Pam

I dragged around for a couple of days. Living in Providence next to Brown University kept reminding of an old flame who graduated from Brown eons ago. A peer, at least in age, as it turns out. I googled her name plus the university and voila, up pops her picture and biography. She's been an incredibly dedicated, hard-working lady these twenty something years since last we met, roving the world as a journalist and working at places like the Baltimore Sun and the Boston Globe and The Washington Times. She lived in Central and South America, and in India and Southeast Asia as the Bureau Chief for one of the papers. And there have been awards galore, and a book written.

So, delighted to have found a way to say hello via the internet, I sent a brief note and never heard anything back again. On the third day, however, I received a note. She said her return messages kept bouncing back, sent and unreceived. By now there have beensseveral exchanges back and forths, and I have promised to read her book. She says there is something about Princetonians that I will want to read, that there is much about tigers and WASPs. She calls me "Uncle," a name that will gain meaning when l discover it in her book.

She asked me if I remembered the red fox in the field by my house in New Canaan the last time I saw her, and I do, barely, now that she has reminded me. Was the fox a metaphor, I wonder? I told her what I remembered was holding her hand. She chose not to respond to that memory. I asked her whether she remembered asking my blueblood publisher friend how he deserved all the fancy things he had surrounded himself with, looking him straight in the eye and asking him: "How is it that a redneck, son of a bitch like you has all this?" And he, being my "asshole buddy" over the years was not amused, and glared at her in disbelief. And I, being the other asshole of the pair, kind of viewed her bluntness as a liability rather than the virtue it now seems. I remember the sudden silence. Where had I found this one, he seemed to be saying.

Worst of all, I have always felt badly about her misplaced letter to me when she returned from a business trip to the South Pacific with the head of IBM. She was so excited to see me, it turned out, and she had folded a beautiful letter in a 45 RPM record with some kind of music, Hawaiian I think, which reminded her of us. We had just begun to date, and now it was all over, almost as quickly as it had begun. I had another relationship evolving, with the women I would eventually, some twelve years later, marry. That fall, I was at the height of my charismatic powers, whatever they might have been, feeling full of myself. I did not commit to relationships or call women in this obnoxious time of total self-centered Assholiness. I waited for them to find me, and call they did. Weeks after Pam's return from the South Pacific, when packing up to leave my NYC loft around New Year's, I found her note. Reading it, I recognized what I had not appreciated: that someone had loved methat I might have loved back, and that I was so full of crap I didn't even know it.

So here she is, from out of cyberspace, but very real. And here I am, no longer a match for one so accomplished, married and a father. She said I would like part of her book which mentions her uncle, a Princetonian. And I messaged her back, "is he..." a man I have always thought of as being a hero, and, as it turns out, yes he is. How ever did I miss that back then? I don't even know if Pam is married or has a family. So that is that for now. I wonder if I will ever see this special Pam again? I want to, even if it is just hold her hand.