"Clothes Horse", and a 1987 photo

"You're turning into a clothes horse!" My mother said this after I put on my newest outfit. She had spent all of my life trying to get me to like clothes including treating every Easter and new school year as a happy time in which she "gifted" me with new togs. When I was fatter and younger, I hated clothes and had no interest in them because nothing looked good on my body. Now that I'd lost weight and looked better in them, she was criticizing me for being too interested in them. Such was the pattern with my mother who made sure that, no matter what I did, I was always failing.

This is the first picture of me that I sent to Tito. It was also the most adventurous piece of clothing that I ever wore in public as it was woven with gold threads throughout the "jacket" and "culottes" at the bottom. It was actually one integrated piece and a pain in the ass for going to the bathroom as it had to be pulled off entirely like a swimsuit. Still, I loved wearing it with black tights and felt I looked pretty good in it. When Tito got this picture, he didn't notice my clothes. Rather, he noticed how sparse my KISS pictures were on my wall in comparison to Aida and Jo who wallpapered their walls. I had plenty of posters, but I didn't like the "wallpaper" look and intentionally chose more space between my pictures.

Being Organized, and a July 30, 1987 greeting card

At some point around my 20th birthday, my mother bought me a file cabinet. It wasn't like a typical office cabinet as it only had one compartment on top for files and a shelf below it. The top held hanging file folder and was beige. The bottom was dark brown and was where I could store random books or other items that were too bulky to be stored in file folders. It had a locking top, though I rarely felt the need to secure it.

I doubt many young adults wanted a file cabinet for their birthday, but I did. I became very organized from a young age which helped a lot when it came to my expanding and expansive KISS collection. I had more posters than my walls could accommodate and had a system for keeping the extras in tubes in a manner that allowed me to easily locate the ones I wanted when I was ready to "redecorate" by swapping them around.

Despite my high levels of organization, I sometimes lost track of things. I think this was down to having more volume and less about a failure on my part to keep things in order. The card that I'm sharing today was one of those things that I lost, then found again. It wasn't unusual given the staggering amount of correspondence that I produced for things to be set aside and forgotten, then discovered and completed.

Linda, and a July 29, 1987 greeting card

Aida once told me that communicating with a friend who you loved was so good that you just wanted to "inhale" him or her. Since childhood, that was how I felt about a few of the children of my father's booze buddies. Being with them wasn't just a matter of passing the time, it provided a sense of completion in those moments which was otherwise absent from my life.

Linda was one of those types of friends for me for several years. She and I did more sleepovers than any of my other friends and I remember setting up a small tent and camping out in our front yard so we could giggle and talk well past our bed time. We had also had an experience during one of her previous nights spent at my house which encouraged us to get out of the house.

My parents had come home drunk and noisily had sex while Linda was there. We were watching T.V., but it couldn't drown out their squeaky bed. Afterwards, my mother came downstairs and asked me to remove a splinter she'd somehow gotten into her toe. Linda tried to suppress her titters as my mother slurred her words and remained oblivious to just how much we'd (unwillingly) overheard. Both of my parents were too dull and self-absorbed to think about how they may have just embarrassed themselves when a guest was in our home.

When we were teens, we used to spend hours at the mall in the biggest nearby town. This was when arcade games were a big deal and we'd waste a lot of quarters playing "Space Invaders" or "Dig Dug". When Linda ran out of money, I promised her a dollar more to continue playing if she'd pick up a bunch of random flyers lying in a pile on a bench and hand them out to people. She gamely did so until the stupid joke wore thin and I gave her the cash. As we walked back to the arcade, we saw a scattered pile of the same flyers on a distant bench where people who'd taken them from her abandoned them once out of sight and we both burst out laughing.

Linda's family rowed in the same socioeconomic boat as mine so she wasn't as put off by the squalor we lived in. I knew that she didn't spread our (literally) dirty secrets as some other kids did after seeing how we lived. She was also the only person who I knew who defended me in school when other kids made fun of me.

