My sister was going through some letters our mom had saved, and she gave me a short stack of them, supposedly ones that I had written. Then I came across one written to my dad from a past boyfriend. It was three and a half pages long, in cursive. It was a chatty letter until it wasn’t. Suddenly, on page three, Rob stated that he wanted to move to Iowa City from Ann Arbor so that he could be closer to me (Omaha) and so he could visit me every other weekend or so.
WTF? He never said that to me. My dad never said that to me. Rob ended the letter with “see you in November.”
Honestly, I was flabbergasted. A statement to me like that could have changed everything, and I probably wouldn’t have dumped him the following winter. I was too far away from him, teaching high school in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska, feeling like I lived on the edge of civilization. He was on a college campus recruiting students to sell books in the summer with him, a pyramid scheme arrangement.
If only my dad would’ve tipped me off that Rob was more serious than he let on, but he didn’t, and Dad’s been gone for almost forty years.
I was composing this blog post while driving 53 miles an hour down the freeway on Easter afternoon, wondering why the guy ahead of me was going so slowly. He probably saved me from crashing into someone since I was focused on how my dad had wronged me, along with Rob.
When I got home, I retrieved the letter, which I just read for the first time yesterday, and noticed the envelope didn’t say William Middleton, it said Mrs. William Middleton. Rob had written the letter to my mother, not my dad.
Okay, now it was time to be mad at my mother, who never breathed a word of the letter to me. What were her reasons for not telling me what Rob had said? It reminded me of a girlfriend whose parents withheld information from her about her boyfriend, since he wasn’t Jewish.
It wasn’t a religion thing with me and Rob, so what was it? And why didn’t he tell me what he had written to my mom, about wanting to move closer?
Now I am mad at my mom, but she’s gone, so I can’t talk to her about it. She’s been in my dreams lately. Is this why? She’s only been gone a year.
I tried to find the guy on Facebook, but his name is too common. He might be dead, for all I know. Come to think of it, I was pretty messed up back then, coming from a dysfunctional alcoholic family. Maybe Rob cut his losses and ran. Maybe I had no good role models for how to close the deal.
I’ll never know. I’m not sure it was a good thing to read a letter from 48 years ago. Why had my mother kept it? Why had my sister given it to me? Why am I writing a blog post about it?
Happy Easter.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 