Butler, PA, and a July 27, 1987 postcard

My aunt and maternal grandmother lived together for the entirety of the latter's life. When I was a child, they lived in a neighboring small town called Rimersburg (which was where my high school was located). During their time there, my grandfather was bedridden with black lung disease. He had worked all of his life in the coal mines and was repaid with a disability payment and days spent in a hospital bed in the sitting room in their home.

It was always strange for me when I saw him. He laid in that room with no TV and a sofa which he could never leave his bed to sit on. Occasionally, the radio would be turned on, but mostly he just laid there and waited for people to feed him, give him coffee with a straw in the mug, or give him a bed pan. I never saw his wife or my aunt meaningfully interact with him. I didn't say anything to him myself because he struggled to get out any reply when I did speak and I don't think he really "knew" me.

We most often visited him when my aunt and grandma needed to take a caregiver's break. During that time, my mother would sit with her father, feed him, and sometimes have quiet and forced exchanges with him. My mother felt her father favored her when she was younger while her mother favored the aunt who lived with her. She'd sit next to him and prattle while he struggled to reply at all. This would go on until her sister and mother returned. My sister and I would read my cousin's books or get into their shed and pull out croquet equipment and play a little, but we were mostly bored and anxious to leave.

The only book I remember reading from that time was a little picture book about the pilgrims. The native Americans were shown as being friendly and caring about the survival of the people who showed up on their shores. It was one of the lies I was told as a child which was exposed when I grew up. It turns out that the Wapanoag were indulging in a little of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" diplomacy. The Iroquois were in a position to annihilate them and they sought to annex themselves to anyone who might help them in a fight.

When my grandfather passed away, my aunt and grandmother, who seemed to be fused in many respects, decided to sell their nice home in a small town for a nicer home in Butler. It was after this move, which plunged them into a life a hefty multiple mortgages and continuing to live even further beyond their combined means, that saw me accompanying my mother to Butler on a regular basis. It was a "big town" by the standards of people who grew up in a town of less than a 1,000. It was also the only place where I could find work after college and where most of my written correspondence to Tito was composed in the office of the halfway house there.

I made many pilgrimages to the Butler post office, where my uncle worked for a time in the back room sorting mail, to send missives and parcels to Tito. The people there didn't know me and didn't read my outgoing mail as the people at the local post office did. I sent Tito this card to show him the streets I was traversing to buy him goodies for care packages, stationary for our exchanges, and mailing things to him. In this card, I say that I learned the population was 33,000. That was either incorrect or it's been seriously depopulated since then.

This was the first postcard that I sent Tito in Japan and it was addressed to his workplace. 

A drive with mom, and a yearbook photo from 1982

I was wearing a striped shirt and dark brown stretch pants while sitting in the front passenger seat. My mother said, "If you lost weight, you could move a lot easier." I flexed my legs and told her that I could move just fine. She paused for a moment and then added, "If you lost weight, you wouldn't sweat between your legs so much." I replied with, "I don't sweat between my legs." She got angry with me and said, "You know what I mean."

The truth was that I didn't know what she meant. I was 17 years old and she was 39. She was talking about her problems with being fat and assuming they were my problems, too. Even though I was morbidly obese, I could sit in cross-legged yoga positions and was very flexible. I also didn't realize that "between your legs" meant what my mother would call "the wee wee area," and not between my thighs. That being said, I didn't sweat in either of these places as I don't seem to sweat much at all (and still don't), but I guess she did.

What my mother didn't say was that she wouldn't be as embarrassed by me if I lost weight. I also concluded that she'd love me more if I did. I think that I remember that exchange in the car, which was not atypical for my mother and me as she often was critical of my fat while ignoring her own, was that I had reached an age where I understood what wasn't being said as clearly as what was.

The striped shirt I wore on that day lives on in local history as it was the one I was wearing when I was photographed with another classmate as "most artistic" among my high school classmates. I won't publish the entire page, but I will say that all of the other categories for people who were daring, flirtatious, musical, etc. showed people in staged positions looking happy and having fun. I guess the photographer not only didn't feel I (and my compatriot, whose glee at posing with me is clear in his countenance) warranted a fun picture, but not even a reshoot when I was ready and smiling instead of being caught in an awkward open-mouthed moment.

Imagining, and a July 26, 1987 greeting card

"We think of ourselves as floating outside of our bodies...big heads just floating outside," said Mary. She stood at the front of a graduate school classroom in chunky heels and layers of old-lady clothes. She was chubby, talked a lot, and loved to tell embarrassing stories about her clients when the students laughed. I found her sharing stories about clients with substance abuse issues urinating themselves while their mortified family pretended nothing was wrong as part of her comedy act in poor taste and questionable ethically.

What Mary was trying to say in an inelegant way was that we often perceive ourselves as a conscious entity that exists separately from our body. The real "me" isn't locked into a meat sack, but exists in the ether. When we think about being loved, we want people to love that body-less self—what some might call a soul.

I spent most of my life feeling separate from my body because it was something that I mentally wanted to push myself away from. It was a prison that I was trapped in, not "me." When I fantasized about being loved by someone, I couldn't put myself in the picture. I had to inhabit another role, another body, another person. I was an actor playing a part in my own fantasies because I couldn't bear to see "me" as being with the body I was in.

I wondered if Mary, who was physically unattractive, talked about this mind-body disconnect because she also wanted to distance her sense of her consciousness from her physical body. I had read her book in which she had had a meltdown because she was in love with her partner in her therapeutic practice and he didn't want her back. She spoke with disdain about a woman "in a sparkly tube top" who interviewed for a clerical role that this man fell in love with. It was clear that she felt he loved a body, and not a person because she would have been his choice had he been less shallow.