Linda was two years younger than me and said that, one day while my class was outside playing softball during gym, hers was sitting in an English class. I was horrible at sports due to my weight and Linda told me that the other kids in the room were laughing at me as they watched from a distance as I struggled to hit the ball and run to bases. She told me that the English teacher told them to cut it out and that I was smarter than them and read books. He said that they would do well to follow my example. I think Linda told me this to make me feel better, but it only further clued me in on the fact that I was being mocked and bullied not only by the kids on the bus and in my grade, but by the whole school.

As the years went by and I went to college, lost weight, and got a job far from home, Linda and I saw each other less and less. I tried to hold the friendship together, but she became too busy with her own life. After she married my class's biggest loser and had a baby, she didn't have time to spend with me. It wouldn't be accurate to say we grew apart, but our lives did.

Linda was the last in-person friend from my hometown who I "inhaled." Then, Tito came along, and I could draw him in day and night, and I did. When a fresh supply of tapes showed up in my mailbox, I was filled with joy. When the mailbox was empty, I played the old ones again and again. He was the air I breathed and provided a sense of completion found in another person that I hadn't had since childhood. This happened even before we got into our long distance relationship, and this was something I tried to communicate in the card pictured with this post.

A Guilty Man, and a May 1987 cassette

Cynthia and I had just finished one of the world's most awkward dinners with our non-profit's board of directors and we retired to the restaurant's bar. Our boss, Bob, had encouraged us to attend because he felt meeting the board would be interesting for us. Since he and the board sat at a completely different table and no one bothered to introduce us to them, it was more like being at the kid's table at a wedding. We went to the bar so we could escape and the two of us could gripe about Bob's failure to facilitate interacting with the board.

When Bob and his wife came over to the bar to talk to us (uninvited), Cynthia, who was not normally confrontational, angrily talked to him about his lack of social skills. He said we should have taken the initiative and approached these strangers ourselves. Sure, we could have walked up to a bunch of pasty, middle-aged strangers stuffing themselves with bread and interjected ourselves into their meals while standing inelegantly behind them, but it would have gone more smoothly if he had just introduced us like a civilized adult would have.

As Bob stood there sparring with Cynthia, he never once looked at me. Even when I spoke up in support of her arguments, he kept his eyes directed pretty much anywhere else. It was as if there was nothing but an empty seat next to her. His wife occasionally looked at me, and even went so far as to exchange a few pleasantries, but I was the invisible woman to Bob.

Months before this experience, Bob had treated me coldly and rudely at the office after being flirtatious with me for a few months prior. He flirted with everyone, but I was somehow a problem because I was younger and single. As I discussed in the book, a coworker told him it was becoming an office scandal and his response was to go too far in the other direction.

Since that situation, things had returned to more of a normal exchange. Bob didn't flirt with me, but he also didn't behave as if I was an evil that needed to be warded off at all costs. That was fine because I didn't carry on with married men. Because things had warmed up to a more appropriate level of professional interaction, I couldn't understand why he behaved so poorly at the restaurant when I talked to Tito about this experience on my tape. Decades later, when I revisited both this story and Cynthia, I figured out why.

Cynthia and I caught up in 2013 and she told me that she nearly had an affair with Bob within the year after I had left to be with Tito. They flirted intensely with one another for awhile and he even showed up at her house one night with the intention of consummating their attraction. She wasn't home and he retreated to his wife and confessed his intentions to her.

Cynthia was blamed, though she never did anything. Bob was a weak man with poor self-control, but he blamed the women he was attracted to instead of taking responsibility for his own passions. My best guess—many years after the fact and hearing myself tell this story on the pictured tapes—is that he didn't want to look at me for fear of betraying any lingering sense of attraction he felt to me in front of his wife. After hearing Cynthia's story, I could only feel sorry for his wife who was at that time a perfectly pleasant, average middle-aged woman who probably didn't know that her husband flirted with other women not to just have fun, but because he was filled with genuine desire for them.

Train Tracks, and a July 21, 1987 postcard

It took about two minutes to walk from the mid-point of the hill that our house was on to the train tracks. Freight trains carrying coal noisily traveled those tracks several times each day and night when I was a child. The traffic slowed down greatly as I got older and the strip mines around us had lower yields.

