FRIENDING

Jo-Jo wants to ponder the full moon from a boat. I ignore the box urging me to “write something.” I scroll through more comments. Sally just buried her cat. My right index finger works the trackball, making words and images float. I look. I click. I read. Henry is re-experiencing a veggie burrito. I click. My lower back has begun its achey dance. I shift my butt around the Aeron’s stretchy tautness. I have theatre tickets for tonight, but I have time. I keep on clicking.

A red flag notifies me of a new friend, Linda Lightner, entertainment lawyer, we worked together on something years ago, I can’t remember exactly. I felt OK about Friending her a few weeks ago, like all the others. Linda is dreading a trip to France this week, says her status update. She found time to say yes to my invitation this morning, in between packing for France, I suppose. Linda wears hip glasses in her pic, straw blond hair pulled away from her tan face. A hairy arm drapes over her shoulder, its owner cropped out. They are posing in front of a church. Or a fancy office building, maybe. These pictures are really small.

I scroll through Linda’s friends. Linda has 2,047 friends. Wow, get a load of Linda, she’s really something! Knows everyone in the business, of course, huge client list, rolling in dough. Check out some of these names: Tina Fey. Jean-Luc Godard. Cormac McCarthy.

What the hell? I click on Jean-Luc Godard’s face. He looks good. He must be, like 80 or something. He’s sitting in a big chair, wearing a dark suit and red tie. Jean-Luc only has 158 friends. That sucks. I scroll down his Friends list. Oops. Jean-Luc listed himself as his own Friend. I should do that. So, really, he only has 157 Friends. Jean-Luc needs more Friends. Jean-Luc needs me as a Friend. Wow, Jean-Luc Godard and I have four friends in common. Including Floyd Silvers. Jesus, Floyd Fucking Silvers is a friend of Jean-Luc Godard’s.

I click on the link marked ADD AS FRIEND next to Jean-Luc’s face. I click SEND A MESSAGE and type:

“M. Godard: I wrote my senior thesis about Weekend (also Bergman’s Persona). I would be honored to be your friend after all these years. Merci, Neil Martin.”

I scroll through the thumbnails trying to go fast, since Linda has so many. Faces slow you down. People you’ve heard of. People you know. People you’d like to know. They jolt you, slow you down. From time to time, I click a “FRIEND” link.

When I get to the page with the “M’s” I see my own face. It’s a three-quarter shot Mick took last August out on Sydney Harbor. The Opera House’s spectacular clown hat grows from the top of my head. The angle makes me look sort of not-fat, which is why I used it. That and the glamour of an international setting. It was the Australians who kicked me into this whole Facebook thing. So far, I have 447 Friends. In two months. That’s 7.45 friends per day.

Two pages later, in the “P’s”, I see a name that slams my scrolling to a dead halt. I click on the black-and-white photo, a face with curly hair, not a good picture. Even the enlargement is difficult to make out. I know it’s her, I think it’s her. I want to click her, but I just stare at the screen, my fleshy right palm sweating up the mouse.

It’s been more than 30 years since Lacey Patton and I broke up in the middle of Duval Street in Key West. She had followed me down from Miami, and we had it out, very ugly. Fuck you, fuck you. fuck you. Shouting. Fiery anger. I never stopped wanting men. She never stopped wanting me to stop. A time of too much wanting. I didn’t hear that she was pregnant until after she had the abortion.

Video brought us together, Lacey and I, back then, when the whole idea was new, along with so much else, new to the world, new to us. We had to go all the way out to Japan Air to pick up our first porta-paks, the drive to Dulles so green, so loamy, so leafy.

This was video for the people, it was power to the people, information power, video in the streets for the first time. It’s all jumbled up, a frenzied mess of history, it was a time, oh yes, and we all knew it. It was morning bongs every day with sweet coffee and the Washington Post, before videotaping some anti-war demo. It was acid on the weekends, and vigorous afternoons under that sweaty sun, picket lines and olive oil fucks and craved-for pizzas with intimate strangers. It was black-and-white screenings in our storefront video center, and hormone-stuffed nights splashed and drowned in Aretha, Jimmy Cliff, David Bowie. It was a kiss and a scream from the center of a fist.

I had picked her out of a scraggly group at the front of the video center that I ran, prospective interns. I remember a slash of red at her neck.

“So you want a job?” I said.