Given my experiences with Mary in the class that she was teaching, I think she overestimated her appeal on a psychological level. She admitted she had attention issues, and she did. When she was in the room, she had to be the one speaking and the center of attention. She was also prone to crying and having mini-fits any time a student disagreed with her and had one big meltdown in front of us. With that sort of emotional manipulation and lack of control, I'm not sure her partner would have found her appealing spiritually either, but Mary imagined she was much better than "the woman in the sparkly tube top," who she felt was unworthy of even having a name and Mary reduced to an object.

When I lost weight and felt more in tune with my appearance—though I never entirely got there—I felt more aligned with my physical presence, but I still struggled to imagine myself in the picture as a corporeal entity. It didn't help that the "me" that Tito fell in love with at a distance was actually pure personality. Unlike most relationships, he really did fall in love with my conscious self as I did his.

Once we declared our feelings and made a commitment, I had to make purposeful efforts to align my thinking with the idea of being physically in the relationship as well. This was the hardest part for me given my body image issues and fears about physical rejection. It was an act of will to see myself as a (relatively) "normal" person in this way since every "relationship" I'd ever entertained in my mind to that point was my mind in an imaginary person's body living that person's life.

This card was a part of the process of pulling the physical "me" into the relationship with the conscious "me." (Note: this previous note pages on Calvin Klein stationary were included in this card, which is why every square inch isn't scribbled all over with words.)

Envy, and a July 26, 1987 note (partial)

Linda's house felt large and threadbare. It was clean and tidy, but the years had left the bare boards looking weathered and worn down. It had been built many decades ago, but had never had any updates to the interior. I dropped by her place to pick her up so we could drive about 45 minutes to a mall that included one of my favorite targets of sarcasm, "Big Lots." Linda didn't have a car or much money so these sojourns were a good way for us to spend some time together without breaking either of our small banks.

Linda's hair was black and nearly straight. She usually had it cut it into a mid-length bob and wore jeans  and a polyester shirt in a plain color. She was of average weight, but she fretted about her "thunder thighs" and told me that she feared she'd have the thick, wavy legs that she saw on her mother. She was well-groomed, but quite plain. This was in contrast to me who, at that time, wore elaborate make-up and dressed to the nines.

As we made the long trek to the mall, Linda said something no one had ever said to me before and I have not heard since. She said, "I was jealous of you when we were kids." Since I had grown up poor, fat, bullied, and abused, I was stunned to hear her say this. As a fellow child of an alcoholic who knew my circumstances better than any other outsider, I couldn't fathom what would compel her to feel that way.

When I asked her why, she told me that my mother was always "so nice" and that she was always buying my sister and me things. It was true. On a material level, my mother did go over the top for us. She not only bought a great many toys and other items during my childhood, but when I was older and became a KISS fan, she'd march into record shops and ask them to hand over free promotional items. I was too embarrassed to ask, but she was incredibly bold. However, she did emotionally abuse her children until their sense of self-worth was reduced to nothing. I told Linda that the face my mother showed her was not the only one she possessed, but I could tell that she didn't believe me.

Linda told me that her mother had also expressed envy of my mother and this further shocked me. My parents fought all the time and my dad frequently stormed out of the house after arguments and hung around in bars until late at night. She told me that her mother felt that way because my dad was on disability whereas her family was on welfare. They got less money from entitlements than we did and had to live with the indignity of food stamps. Her father also sometimes physically abused her mother whereas my parents limited their abuse to words.

My conversation with Linda opened up a window on a perspective that had been tightly shut before. As bad as my life circumstances were, there were still others who had it worse. The level of hardship I endured was a matter of perspective. Since Linda wasn't bullied daily at school and could be average and invisible, I always saw her as better off than me, but she saw me as smarter, better loved, and more materially wealthy than her. Both of our views were informed by incompleteness though. She only saw my advantages and I only saw hers.

I had more fun with Linda in my childhood than any other friend and I tried to carry on that relationship into my adult life. Our infrequent trips to "Big Lots" and other types of shopping stopped when she had a baby and didn't have time to venture into the world with me anymore. By the time Tito came into my life, Linda had largely exited it so she is rarely mentioned in any of my correspondence with him, but "Big Lots," which I connected with spending time with her, was still there.

Psychological Teddy Bears, and my first cassette to Tito

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my aunt and uncle were crazy about Elvis Presley. They spoke excitedly about seeing him in concert during what had to have been his last years of performing before his death. I questioned how people could be so wrapped up in someone who had become famous in the 50's and 60's.

It wasn't just that they liked his music. They were middle-aged people enthralled by what I saw as an "old guy" (in his 40's) who wasn't producing new music anymore. I felt like they were watching re-runs rather than something new.

By the time I was 22, I  had my answer as to why this happened because I had been a KISS fan for 10 years at that point in time and continued to be one. The  band was less successful, less interesting (as they had taken off their make-up and were performing in rags), and their music was less impressive. In many ways, I didn't even like the band anymore as they seemed to have transitioned from exotic performers in kabuki-style make-up with distinct personas to a generic hard rock band.

As I talked to Tito on my first tape to him, I told him that the band was like a teddy bear to me and to other fans. Jo and I had discussed it and what we realized was that being a KISS fan was so woven into our identity that holding onto our fandom gave us security. We couldn't let go of it because it meant losing a piece of ourselves.

At some point in time, many years later, I realized how having your identity connected to something external to you was a dangerous thing. It opened me up to disillusion and disappointment, but it also sucked the joy out of life to remain psychologically shackled to something just because embracing it was a small comfort due to its familiarity. I let KISS go completely, sold my collection, and moved on.

It wasn't easy and part of me kept wanting to run back to my fandom so that I could find the piece of me that I felt was attached to it. In the long run, the experience of releasing my attachment to something which defined me for the longest time prepared me to let go of other things I once enjoyed, but no longer did. I learned that it was only after walking away that I could find new facets of myself through embracing other interests. It was psychologically like clearing the shelf of old objects which no longer made me happy to make space for new ones.