When I was a kid, my cousins and I would wander around the tracks looking for random items of interest. There was a lot less trash in those days, so we were mainly fascinated by rail road spikes which looked like nails on steroids. At one point, we collected over a dozen of these heavy and useless objects and deposited them in our dilapidated barn. They stayed there in a pile until the structure caved in many years later. Aside from the highly collectible rusty spikes, we occasionally found some wires or large bolts, but nothing exceptionally fascinating came of our trips to the tracks.

In my teens, I started walking the tracks alone and would sometimes follow them for as much as an hour outbound in each direction. I didn't know where they lead when I started walking them. I just knew that I couldn't get lost if I followed them and, having a poor sense of direction, this was of no small importance to me.

One day, I was about 10 or so minutes from home walking along the tracks and a man was following at a distance behind me. I'd never seen anyone else walk those rails and was afraid he might do me harm. I hustled forward until I'd gone around a turn and was out of his line of sight then climbed an embankment that was overcrowded with bushes and cut up through fields and woods in a long diagonal back toward my home. I don't think he meant me any harm, but seeing anyone out there with me filled me with adrenaline. I went home scratched up and shaken.

Though that experience scared me, I didn't stop walking the tracks. Aside from that lone experience, I felt very free on those walks. It helped me spend time away from my family and to escape my emotionally abusive mother. It was also a way for me to be outside, but for other people not to see me since no one (aside from that lone man on one occasion) tended to walk there. It was a rare situation in which I could be free of public shaming and bullying about my weight by strangers so I wasn't going to abandon that route.

As I approached my mid-teens, one of the biggest reasons that I kept doing it was that following the tracks all the way to town lead me very close to where the post office was located. It took about a half hour or so, but it was the most direct way for me to get to our post office box without my parents' assistance. Even after I got a car and lost weight, I would sometimes take that walk because it was so peaceful and exhilarating.

After I got into my long distance relationship with Tito, I used that walk to tape him a few times. It was the only way that I could walk and talk in public and not be seen as a lunatic because the only "risk" (aside from errant wanderers following me) was that a train would come along and I'd have to step aside and let it pass. I could also just pack up the tape I was working on, seal it in the padded mailer, and send it off when I reached the post office.

Of course, as I detailed in my book, the post office was a place that I became ambivalent about because the workers were nosy and sometimes withheld my mail. I spent no small amount of time on those treks thinking about whether or not I'd be able to retrieve goodies from my pen pals when I reached it both because of random delivery schedules and the postal workers' behavior.

This card from Tito, which had a Japanese theme but was not sent from Japan, tweaked the workers who may have tampered with my mail.

Cats, and two photos

Our basement was a concrete bunker, and not the good kind that you can live in if civilization falls or zombies rise up to eat the earth. It was dank at best, and sopping wet, moldy, and gross at worst. When I was a child and forced to go down there to do laundry, I was scared of the dark, little room on the left that used to house our winter supply of coal and was now housing a healthy pile of slag. I was less frightened of, but not a fan of the little room on the right with shelves that held suspect jars of canned food that my mother was given on occasion. Mice favored that room, and I did not favor them back.

The only benefit of that space was that we could keep our cat litter box down there so it wouldn't stink up the rest of the house. The dogs' peeing and pooping on our carpeting had to carry the burden alone in that respect. We had to keep the door between our dining room and basement cracked open at all times to allow the cats free access to their toilet and this worked fine when the weather was inclement to varying degrees. When it grew warmer, and we left the door to the back yard that led into the basement open so dankness would dry out and become less prone to mildew, things got complicated.

One of my cats, a calico named Zee (technically and confusingly spelled Sie as the name was German), was a world-class hunter. As I explained in the letter I posted a several days ago, this would result in general carnage strewn about the house. I would have taken mouse guts and rabbit heads over the worst of her transgressions one summer day.

Zee brought something up the steps through the basement that was nearly as big as her and quite dark. We were accustomed to seeing her drag some poor animal into the house on a regular basis so this wasn't a huge deal. It was almost funny looking at what she had and guessing what she'd caught this time. "This time" though, it was a black snake which was not as stunned as her usual prey. It was very much alive and she dropped it in the living room.