She was a girl scout gone tribal, a camo shirt knotted up under her chest. Medusa curls masked a round face. Her teeth were too big for her smile, her breasts too big for her waist, and there was hair between them. Another woman looked her up and down and Lacey didn’t seem to mind.

My focus was not pretty girls, but I liked Lacey right off. We met thru Brian, who was fucking my ex-roommate Bobby’s boyfriend, Will. Lacey was about to graduate with a broadcasting degree, but it was not her technical chops that got her the intern job, it was her street cred, her tribe, her life. She’d been part of a mixed commune that included some guys I knew from the life. I’d seen ‘em at the food co-op next door to the video storefront, and I went to parties out at their house, a big clapboard rambler crammed with books and mismatched furniture, like all of our communes. At rallies, it was always the mindfuck clothes and their mutt named after Shulamith Firestone, a left wing feminist mutt.

If video brought us together, it was a movie that made me fuck her. This French brother and sister die in a faux-tragic, quasi-incestuous jealous accidental mutual poisoning suicide type of plot by Cocteau. Can’t tell you why, but it shook me to the core. The week before, Lacey had gone to a fortune teller, said we were Spanish royalty, 16th century, I think, a brother and a sister who burned in a mysterious fire in their castle. I thought fortune-tellers were full of shit, but I smelled allure in her story, the death intensity that had grabbed Lacey and I from the jump, better-than-best-friend energy, stirred with daddy-baby vibes and a desperate craving that I mistook as familial — a DNA bond shared by a waylaid brother and his libidinous younger sister.

I took Lacey to the revival house the next night to see the movie. She grabbed my hand, right there in the theatre. Later that night in the living room of the townhouse that I shared with six other misfits and over-educated dropouts, I lit up a joint, splashed out some cheap red, and looked her in the eye. Then, I took her, right there on the rug. Entirely unlike the Sunday School primness, the high school dress-up sex that I had had with other women before coming out and entirely unlike the bam-bam sex I was having with guys these days. No, more like the one true moment of my first time with Jimmy, the tip-top of lust, sloppy and angry and joyous and scary, sweaty and naked and mythic. Ancient.

Turned out, she’d been waiting for it, wanting it for a long time. Turned out, we fucked all night that night ‘til we fell asleep in a sweaty pile. Turned out, in the end, to be a fucking tragedy like the movie, but it didn’t seem so that first morning, the first of many over the next year, mornings when Lacey and I would slumble down the back stairs, across the hardwood, sunlight like knives poking our hangover skulls, into the kitchen in search of coffee and consciousness.

“Hey,” said Walt, his furry face a question mark poking at me, his furrowed brow the only betrayal of his befuddlement.

“Hey, back,” I said, knowing I could buy a minute as I poured the coffee.

“Lacey stayed over,” I said, carrying two cups quickly towards the dining room, a dreamy Lacey following.

Our murmurs and kitten whispers confused everyone in the house those first few weeks. The members of my commune were gay and straight, men and women, hard-core political, and not-so. We called ourselves the Snuggle and Struggle Collective, and we all dragged lovers through the back door of the big house, up the winding staircase into the refuge of our individual beds. Sit in the kitchen long enough, you’d see every type, every gender, every vibe. For me, it had been men, ever since I moved in, ever since I left Patsy for Jimmy back in ‘71, only to be dumped. Another story, but hell, it was Jimmy who pulled me into the life.

Everybody knew Lacey because we worked together, but the bedroom thing, this was new, and it confused people. Hell, it confused me. Because, in most respects, nothing changed, the hunt was still on.

Darkness would take hold most every night, blood would run high and the prowl would begin. Perhaps along the European expanse of Connecticut Avenue, a spin around some flirtatious statue, perhaps a pause in a doorway, stroll into an alley for a blessed moment of savage dancing, the quick stink of mutual self-delusion. And later, boiling and hopeful, we would succumb to a magnetic force pulling us westward, groping out of the self-conscious dust and trash of the grid, and into the meandering pathways and deep hovering maples of Rock Creek Park, a crooked finger of cultivated nature crammed between low brick houses above the water flow below, and the rush of a road where other empty men hurled towards angry sheets of zipped up suburbs. Hunger screwed more tightly as the shadows deepened, icons knelt in tableaus of hidden passion, ignited by the tasty glance of a passing fellow, the simultaneous turn of two hungry souls.