Student Assistants, and a July 26, 1987 note

The student assistants worked in a fairly industrial-looking room with a handful of old command-line computers and a huge printer. The printer we had been using required paper with strips on either side with holes punched in it to guide the feed. After a page was printed, you tore the strips off using perforated edges. It had one font, and printed a bit lightly, but otherwise served us well.

One day, a new Macintosh was delivered alone with a fancy printer with a daisy wheel that could print pages on plain paper and in a limited variety of fonts. I took little notice of it as I was more interested in efficiency with my tasks than novelty, but the other assistants including a slim young woman with medium-length dark brown hair gathered around it in intrigue. The dark-haired woman in particular seemed to fall in love with the new set-up and spent hours working with it much to the consternation of  the other assistants who wanted a crack at it, too.

A few weeks after the new printer arrived, I was told that it was broken and that the young woman who had formed the strongest relationship with the psychology department's new technology was responsible. I thought she had just used it to the exclusion of all of the older, sturdier equipment, but it turned out that she was using it to produce personal correspondence.

The oldest assistant among us, a chain-smoking guy with floppy light-brown hair who tended to pace nervously around whatever space he was in, told me that she was making form letters to send to her friends back home. She would ask a question and provide what she thought were funny, interesting, or quirky multiple choice answers for them to check off and return to her. After the umpteenth letter, the daisy wheel on the printer pooped out and she was barred from touching the new technology. While everyone was angry with her for breaking the new gadget, I felt sorry for her that the only way she could get her friends to write back to her was to give them a form letter.

I was far too verbose to use this sort of letter-writing, but my mother bought me a tablet full of the same check-box style correspondence. If you look at the note I'm showing today, you can see a line across the top where it was torn off the page. This was the first and last piece of written correspondence of this type that I sent to Tito. Most of what I did was covering nearly every square inch of space I had with words.

Hugs, and a July 25, 1987 greeting card

I was sitting on the bleachers in our school's gymnasium. It had been converted into an "auditorium" by pulling the seating, which could be pulled out and pushed back like the bellows of an accordion, away from the walls. My class of 1982, which had exactly 82 graduates after the drop-outs and failures, was waiting nervously for commencement ceremonies to start.

Valerie walked up behind me and embraced me around my shoulders for a warm hug. A short time before this moment, I'd awkwardly given her a silver identity bracelet as a graduation gift. It had been a "hit and run" present because I lacked the social skills to remain present with gratitude. I sat there feeling like I'd successfully escaped any emotional displays when she hugged me.

Val had been my best friend for the last three years of high school. She was beautiful with long, straight, brown hair and big brown eyes. Her figure was nearly perfect in a voluptuous way with large breasts and hips and a small waist. Her physical attractiveness wouldn't have been so remarkable if she hadn't been so kind to me. Most of the pretty people didn't want to have anything to do with me, but she talked to me when few others would. She also gave me the first hug I could remember.

While I'm sure that my parents likely hugged me on occasion as a very small child, it happened outside of my conscious memory. No one in my family was comfortable with any sort of touching and my father was especially resistant to showing physical affection to his daughters. As a result, when Valerie embraced my shoulders from behind, I was frozen in shock and didn't know how to feel or respond. I didn't react, and she wandered away to continue her preparations for the ceremony.

Tito had told me that he loved hugs more than anything and would take a hug over a kiss from a girlfriend. Though I had rarely had such experiences, I wanted them, and I was sure I'd welcome it when we finally met. This is the card that I sent to express that desire.

Obession, and a July 25, 1987 greeting card

A heavy wooden side table was next to my mother's favorite chair. It was a chunky thing that could have supported the weight of an adult man. While no one ever stood on it, it was the resting place for my mother's flotsam. This included stacks of open and lightly skimmed junk mail, empty mugs that once contained Nestea instant tea mixed with hot water and powdered creamer, and stacks of cheap romance novels.

My mother was obsessed with paperback bodice rippers. The covers were always the same with minor variations. Manly men and womanly women who dressed in clothes that revealed their well-appointed bulges graced every tome. If you looked at their posture, there was always a sense that these strapping men were both protecting and dominating the women next to them.

I occasionally glanced at my mother as she spent hours reading these types of books. Her face registered more emotion while engaging with them than it ever did when dealing with her husband or children. She'd smile. Her eyebrows would arch. She'd look engaged or excited. She'd frown, which was the only expression from her that we shared with the books.  

The books were my mother's obsession because they allowed her to live in a fantasy existence. She needed this to survive the harshness of her reality. If she was given the choice between living with poverty, an alcoholic husband, and the squalor of our home and envisioning herself as the comely servant woman who the handsome and wealthy lord of the manor fell in love with, she'd choose the latter.

I never read those romance novels because I spent my time weaving my own fantasy worlds to escape reality. When Tito came along, I became obsessed with him and he became my default thought any time I wasn't occupied with work or other tasks. Our long distance relationship was where I imagined a better life. The main difference between my mother's obsession and mine was that mine carried the hope of turning into reality.

This card was written a week after Tito and I committed to our long distance relationship and details very well how preoccupied I was with him.

Replaying a moment, and cassette tapes from July 14, 1987

When I was a child, we had to have a TV guide because the only way you could watch programs that you wanted to see was to be in front of the set at the moment it aired. VCRs either didn't exist or were only used in professional settings. It wasn't until I entered junior high school that they became commercially available, and my family was too poor to buy one until I was in college. Experiences  were transitory. You had them for the present time, but they could be replayed only as imperfect memory.

