A football game, a picnic with Julia Wilkins, Paul Gregory, Chris Dewey, and Janet Paige, and a photo shoot of Janet.
 
Paul and I became friends when I was in my senior year of college and he his junior year.  I don’t remember if he was a philosophy major, but he was taking similar Western Civ classes as I was.  He lived off campus.  He thought off campus.  I enjoyed his mind, his creativity, his sense of humor, his pot.  I’ve wrote about Julia in an earlier blog.
 
Most of my college friends were in the class above mine.  During my senior year, only Chris Dewey was left.  Paul was around during the summer.  I was then a married student and lived in married student housing.  Janet went off to work at the Linn County Home.  I looked for a job everywhere.  The unemployment rate was about 10 percent.  Farmer Jimmy Carter had punished the Russians for invading Afghanistan by cutting grain exports, insuring that Iowa’s farmers voted for Reagan the next cycle.  The only job I could find was selling water softeners to the gullible.  The sales manager taught us how to find the simple-minded, how to gauge their resources and desire, and how to price the system accordingly.  Any price paid above a certain point and we split the extra profit 50/50.  The place was totally bogus and I lasted only two weeks.  We were living on Janet’s minimum wage job and it funded a minimum lifestyle.  I was in the midst of a deep depression.  It would be 15 years before my diagnosis so I didn’t know what my problem was. 
 
Janet and I had just gotten married.  David Babcock had just moved out of our apartment.  He had asked to stay there a week to finish the yearbook.  He left about three weeks later.  Now that we were safely married, Janet brought up an extremely personal issue that had troubled her and stopped our sex life.  For months.  I became even more depressed.  That’s why I have poor, imperfect memories of this time.
 
And at that time, I shot this set of portraits of Janet.

I now wonder what was going on in her mind.  We had married just a month earlier.  Was she already regretting her marriage?  What did she think of my taking photos of her?  She looks reluctant at the beginning, but engaging in the middle, and happy by the end of the session, culminating with a selfie kiss.  

I loved her deeply.  Though we had dated for about two and a half years before the marriage, we got real serious really quick.  She was talking marriage after just four months of being together.  I wondered about never having really dated anyone else seriously.  I felt that for better or worse, Janet was my soul mate.

As you can see, Janet was gorgeous.  She grew her beautiful hair out long at my request.  She turned heads in public.  She said that she hated the masculine attention.  I believe that she did hate getting attention from the wrong kind of men.  Fraternity boys.  Older men.  But she warmed to the occasional slightly older, slightly hipper or holier, handsome men.  I wonder if she now turns heads, and if not, does she miss being young and beautiful?

These photos make me wonder, where are they now?  Chris died in a climbing accident in 1989.  All the others moved on with their lives.  A google search for Julia Wilkins turned up nothing.  Paul Gregory is too common a name for any search to be worthwhile.  Janet showed me 40 years ago that she had no interest in communicating.  When I sent a letter congratulating her on her second marriage and first child, I got a postcard back acknowledging receipt of my letter.  When Chris died, I went to the wake and she went to the funeral.  Ruth Burch went to the funeral and said that Janet was as cold and distant to her as ever.  Chris Dewey had told Dave Babcock who told me that Janet told Chris that after all the chaos of the divorce and the whirlwind of being suddenly single on the open market and then getting pregnant and married, she wondered what exactly she had accomplished.  What had she changed.  I wondered what part of her thought got garbled in the retelling.

It would be years before I fully comprehended what she had taught me and how much better I was for those extremely painful lessons.