On the other side of the creek and the park and the path were the ancient cobbles and bricks of Georgetown, tidy blocks of restored Federalist masterpieces tumbling up and down those gentle slopes that had cradled generations of powerful men who swaggered out each day to control the world. The damp and often steamy stroll from the park took only 15 minutes with determination, until, at the top of a rise, you could begin to discern the movement of dark forms, floating with magisterial reverence, silhouetted against the orange mercury pallor violating the cast-iron solemnity of the perfect street scene. As you approached, outlines and forms materialized into dozens of men making their way around and around and around, rarely speaking, sometimes not even looking at each other, like suspects in an endless line-up.

We called it The Block, and you could hear the reverence when some queen tossed off the phrase in answer to “where ya goin’, hon?” on the downside of last-call in gay bars all over town. Whether it was the preppies or the hippies or the cowboys or the hustlers, the bikers or the accountants costumed to meet somebody else’s expectations, the gay men of Washington showed up at The Block. Some would drive around relentlessly, slowing their cars to crane for a glance or a gesture. But most were like me, on foot and in heat, playing an exquisite game with rules that nobody had to teach us.

The Block was a few streets over from the townhouse where Jackie and JFK lived back in the 50’s when he was a Senator, helping along the immutable laws of real estate that had brought Georgetown back after the white people fled the District’s rising blackness. House after glittering house offered a crystal chandelier or a manicured garden that might catch the edge of a glance, deflected from the eye of a unappealing passerby, if you cared to look. Secret service men, protecting a house now occupied by Henry Kissinger, stood about, solemn and watchful, without expression or judgment, as if the nocturnal parade were part of some grand plan, a vision of national security which could not be disturbed by the random hand job in a car down the street or a sashaying drag queen at the butt-end of a spree.

All of which Lacey knew, because I told her.

She was smoking as I stumbled into the kitchen one night.

“It’s late, baby,” I said. Marlboro wisps cut through the slash of reflected light from the street light in the alley.

“I know,” she said. For that whole year we were together, she never moved in. Not that it mattered, we were together so much of the time.

“I woke up and you weren’t anywhere. I couldn’t get back to sleep.” I searched the edge in her voice, the angle of her eye.

“I hit the bars, and then Brian and I went over to The Block,” I said. “Pretty dead, but I did score some nice weed. Want a toke?”

“No thanks.” She was looking at her hand. I sat down across the table from her and I waited.

“What is it, Lacey?” I asked, finally. “Is there something going on?” She turned her head and stared at me through the smoke.

“Why do you do it?” she said, and turned away.

“I really don’t know.” I said in that dark room, that night and many times again over the year we were together. “It’s the deal, right? It’s my nature.”

That’s a lie: I don’t remember what I said. That is what I should have said, perhaps, had I possessed the wisdom, the compassion, the self-knowledge. But as with a child, my behavior simply expressed need: it was a call, a moment when something was required, the ringing of a bell, a tiny movement of the heart’s clockhand over an invisible line, a time after which feelings could never again be denied, and by their acceptance reduce some of the shame.

Oh, beyond imagination, this new world of men, men who were suddenly available, no longer forbidden. In my youth I had fled from the permissible world of men, the moments of unremarked physicality, the kind of touch validated in sports and anger and the slaughter of animals. This new world of men was now everywhere — on a bus, on a street, in the ordinary egress of daily life, everywhere, especially in those magic colonies we were constructing, places where primal rutting was always within reach, by the mere flick of an eyelash, the turn of a cheek. We lived through the glorious time-lapsed opening of the petals of a flower, no longer a constricted, arrested bud tended by the gentle hand of a woman, changing water daily, never letting anything get murky.

We had always been in these places, of course, hoarding our secret alienations, tending our souls in retreat, masked to all the world but those who had the code, those of us for whom a miracle of genetics or maybe just coincidence had occasioned a private initiation, a prefiguring of the spectacular public riches of body and spirit that we began to take for granted in the early seventies.

Feet first, we jumped in and nearly drowned in a tsunami of narcissism. We saw only those who mirrored back what we desired, looking past the women and children and the old people in whose midst we built our settlements, always on the lookout for those we would have, and those who would have us.

