Linda

I met Linda at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of the seventies.  We were both getting master's degrees in TESOL.  We knew each other through Nancy, and were just acquaintances.  However, when I returned to the U.S. from Italy, Linda helped me get a job at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  She helped me find an apartment too.  We worked and socialized together a lot.  I used to ride my bicycle over to her house pretty regularly. 

Linda was a very nice girl, kind and helpful, fun-loving and humorous.  I didn't get to glimpse her darker, deeper side except in rather veiled references made about an abusive father and negligent mother.  Her later marriage didn't surprise me but the fact it didn't last did.  I suppose what I am saying is I never knew her well.  Of course, I have been so impossibly self-absorbed during most of my own life that it's not surprising I feel I know so few people very well.   

As you can see, Linda had a very straight back; her spine had been partially fused due to scoliosis.  She had wide-set blue gray eyes, and large, perfectly formed white teeth.  She had an odd nose, with a cleft in it.  Her face was expressive, but I suspect she kept a lot of her emotions in check.

After Linda had a baby, she had little interest in keeping in touch with me.  She was consumed with child-rearing and the intensity of emotion that motherhood had aroused.  In conversation she referred to her infatuation with her son, her marital troubles, counseling, issues with her mother.  We reunited briefly ten years ago at a TESOL Conference in Seattle, chatting briefly on the stairs in front of the Convention Center, with little to say to one another and not much warmth or curiosity expressed.