Like no small number of people, I am very frightened of snakes and I freaked out. My mother said it wasn't a poisonous snake so there was no reason to be too worried, and she was probably right because more than  90% of snakes aren't venomous or dangerous. However, the human brain is designed to be "wrong" in this respect because there is no penalty for being so. It's why we're scared of things in general categories rather than as specific entities.

My mom took matters in hand because I was too paralyzed to act. She cornered the snake (which was looking to escape under the couch) and whacked it with her shoe. The inert snake was then offered back to Zee so she could carry on in her usual manner, but she lost interest in it now that it was dead. These were the cats of my world.

Tito had a cat, too, but his never hunted anything or presented any animals for his inspection. His cat was cuddly, sweet, and prone to meowing a lot. Mine were partially feral hunters who preferred the great outdoors to my petting them. They'd occasionally pee in my bed, but they didn't have that much use for me in general. Somehow, even our pets separated the types of lives we lived even when they were the same animal.

Like sands through the hourglass, these are the cats of our former lives:

 Zee on my bed, on a day when she hadn't urinated on it.

 Zee eating what I provided her, and what she provided herself.

Tito's cat, Malachi, having a yawn.

Patience, and a July 28, 1987 greeting card

I was six years old and crying in bed when I was supposed to be going to sleep. My mother walked in and asked my sister what was wrong with me. She said, "She's upset because she wants that doll." I had discovered a black Barbie doll named "Christie" and I felt that I had to have it immediately or that it would be the end of the world. That was the first and last time I can recall sobbing in desperation and impatience for a material object that I felt I would never have. Several months later, my mother did get me that doll for me despite the relative expense. She was my first and only Barbie. I remember being so happy to finally get what I wanted and was in love with that doll for quite some time.

I have never been a patient person as indicated by that anecdote from my childhood. I literally felt pain when I had to wait for something I desperately wanted. While I have managed to expand my ability to wait as the years have gone by, I was less capable of managing my feelings at 22 when I got into my long distance relationship with Tito than I am now at 55.

Part of the ying and yang of impatience is that it can be highly motivating as well as emotionally draining. My way of managing it was to analyze the circumstances I was in and to construct as many emotional bridges and connections to Tito as I could. Much of my early correspondence reflects this, and much of my later correspondence reflected my resolve crumbling and reforming.

"Inappropriate" work conversations, and a July 27, 2987 letter

As I read back through this letter, I had a few thoughts. The first one was that the conversations at work that I talk about here would never be permitted in the present cultural environment in America. My boss would be in a huge vat of boiling hot water for saying the things he said to two female employees at that time. The second thought I had was about why we talked so much about sex at my former workplace. For my part, I think it was because it wasn't something anyone had ever talked to me about before and made me feel more included with the group. It's also likely that, given how out of reach nudity and pornography were at that time compared to the present, it was more taboo and therefore more interesting.

This letter was one of those times when I recounted things that happened in my life in detail to Tito so that he had a better understanding of how I spent my days. It helped him inhabit my reality, which I was only to learn many years later was hardly typical for most people.

Postage Shock, and a photo from August 1987

My first package to Tito after he started work in Japan contained the usual assortment of tapes. The main difference was that it had a long and confusing address which I checked again and again to make sure I'd copied it correctly. It was addressed to his school's office since I didn't have his home address yet.

Both of us knew that our postage costs were going to increase after our long distance relationship changed from transcontinental to international, but I had no idea how much more it would be. I handed my padded parcel over the the nosy postal workers and they weighed it up. It would have cost $2-$3 if I'd sent it to California. They charged me $20 to send it to Japan. (Note: In 2020 dollars, that's $45 for one small package.)

I told Tito in my next correspondence that I didn't know how often I could tape him with that sort of price tag. He came back and said, "Don't you know about "small packet"? I had no idea what that was, but the mail bitches who read my mail and vexed me so didn't mention it when I asked them if there was a cheaper way to send my package.

In the end, I had to educate the workers at our small town post office about small packet rates. They argued with me at first, and I asked for a rate chart. In the end, they sighed as if I were imposing a great hardship on them and acquiesced after I'd pointed out the existence of this much lower rate.

Tito sent me a photo of himself mailing a small package (via "small packet") to me from his local post office once he had settled in Kitasenju. Fortunately for him, the Japanese postal workers were far more knowledgeable and polite.