The idea that you could record and replay anything, let alone special moments in your life, was not something anyone expected. Cell phones with cameras weren't resting in every hand. The best you could hope for was that a wandering photographer at an event may have caught something important and offered you a print. This is why so many events, such as weddings or proms, only involved highly staged photos that captured the fact of the experience, but none of the quality of it.

Even though we presently live in a time in which people are constantly recording their lives, it's still serendipity if a spontaneous, precious experience is recorded. The first time someone tells you they love you, your first hug, or your first kiss are unlikely to be in a replayable format. One of the handful of benefits of a distance relationship back in the pre-internet age was that it was all written or recorded. I could put in a tape and hear Tito say over and over and over again that he had strong feelings for me. And, I did.

The two tapes I'm picturing  here were labeled physically by Tito, but I called them "Wow" and "Oh, Wow" and I listened to them more than a dozen times. Hearing them was the best moment of my existence and I could repeat it as many times as I wanted. This was a rare gift of our circumstances.

Reception and Transmission, and a July 24, 1987 greeting card

One of the many things I learned during my relationship with Tito was how reception of what you say shapes what you transmit. I wrote a lot of letters and made many tapes in which I poured my heart out to him. I was incredibly vulnerable and admitted things I would never have said to anyone else. With one sentence, he could have curtailed this tendency by making me understand in ways subtle or gross that such things were not welcome. But, he never did. He was so emotionally available that I could tell him my joys, my sadness, my fears, and my pains, and he'd take it all in.

This experience was enlightening in a way that I would never have imagined. The contrast between how I formed a friendship and later relationship with him was so stark that it made me reflect on my other relationships in ways I would never have done so otherwise. When everything works the same way, even if it works poorly for you, you think that is the way of things. When something comes along and works so much better, you start to question what is wrong with everything else. Over time, I also considered how my reactions were limiting how other people talked about their lives to me. It was transformative on both sides of my relationships.

My nosy mother may have wished for a more emotionally intimate relationship with me, but the way in which she reacted shaped the limits on our relationship. Every time I talked about a hardship in my youth and she said, "You think you have it hard, you have it easy compared to my problems," she let me know that she didn't want to hear about my pain. Every time she belittled my accomplishments by telling me that my grades meant I was "book smart, but lacked common sense," she let me know that she didn't want to hear about my success. One invalidating remark after another formed the boundaries of how intimately she could be involved in my life, and she didn't realize she was the one hammering in the posts in the fence I built  around myself.

As I post more of my written correspondence, there will be a lot of emotional revelation, because it was what I was experiencing and Tito welcomed it. It may seem a bit much for my readers as they may feel discomfort with so much emotion and self-analysis. For me, having one person in my life with whom I could tear down all of the walls was liberating and it made Tito and me closer than most people will ever be.

Memory, and a July 22, 1987 greeting card

One of my friends remarked to me that he felt bad about how little of his childhood he recollected based on how much of mine I remembered. While it is true that I have a lot of memories that are quite clear and well-developed, and my sister confirms the ones that are shaky, a big part of how much I remember comes down to three things.

One is that I reinforced those memories by writing them down a long time ago, often multiple times. I had about 20 pen pals by the time I was 17 and I didn't have a kaleidoscope of experiences to relate to them on a regular basis. It wasn't uncommon for me to relate the same stories again and again to people.

I believe the second reason was that I grew up in an era with far less media saturation so I was less distracted and more engaged with my world, troubling and troublesome as it could be. I wasn't spending my days distracted by Netflix, surfing the web, or playing video games. The norm for me was being present in the world and observing closely. When you live in a state of hypervigilance, this is necessary, not just a product of curiosity.

The final reason is that I'm a very emotional person and the feelings you have at the moment a memory is formed are encoded with the details of an experience in your brain. Strong emotions and detailed memories stick out like mountains in the memory. People who aren't present live life in a blur because they're not reacting. The memories are plains of indifference.

All of that being said, without my enormous stash of correspondence from the time of my long distance relationship, I wouldn't have the details required to write my book with any sense of accuracy. It comforts me to have such granularity to my story because I value truth and complexity. Many of my cards and letters to Tito were about detailing my history and reactions in a way which I wouldn't otherwise recall in such detail.

Limerence, and a July 24, 1987 greeting card

I follow a community on Reddit which talks about limerence and how some people are enslaved by their feelings for someone who doesn't return them. One of the questions that often comes up is why some people are limerent. This question is proffered as a way of figuring out a "cure."

Many people think that it's a spin-off of OCD since part of experiencing it is obsession with someone who you believe you are in love with. I can certainly see this connection as I experienced it when I was infatuated with "Henry." I don't feel that the compulsive part of OCD really fits the experience though. For me, fantasizing about or being preoccupied with the object of my desire was too mindful to be a compulsion.

Based on my experience of falling out of love with Henry, I believe that limerence is a way of dealing with a sense of incompleteness in your life. This seems to be especially so when you've grown up in hard circumstances or have low self-esteem. I used fantasies of being loved by a kind person and living a normal life as a way of creating a positive narrative in my life when one was entirely absent. It was a way of surviving everything that hurt me by imagining another possibility.

If I were to get metaphysical, I would say that I was born to be limerent because the way it made me tick set the stage for having a long distance relationship with the person I was destined to be with. I was already practiced in weaving realities of a relationship in my head with someone long before Tito came into my life. I was also used to sustaining myself emotionally with hope when no tangible reality was at hand.

Many of the cards, letters, and cassettes that Tito and I exchanged were about sending the threads of those cloths into the gap between us to integrate the bond I was fabricating with him. It was easier at first because it felt more real.

Gift duplication, and a July 22, 1987 greeting card

I had pen pals all over the world, but most of them were in the United States. At the highest point, I had 20 people who I kept up regular correspondence with. The core was a smaller number and this group engaged with me more as a friend than just a fellow KISS fan. I'm still in touch with a handful of them to this day, but mainly through Facebook.