If pastel vortexes swirled in certain city centers, from the Castro in the west, across the fruited plain to the Village and Dupont Circle, they fairly erupted with divinity in our enchanted resorts, which had always been looser, more naked, more hospitable to anything-goes, places like Provincetown, Fire Island, and my beloved Key West.
I had discovered Key West the previous Christmas, long before Calvin Klein had purchased a conch house for a million bucks, before the developers began to rejigger paradise, their Marriott-kind of paradise, their tidy theme-park charge-card paradise, before the evisceration of our ramshackle sweaty boho drug-sopped jungle fevered art crazed navy-whites fucking seafood nightlong tossings in a bed with mosquito netting ghosts of Ernest Hemingway and John James Audobon and mustaschioed Cuban cigars and really strong coffee spiked with cocaine from room service kind-of-place that I had discovered a year before, when Walt and I kissed his dad in West Palm Beach, my mom in Ft. Lauderdale, tired refugees screened up in the Gold Coast, so happy for a visit from their prodigal sons, their faggot sons who hugged farewell and aimed their ‘72 Super Beetle at the sweaty setting sun, without a care or a clue, nirvana all tied up at the end of a two-lane ribbon of road that prevented Key West from being an island that would float forever in a dream.

Tequila sunrise before lunch and a long fat joint shared with strangers on a clumpy town beach near our trashy motel, sniffing out a bar, not obvious but undeniably gay at a certain bewitching time, dragged to an after-hours bash in a white Victorian where James O’Herlihy wrote Midnight Cowboy, so it was alleged, having it off on a widow’s walk with a slutty boy, a tiny room above the frou-frou rooftops poking through the lush jungle foliage, socked by a cacophony of rage from the lover of the boy I was fucking, oops, he was the owner of the house, I’m out on my ass, arm in arm with a friendly man in a dress who takes me in and hosts me for the rest of my stay, throwing his legs up as often as I’d comply, trotting me around like a blue ribbon calf at a County Fair for his shaggy gaggle of dirty minded louts and relocated locals to flirt with. I was entranced. I was in heat.

I had wanted to move to Key West instantly, have verandah cocktails I couldn’t afford, create forgettable petty scandals, know everyone, cook soup, watch endless sunsets with a different boy each night, never wear shoes, dawdle over journal entries, sell piles of Polaroids to pathetic tourists, pretend I wasn’t one of them, own a stool at every bar, a table at every restaurant, run for office, leave the world behind.

Was it any wonder that after Lacey and I travelled to south Florida, visited my Mom and her aunt for Christmas, that I wanted to hit Key West again? Without her. To which she agreed. Reluctantly.

Anyway, I didn’t understand the problem. We were, after all, both gay when we started sleeping together. Shit, I wanted to sleep with everyone, anyone. Sex was magic, gimme some, gimme mine, say a spell and have your way, surrender and I’ll have mine, light a joint, get naked. For Lacey’s part, she had those big breasts that drove the bull dykes mad, so it wasn’t unusual to see her hand-in-hand with one. There would be the same face for a few weeks, then another, the longest stretch belonging to this black woman from the suburbs who was married and worked at the Labor Department. She was all over Lacey with her eyes, barely noticed me.

For me, there was not time enough in the day or night to have all the men I wanted, because I wanted them all. Fleeting expulsions of sexual energy seemed a natural, not trivial, part of our tribe’s ritual: emotional scarification, wounding, growing over in patterns, wounding again.

So there we were, hurling words into the Duval Street dust, me trying to keep the sailor I had just picked up in Hemingway’s bar from running into the night, looking for easier fun than this.

The crowd masses as Lacey and I stoop under the weight of our tender, ferocious fears. We dizzy up all the drunks and revelers more than their tequilas and beers, just another night’s entertainment.

— You never really loved me you selfish bastard! She screams.

— Leave me alone, you lying cunt! I counter.

Sounds plausible. Moves a story along. Only, I made it up, I have no idea what we said. I simply remember the scene, produce a few phrases through the vigorous spanking of my failing memory. For some unknowable reason, I want to possess the facts: what happened.
I turn to the computer screen, to the only other person who may remember. I click on the box marked “MESSAGE,” fingers hovering over the plastic keys. But, my will flickers like the miniature Lacey before me. I can’t do it, can’t compose from this patch of ancient pain.

I swivel my chair toward the closet, mirrors concealing floor to ceiling shelves stacked high with plastic tubs and cardboard boxes. Bins of albums and journals, loose photographs, tax records, high school yearbooks, four containers labeled “Mementos”, a banker’s box inscribed with the legend: “Cards and Letters.” I’m a rat, hoarding long-forgotten materiel of a life, spinning a stinking nest in the safety of the dark.

