the amusing letter from my post last week.  Gloria Inch, my roommate, was a five foot nothing blue eyed blond. She had a irresistible bubbly laugh and incredible karma. She once sat next to Martin Luther King Jr. on an airplane from Atlanta to Florida. Her parents were elderly retired snowbirds, Canada in the summer and Lakeland FL when it grew cold up there. Everyone who met her fell instantly in love except my parents. They disliked her from the minute they met her for reasons I never understood. I wish I could see her now, but we managed to lose touch somewhere along the way in those pre cellphone, twitter, and facebook times. I know she lived in Hawaii for a while after she married, and then went back to Lakeland where she and her husband ran a marina. If she looks like someone you know, please drop me a line.

My hair was very short because I wanted to get the blond off the ends. It was blond because of my high school boy friend who cheated on me with one of my best friends, and then joined the army to get away from both of us. The week after, while I was sitting around the house in my pajamas, eyes red from listening to "our song" and crying, my mother gave me 20 bucks and instructions to go "get that stringy hair cut and get a permanent".  I can't seem to remember what "our song" was now but I do remember the look on my mother's face when she picked me up from the hairdresser. The stylist used a lot of bleach to get all the auburn out of my almost waist length hair. Mom went and had a few words with her, but sent me to the car first. I can only imagine how that went down. Her eyes were still wide as saucers and capable of bringing down small aircraft when she slid into the station wagon. Fun memories.

John, my first husband, is somewhere in El Paso, TX last I heard. At least that's where he was when he called me about 10 years ago, some months after his father died. Of course, it would have been thoughtful to have let our child know that his grandfather was dead when it happened,  but well, leopards don't change their spots, now do they? I imagine he still complains to his third (or maybe fourth by now) wife about me. If you know someone who looks like him, run as fast as you can.