With so many of them, one might expect that birthdays would be a cornucopia of presents. I had little to complain about in that respect. Some people would send me a KISS picture. Others would send me items which were more oriented toward who I was as a person.

More than one of my pen pals paid attention to my saying that I liked impressionist paintings and responded by sending me a gift of note cards with said paintings on them. One of them was from Dina, as mentioned in a previous post. Another was from Jo. They were identical boxes of blank cards. This happened despite the fact that Jo lived in Pennsylvania and Dina lived in Alabama.

This happened because shopping in the 80's was a more uniform experience than it is in the current culture. I've remarked on this before, but our cultural touchstones were far fewer than they are now because we all had access to far fewer people, places, and things. We had three TV networks and PBS with a handful of other channels that ran re-runs of ABC, NBC, and CBS shows. It was much easier to have things in common and talk about shared experiences then because we all shared similar ones.

Stationery was a popular gift choice among our pen pal network for obvious reasons. If we wanted to get something, nearly every one of us went to the local Hallmark store at our respective malls. Unsurprisingly, they didn't carry a vast array of note cards with Impressionist paintings so both Dina and Jo bought me the same gift. It was for this reason that Tito ended up with two cards with the exact same design in a short period of time. Well, there was that and the fact that I'd forgotten which of the four designs in the box I'd already sent him.

The etiquette of taping, and a March 1987 cassette

Etiquette may seem like an outdated concept, but it helps align expectations with reality across all involved parties. The reason we have rules about not chewing with your mouth open is that no one wants to see your masticated foodstuffs. Shaking hands is a way of showing we're not carrying weapons and are offering our friendship to others in a disarmed state, or at least that is what it used to be about. These days, people may have a shoulder or ankle holster and still be weaponized. We make these rules so all are more comfortable, not to rigidly impose arbitrary standards on people.

In our taping/pen pal world, we had unique rules for our etiquette based on our uncommon circumstances. In 1986, I wrote a guide on how to be a good pen pal who taped to people, but it was roundly ignored. I talked about how it was good form to ask questions and to answer them. I also mentioned the material aspects of this somewhat expensive way of exchanging communication at a distance.

One of our unavoidable costs besides stamps was using a padded mailer. It was proper etiquette to reuse a mailer you'd already received and an ecologically and financially sound practice. A good mailer could stay in the rounds for a half dozen exchanges if you were careful not to tear it open destructively. Sometimes, I'd tear off my address label in preparation for reusing a package and find that it'd crossed the country several times as I peeled back layers to find a variety of states reflected in its history. My padded mailers were more worldly than I was.

Reusing the cassettes themselves as well as the packaging was also good form. However, you gave back what you got. You didn't take from one person's tapes and send those tapes to another person. The reason for this was a respect for the quality of the cassettes a person used. We poor correspondents often used the brand "Denon" which was the cheapest cassette on the market at that time and a pretty crappy quality media. You didn't get much for 75 cents per tape. In the middle, there was BASF, and, at the top, selling for nearly $4.50 per tape in 2020 U.S. dollars was TDK.

This wasn't a petty consideration because the cheaper tapes didn't go the distance and developed distortions quickly. They would also become too tight to move on the recorder's spindles and snap. Someone who splashed out for high quality tapes was investing in a better and more long-term experience. Eventually, when tapes went bad, someone had to put in a brand new one and it could be costly to do this and most of the people in our taping/pen pal circle weren't rolling in spare cash. Most of us were lower-middle-class or poor. Tito was probably the only one who was solidly middle class and he used TDKs or other higher quality tapes exclusively.

"Jo" violated this etiquette at one point in order to appear to generous. She taped Aida once and boasted about how she'd bought and put in three "brand new TDKs" for their exchanges. It was usual when reusing someone's tapes to pull off their labels and put on your own so that is what Aida did. When she pulled off Jo's labels, she saw Tito's handwriting. Jo had stolen his tapes and used them to tape to Aida and lied about having bought them herself.

This habit of recycling tapes is, unfortunately, the reason that I only have one of the two tapes that Tito sent me which resulted in my falling in love with him. I received two 90-minute tapes, but I only needed one to tape him back so I recorded over part two. The reason that I still have this cassette is that I observed proper etiquette. I kept this tape for future taping back to him when I needed more tapes than he had sent. It was never taped over because he always sent me more than I sent him so it was held in reserve indefinitely. I will be forever grateful that observing good manners in this respect left me with this souvenir of the conversation that made me fall for him.

A Bus Tale, and graduation photos

When the final bell rang and school was out, every kid was happy to get to the school bus and head for home. There were so many buses that we had to leave at intervals and I sat nervously waiting for our bus to be called. I wasn't anxious because I was itching to leave, though that was true. I needed to get to the bus as quickly as possible for reasons that had nothing to do with getting the hell out of Dodge.

If I got on the bus when it was even as much as half full, I faced a gauntlet of humiliation. I needed to reach it before all of the empty seats were gone. It was also preferable that I got a seat as close to the front as possible. If I had to walk past many occupied seats, I would receive "the disease" treatment. Each person who I walked by would shout, "(Shari's) germs, I quit!" This would be passed up and down all occupied seats until every single person on the bus had pronounced their inoculation from incidental contact with the space I occupied. A seat in the front spared me this echo chamber announcing my diseased status.

If all of the seats were partially occupied, there was an added layer abasement. Each single occupant of the seat would scoot over to the edge to block me from sitting with him or her. It was only after I stood helplessly unable to sit because all seats were full or blocked that the bus driver would demand someone move over and allow me to sit with him or her. This part would cram himself or herself up against the window and squirm throughout the ride. Sometimes, he or she would also theatrically hold their breath as if they were in the sphere of contagion. My relief didn't come until enough kids got off so that I could move and sit alone.