I sneeze, and wipe the dust from the box’s cover with a Kleenex. It’s jammed full of papers, all shapes and sizes. A small folding table that I use when I’m doing my taxes is propped against the wall. I spring it open and dump the contents of the box onto its nubbly surface. These are messages from a time not so long ago, when the human requirement to make sense of it all compelled the writing and sending of letters, many quite long, ten pages or more, some even sent by special delivery, letters written on faded flowering note paper and hole-punched legal pads, single-spaced typewritten tomes folded twice, folded like brain terrain.

I sort. I shuffle. I search for the Lacey part of my life, lost in a forest of words and history. Demon memories drift into the foreground, zombies wander through the mists and ominous streams. There is no order in the pile before me, no order in the physical evidence of my life, frozen moments of love I have inflicted and borne, picked scabs and confusion, rage and joy and all the rest, memories on the shaking papers I sort.

Her round cursive hand appears soon enough on a crumped up envelope, bidding me to press onward, beyond the artifacts from all the others, to find more of her, ignoring them, collecting her, tossing back into the box all the others, the love letters, hate letters, fuck-you letters, fuck-me letters, sex letters, get-together letters, get-lost letters, I-don’t-think-I’ll-ever-understand-you letters, porn, cards for birthdays, cards for holidays, cards for no reason at all, envelopes, oversized envelopes, girly envelopes, #10 envelopes imprinted with company logos, envelopes touting causes, home-made folded construction paper envelopes, calligraphy, propaganda, foreign postmarks, faded postmarks, scratchings, soooo, illegible signatures, and heart-piercing penmanship that brings back an entire, three-dimensional, full-blooded, embodied person that I once loved, Lacey, a soul into which I poured myself, only to half destroy her before splitting, or so I remember as I begin to read the small stack of letters and cards from her, and surprisingly, to her from me. Carbon copies.

I separate out the letters that rambled on about work and the banal travelogues, preferring to search the rancid accusations and long recitations of self-pity for the information that is driving me nuts. I want to know about the abortion. I want to know why we loved each other and why we didn’t. I want to remember it all. I have an uneasy feeling. Time is running out. I’ll have to read them another time. Time to get ready for this fucking musical.

—

Dear Lacey. What has it been, 20 years? Really don’t remember. I know, sooooooooo embarrassing. You on Facebook, too, wow! I just got into it, old fuck like me. Shock to see your name. I scanned 950 old pix last summer, so that’s why probably old Lacey in my head. That, and, I confess, I started digging in old letters and journals. I found some from you, copies of ones from me to you, very confusing many had no envelopes or dates. I can’t get the sequence right. Anyway, hope you’re well. I see you have a shrink degree. Impressive. Hugs, Neil

—

Dear Neil. It has indeed been a long time. Your name came up the last time I saw Larry’s cousin Sandi, she saw you in Vermont last summer, said you looked great. She of course looks like shit. I can’t believe you don’t remember the last time we had lunch!!! It was in DC, remember, we were both visiting. Awkward. You stopped drinking, I remember that. You still in LA, I’m jealous. Let’s do better, stay in touch. What did you find in those letters, anyway? Lacey.

—

Lacey. Oh, the letters, filled with lots of pain. We both needed editors. Bad, whew…..Neil

—

Dear Neil. Here’s the thing. I lost everything in a garage fire three years ago, no documents, pictures, nothing. Horror of horrors, not good for a shrink, past erased. Sometime maybe you could photocopy for me, just a few choice ones, for old times sake? L

—

Lacey, old gal. Well, I’m willing to do the xeroxing, what the hell. Can’t give them to my secretary, too dirty. ha-ha. I’ll get to it this weekend. Let me know when get them. N.

—

Dear Neil. Got the letters. You’re a dear. What a confused and bitchy kid I was! Blah blah blah. Here’s my favorite:

I received your letter, a pretty typical justification of your hostile, egocentric, oversimplified projections of who I am and what my motives are, oozing with self-righteousness, condescension and not so subtle sexism. I don’t give a shit about how you feel at this point. I think your letter was pathetic and I was not aware that you were so confused and paranoid.

I do NOT remember when I wrote that, my memory is worse than yours. Was it after the break-up? During our primal scream therapy phase? Some early fight? Shit, we did write a lot of letters. LOL. Lace.