My disease was being fat. Every single day, I spent 45 minutes on the bus to school and 45 minutes on the bus home being ridiculed, bullied, and treated as if I were the most disgusting creature on earth. It was unrelenting. Is it any wonder I stopped viewing myself as human?

When I was ready to let Tito know what I had been before he got to know me, I sent him the two pictures below. I referred to them as "before" and "after" my weight loss, but the truth was that they were when I saw myself as subhuman and when I saw myself as human. The way I was treated throughout high school and elementary school never shamed me into changing. It filled me with so much pain and trashed my self-esteem such that I had no energy to deal with my body. I also saw myself as a walking pile of trash. It was only after Seanna became my mentor in college and treated me as worthy of respect and possessing value that I was able to muster the ability to take care of myself and see myself as worthy of care. Shaming me only made things worse.

Comics, and a card from July 21, 1987

In 1987, pop culture was a more unifying force across generations and classes than it is now. Considering how tribal people are in this day and age, that may seem hard to believe, but, hear me out. Imagine your grandma, your aunt, your dad, and every classmate in every grade of your school reading the same comic strip every Sunday that you read. That was the power of the Sunday funny pages in the pre-internet age.

Neither Tito nor I were huge comics fans, but we both were familiar with the big guns of the newspaper "funnies." He knew them and liked them better than me because his family subscribed to the local paper and mine couldn't afford it. I only initially knew them second-hand through newspapers I ran across at work or at my maternal grandmother's house. When I got older, I spent more time at the local public library where I'd kill time on occasion by reading popular comic book collections (e.g., Peanuts, Garfield, Cathy, etc.) while my mother did something boring.

Many of the greeting cards that I bought and sent to Tito featured the comics that were popular in that time. The reason I chose the designs that I did wasn't because I had an affinity for those comics, but because they expressed something I felt at the time. This Cathy comic was especially relevant in the early days after our relationship started and I was getting love via expensive telephone calls.

Cursive writing, and a July 12, 1987 letter

When Tito was in his early 20's, his mother was filling out some documents that both she and his father needed to sign before she could mail them off. His father wasn't home and wouldn't be home relatively soon and his mother wanted the paperwork completed. She asked Tito to forge her father's signature by looking at some other documents that he'd signed.

Tito knew his father wouldn't care if his name was forged on the documents, and it wasn't anything important enough to be a legal problem in the future. However, he told his mother that he couldn't do it. She argued with him that it was no big deal, but he repeated that he really couldn't do it, and,  it was true.

This was a story Tito told me early on in our relationship to explain that he couldn't forge a signature because he had never learned to write in cursive. He could barely sign his own name in cursive, let alone try to copy someone else's writing. In this day and age, many people never learn cursive, but it was unheard of for children raised in the 70's to not know how to do it. It was one of those classes that Tito had opted to skip when he was younger.

All of the letters and cards that Tito wrote me were printed because he didn't know how to write in cursive. This was the first letter he ever sent me. He's sent cassette tapes and a note on a postcard, but this was the first letter. I think one of the reasons he always preferred talking  on tapes was that his way of writing by hand was slower than mine—because he never learned to write in cursive.

Privacy, and a second July 19, 1987 greeting card

It's hard for me to imagine what levels of privacy people who didn't grow up in my home possessed because I so rarely had any. What little I had was constantly being interrupted by surprise guests or people who my parents decided should spend the night for whatever reason. In the card I'm posting today, I mention a surprise visit from my cousins who were going to stay with us for three nights. This wasn't especially unique except that these were the "good" cousins who had never stayed with us before.

The "good" side of the family was the maternal one and the "bad" was the paternal one. My mother's relatives rarely visited and never had their children stay with us because of the state of our family home. We were beneath them, and that was always clear. The reason my aunt's kids stayed with us was an emergency health situation with their father and no one else was willing to look after them for an extended time. So, they were too good for us, unless they needed us.

This card was written one day after Tito and I talked on the phone and started our long distance relationship. It seemed all too common that my privacy was yanked away from me at the most inopportune moments. It's no small wonder that I felt like fate was sitting around chuckling at my misfortune. Even in the best of times, things could be difficult or tricky. My privacy was taken away right when I most wanted to celebrate my new status as a partnered person.

Being a "bitch", and a greeting card from July 19, 1987

When I was younger, and far fatter, I was always the "nice" girl. Even when I gave kids my lunch, helped them with homework, and was unfailingly friendly and kind to them, many kids bullied me and treated me as if I was dirt that they wouldn't even deign to walk on. I had to be "nice" all of the time to keep whatever scraps of kindness blew my way.

After I lost weight, people started treating me like a normal human being. I discovered that I didn't have to constantly bribe people by letting them walk all over me. I wasn't mean to people, but I definitely started to push back on occasion when people treated me poorly. To me, having any boundaries or self-worth was "being a bitch." That's because all of my life, I'd had to sublimate my needs and hide my reactions in order to not be treated even worse than I already was.

I sent Tito this card, which fit who I saw myself to be, but wasn't who I actually was. Of course, it took me years to realize that not putting up with other people's crap constantly didn't make me a "bitch."

"Monica", and a cassette from May 1987

The tape cover has been edited to remove a first name and obscure the real last name to protect "Monica's" privacy. She also no longer operates out of Morgan Hill to the best of my knowledge.

The graduate school at which I was taking a few classes included a subject called "Transpersonal Psychology." This meant a lot of things,-some of them confusing-but it mainly meant that it embraced a wide variety of ideas about psychology. It had a broad approach which incorporated a client's spirituality and worldview into treatment. Since prayer is a form of meditation, this seemed like a logical inclusion. Also, many people find faith of any sort to be a source of comfort and support. I see no reason to ignore that.

Many of the students were interested in topics like massage therapy and psychics. The former was a way of incorporating both the mind and body into treatment. This also jived with what I'd learned in my undergraduate studies. It's not even certain that a feeling precedes a response instead of a response preceding a feeling. Are you nervous because your heart is beating or is your heart beating because you are nervous? Either way, the body plays a big part in psychology so massage can be a credible component of a treatment plan.

In terms of psychics, that was where the airy met the fairy at the school. I think most psychics are good at cold reading or give such vague predictions that what they tell you is pointless. Nonetheless, I was curious about whether someone could give me a recommendation for a reputable psychic. A young woman who groomed herself to resemble a young man (but she was not trans) told me that she was sure her psychic was the real deal. "Great! Tell me who she is!" She instantly lost confidence and said she was "afraid" to tell me for fear that her psychic actually wasn't credible.

In my book, one thing I can say is that "Monica" seemed like she was more than your average soothsayer looking mainly to have her palm greased. Her tape hit too many marks which were far from likely guesses. Some of them were eerily specific. When my contacts at the graduate school failed me, I decided to look her up after so many years to see if she was still doing readings.

While her location had changed, her name had not. I found her online selling new age trinkets. In fact, one of my relatives by marriage who practices reiki collects cards that her company sells. I messaged Monica at her company e-mail and, surprisingly, she wrote me back. Less surprisingly, she told me she hasn't done a "reading" in decades so she was out of that happy business. It's unfortunate because I would have not only been happy to pay her for a reading, but I also would have brought the tape she made decades ago and let her know how accurately she'd hit unlikely nails on their heads.

Maximum Occupancy, and an enclosure with the July 9, 1987 greeting card

Bob handed me a bunch of files and asked me to review them. Each was a record of a mentally ill person currently taking up short-term residence on the psychiatric ward at the local hospital. I'd been in that ward once before for far more personal reasons, so the idea of going there again was intimidating.

The last time I'd gone there was about six months I'd gotten my job. I was working as an "arts counselor" at a Lutheran camp. The camp usually kept us locked in six days a week, but one Thursday, someone came and grabbed me and said I could leave. Since they were so Draconian about us staying on the grounds around the clock every day except Saturday and part of Sunday, I was confused about why  they were letting me go.

My father was there waiting in his car for me. His explanation was brief and ambiguous. My mother was in the hospital and he wanted me to go there. Through some stilted exchanges, he let me know that she was in the car with him and became increasingly incoherent and drowsy. He'd seen her popping pain pills, but hadn't realized she'd gotten confused and was overdosing until she'd passed out.

He rushed her to the hospital and they told him that they thought she wasn't going to make it. Oddly, rather than stay with his dying wife, he got in a car and drove to the camp to get me. I guess this was just part of being a parentified child with parents who couldn't face adult responsibilities.

When I got to the hospital, the doctors took me into an emergency room where my mother's eyes were open and blank and she was constantly having small seizures. Her body's twitching was the only sign of life in her. As I stood there looking shocked, the doctor told me to shout to her as that sometimes helped people who were on the brink come back. My dad stood back looking uncomfortable and helpless.

I walked up to my mother's twitching body and started yelling "Mom, we love you, come back!" I kept shouting and my dad weekly started saying her name somewhat loudly, but it was clear that he was fighting discomfort and vaguely following my lead. My mother kept seizing with dead eyes and showed no reaction to either of us. After a few minutes, the doctor said we should move along to the waiting room and we would have to wait and see if she recovered or died.

My mother pulled through, and the doctor said he felt it was because of what I did because he expected she wouldn't make it with the level of drugs in her body. After this experience, a psychiatrist from the hospital came by to talk to both my mother and me. He told both of us that he felt she needed a place where she could just relax and get away from her stresses for about a week before returning home. I think he had spoken to her first and she'd revealed some of the hardships of her life to him.

He pressured both of us to have her spend time in the psychiatric ward. I confirmed with him that this was just about getting her some rest and nothing else. He said that was so, but when we went to the ward, it was behind a locked door and her room was locked as well. There were hangers that were welded into the closet and nothing in the room with which she could hurt herself. It was clear that he believed her overdose was intentional and she'd tried to kill herself. My mother became increasingly freaked out by the rubber-room-feel of the space and begged me not to make her stay there.

Since it was clear that we'd been tricked, I told the psychiatrist that we'd changed our minds. She didn't want to stay there and I wasn't going to force her to do so. He argued with me calmly at first, but became angry and started shouting at me when I didn't back down. In the end, he told me that it would be on my head if she killed herself as he was certain she was a suicide risk.

My mother hadn't tried to kill herself and, in fact, refused to take any strong pain medication after this incident. One of my cousins told me that she'd noticed some signs of confusion in my mother before this happened. She said she'd noticed my mother trying to eat, but sometimes struggling to hit her mouth because she was clearly over-medicated. I wished she'd told me about this before my mother nearly died.

About eight months after this incident, I took my pile of files from Bob and went to that very same local psychiatric ward. This time, I was there to interview people whose families committed them to see if they were ready to leave the locked rooms and ward and move into our halfway house's residential program. There were certain criteria that people had to meet to get in, and I had to assess them. When I arrived, one of the first people I saw was the psychiatrist who'd tried to browbeat me into keeping my mother in the ward. He looked at me quizzically, but didn't seem to connect me with what had happened. He just knew he'd seen me before.

I conducted interviews at that ward on a fairly regular basis because we needed to fill any empty slots in the halfway houses. We got money from the state and county for each bed that was occupied. On July 9, 1987, I got a copy of a letter from the board of directors telling us we had to first have full occupancy before we could get a raise in our salaries. It's important to note that we weren't well-paid. Many of our workers with children qualified for food stamps because their income fell below the poverty threshold for a family of a certain size.