—

L. You picked a doozey! Most of your letters were maudlin, not so ferocious. I myself was just an asshole, such a bullshitter, jesus, and, a little horndog I was, of course, to wit:

I love LA, love the cruising, meet guys, have sex. I immerse myself, living out the energy, a basic compulsive search for attention, so crazy, I need to scream and I can’t. Even if I find man of dreams, can’t imagine this drive ever disappear. Something in me resists the commitment. So lonely, but even if I get everything I want from them, I still need you. Must be crazy to cut you off as I did.

Ah, good times, eh? Actually, I think these pages are original, I never sent to you. Just as well, so fucked up! Neil

—

Neil. Gee, thanks for such a lovely reminder – Yuch, I was a super masochist to put up with you. It was the 70s?. ‘Freedom’s just another word….’ Janis sang. OK you were crazy, but not like me. This stuff is heavy duty.

On our last Sat night I freaked out on some primal feelings.You were leaving me, a final, eternal separation. This time I became more aware of the choice I make to go to my “saver” place, where I am tough kid, can’t trust anyone, no one ever going to love me good as Daddy. Only option is to hold on til I’m with Daddy again, which I know “rationally” can only happen when I die. Other option is to wait life out, half-trying at relationships, diverting myself from real pain and only real option, ie to kill myself and make it quicker.

Hoo-boy, pretty disturbing for a therapist to read one’s own suicidal ideations. Enough 4 now. Love, L.

—

Dear Lacey. I came across this gem I didn’t send to you, part of a 12-page typewritten “questionnaire” for a therapist after we broke up — do you remember George? Me, I was a mess too.

When Lacey began at the Center we became close, moving in together that fall. Not as lovers, since I was still reeling from Donald and she was involved with several women, but close. By April, we were sleeping together. That lasted til this past January. Our relationship played into some of our worst shit. I was gay, really, continuedr sex with men. This was perfect for her—-she could never have me, but would still keep trying. It was destined to never to work out. Our break-up was followed immediately by another trip to California for old Neil, familiar pattern.

Since the breakup, I have been looking hard for a man to love. I feel lonely, angry that nobody is here to give me what I want, need, deserve. Sex in a park, the baths, quick pickup someone I’m not wild about. Since December I have had syphilis, gonorrhea (twice, once in the throat), hepatitis, severe flu, and several minor infections. I have lost the self confidence I used to have. Lacey is officially out of my life.

—

N. We were both searching for Daddy, that was the problemo. You never got over your dead Daddy. I never got over my live Daddy. I also never got over you, but then you know that, that’s what I said that last time we met. Wanted to say more, but I guess I learned to hold my tongue. Was doing no good for anybody. L.

—

Lacey. OK, I’m really confused, I confess. I have many memories before we broke up. But after, it’s all disappeared. Drugs, maybe? For instance, I have it in my head that you had an abortion and it was mine maybe. I feel the wound, I just can’t remember when it was inflicted. This is actually why I went to the letters. But the ONLY thing I can find, and believe me, I’ve read everything, is my own brief diary entry:

Just finished all my remaining cocaine & watched WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT” with Doris Day on TV. The second NY blackout was this week. Also this week, a very dramatic episode in my book — that’s the way I relate to all facts of my life, it’s material for the book someday I will write — Lacey told me the child she aborted could have been mine. She had to, she said. She would have kept it except for errant IUD.

Entry was undated, but had to be July 1977 — I looked up the blackout on Wikipedia. So, Lacey, just for my piece of mind, can you help me out? when did you tell me about the abortion, anyway? Neil

—

Dear dear Neil. You will have noticed that it has been a few days since your last note. I’ve held the phone in my hand more than a few times, but I realized, I only have this fucking website to connect over, no phone number. Anyway, I’m chicken. You want to talk after this, my number is on the profile now. Anyway, just read the letter I wrote to you from New York, it’s dated March 1976. Everything you need to remember is right there.

Being Pregnant is a constant revelation to me. Now that I’m no longer sick all the time (first 3 mos) it’s particularly better. I’m optimistic about my ability to combine motherhood and work. I’m actually very happy about having the baby. (Susie swears it’ll be a boy, so at least I’m no longer positive it’s a girl.) I regret that we seem to have lost a lot of our ability to stay in personal contact. I think it’s been difficult because of all distance between us, emotionally, life style, priorities, etc. But I guess I’ve also kept the feeling that eventually we’d get past them and regain some sense of the quality which was there in our friendship throughout. I hope that it might be possible to make more contact in the future as I know for myself it has been something rarely found. I’ll tell that to the baby.