I sent a copy of that letter with my angry comments to Tito. Note that the non-profit that I worked for has been out of commission for decades now and that is why I am allowing the real name on the document.

The Muralist, and a picture from June 1987

My bedroom used to be my parent's room. It had dirty mint-green walls and cruddy white baseboards. Several years after my sister and I moved into the room, I painted it white and the baseboards a light brown. These changes were meant to make it look less dingy, but also to allow me to paint on the walls.

When I was 11 or 12, I painted an enormous black and white illustration of a horse standing on rocks in a mountain-like landscape on the wall at the foot of the steps. As I got older, it started to mock me with it's imperfections. My mother protested, but I painted over it and promised to try again some day with a better horse painting. I was sidetracked by my infatuation with KISS so the horse never moseyed back to the foot of the steps. From the time I was 13 to 21, I painted KISS on my walls several times. One was a very large mural that never quite worked for me so I kept fussing with it until I grew frustrated and painted over  it. I was a perfectionist which allowed me to constantly fail.

I was painted my room's walls and even the floor in an effort to transform a pig with lipstick. It was never clean enough. The paint was never smooth enough. It always looked like paint had dried over dirt no matter how hard I tried, but it was better than the rest of our house. The lack of a carpet made it better yet since our pets "accidents" couldn't permanently stain or stink up our bedroom. I made the space mine, and filled it with things which divorced me from the rest of my family's tastes and interests.

My bedroom contained two pieces of exercise equipment that I paid for myself when I decided to lose weight and get in shape. One was a cheap exercise bike that had a tension control courtesy of two fiber pads that pressed on the sides of the front tire. The other was a mini trampoline. I used each of these for 45 minutes every day in an effort to bring my body to heel. It worked, but only so far. I was the only one in my family to ever do any sort of structured exercise, though my mother once bought one of those exercise pulleys that can be attached to a door handle. It was used once or twice and abandoned.

This is the second photo of me that I sent to Tito. I'm sitting on my trampoline with a poster of Paul Stanley behind me. My college graduation tassel is hanging on the wall and some ancient curtains that someone gave us are covering the window. During that time, I was experimenting with style and wearing bejeweled bolos with button-down shirts. I was also wearing black pants and sitting in such a way as to obscure my fat belly from view in pictures.

"Rockin' Fred", and a July 9, 1987 greeting card

I tried to begin most of the cassettes that I made my pen pals with a song. I had what I would now regard as one of the world's biggest collections of awful hair bands. History has proven that they were also quite forgettable. Groups like Cinderella, LA Guns, Riot, etc. saw much more airplay than they deserved thanks to my talk tape habits.

Playing these groups for friends was about showcasing my "coolness" to them. I liked the kind of music that I should like in order to fit in with a bunch of KISS fans. Long before it became common to talk about one's "tribe," I belonged to this one.

Since Tito wasn't a KISS fan, I was not obliged to play only my "tribal music" to him. I was free to be a "me" which would could alienate me from the other heavy metal and hard rock members who I tended to correspond with. One day, I played an unusual record and wrote on the label "Rockin' Fred." It was something I never played for anyone else.

Tito got my tape and, before listening to it, he talked about the label for a brief time. He then paused in his recording and popped the tape in to listen. When he came back, he said, "Shari, you're weird!"

Tito had told me that he was one of those people who struggled in the mornings to reach consciousness. This was, no doubt, due to his late-night habits messing up his circadian rhythms. I didn't tell him that though because I wasn't judging. I did send him a song that I hoped would "assist" him though. It was Mr. Rogers singing a "wake up" song. "Come on and wake up! Come on and wake up, now."

The weirdness didn't end there. It cropped up from time to time in cards and letters. This was one of the earliest examples.

My commute and a July 7, 1987 greeting card

I got up at 6:00 am and crawled out of bed. This was more than a little precarious because, though I was 22 years old, I still slept in a room with bunk beds with my sister and I was on the top. My sister's bed was starting to fall apart and my dad had nailed both beds to the wall in order to grant us some stability. The risk of my coming crashing down and killing her was still there, but relatively minimal.

Besides our beds having a pretty creaky infrastructure, there was a hole in the thin plaster wall next to my sister's bed. It had started as a crack and had crumbled more and more over time. The hole led to the stairway to our wet, dark, and mouse-infested basement. In the winter, cold air bled through the hole and we had to be sure to cover it with a plastic trash bag.

After dragging myself out of the top bunk, I'd sit in front of a make-up mirror with two wings with rows of lights. It was a small thing meant to resemble the sort of glamorous mirrors actresses planted themselves in front of as they prepared for stage performances. It was dingy and my mother had picked it up at a yard sale some time ago. It helped me get my contact lenses into my bleary eyes.

In the dim early morning, I used this to carefully put on my face for work. I'd line my eyes, put on some shadow, and mascara. I never used foundation because it made my skin itch, but I didn't need it because I had beautiful, pale, blemish-free skin. I also eschewed any sort of lip make-up because I'd long ago given up on attempting to enhance my small, thin-lipped mouth.

After applying make-up, I'd get dressed and hustle out to my Chevette and drive an hour to work. I usually drove too fast and whipped around curves at somewhat unsafe speeds. I would have done the same for the hills except my puny, little car could barely manage them. This speed seesaw didn't keep me interested in the drive enough to stop my brain from occasionally kicking into beta mode. Sometimes, I'd make this long commute and arrive at work with no memory whatsoever at having done so.

This speedy trip was even faster on the way home from work since I was more anxious to leave work than to arrive. Knowing that I'd received correspondence from Tito only made me drive faster on the way home. I never got a speeding ticket, but this was no doubt courtesy of my underpowered vehicle rather than any prudence on my part.