Lydia

Lydia. Lee-day-ah fahn duh Nee-fey-ah. Now this one's also going to take quite a while to talk about.

Lydia is my ex-wife. We met on June 11, 1976, at her parents' apartment in Amsterdam. Her parents, Ans and Aaron, were friends of Ab and Jacquelien, who were friends of Albert and Janny, who were a Dutch couple I'd picked up hitchhiking the summer before, while I was travelling west through Canada. So Ans and Aaron invented this party as an excuse to introduce me to their crazy daughter, and their crazy daughter was absolutely fucking gorgeous in a very short denim skirt and a tight white lowcut T-shirt, and we went up to her attic room and played Beatles albums and talked and fell in love. We necked on the grass out behind the Stedelijk Museum, which is Amsterdam's Museum of Modern Art, and then I got on my new motorcycle and drove down to Florence for the fireworks on June 24th, but I missed Lydia so much I flew back up to Holland and got her and flew her back down to Italy, and we biked together all the way down to Crete, and then put the Jawa on the Magic Bus and rode back to Amsterdam.

And we went to America together at the end of '76, and lived in Florida and Louisiana, and then her visa ran out and she had to leave the country, and being apart didn't work out at all, but she had no right to be in America any more, and I had no right to live in Holland, so we decided the only way to deal with the situation was to get married. Which we did, on December 11, 1977. And my parents sent us to the Bahamas for a honeymoon, and I wound up leaving her there and flying up to Pennsylvania for an interview with Slippery Rock State College, and they offered me a job, and I took it, and we U-Hauled our worldly goods up to PA and moved into an awful student apartment across from the college. That didn't work, so we moved down to Pittsburgh, and I drove up at the beginning of the week and stayed a couple of nights at the Alumni House, and drove back to Pittsburgh at the end of the week to live at our apartment and work part-time at Heads Together and take the est training and decide to move to Holland instead of getting divorced.

We moved across the ocean in July, 1979, and moved into Lydia's miniscule apartment. And in March of 1980, the University of Maryland hired me to teach a couple of courses at an Army base in Tevern, West Germany, and the NATO base in Brunssum, Holland. Like in Pennsylvania, I drove to work at the beginning of the week and spent a couple of nights there, then came home for the long weekend — and a part-time job as a proofreader for Excerpta Medica, the publishing company (medical textbooks) I'd been working for as a part-timeproofreader and desk editor since we'd moved to Holland.

When that first assignment ended, Maryland sent me down to Glyfada, just outside Athens — yeah, that Athens, in Greece, a far cry from Athens, the street in Lakewood, where I lived in the early '90s — for two months. Then I didn't teach for most of a year, and then I went to England for the summer of '81, and then I didn't teach for about nine months, and then early in '82 I went to Greece (interlude with Beth, drive down with Rudi, letter from Robin) and then Spain and then England and then Bahrain — where I met Vicki, and life irrevokably changed direction.

(November 24, 1993)

Since I wrote the first part of this entry, I’ve heard more. Rudi and Lydia are now married! She’s got her own alternative-medicine clinic in Amsterdam, and Rudi emailed me the URL — Uniform Resource Locator, or Internet address — and I checked out the site . . . and found the first recent photograph of Lydia I’ve seen in something like 15 years. She looks older. A couple of months ago, she attended a conference in Florida, and she and Rudi wound up getting together with my parents and Laura. Everyone, as I understand it, enjoyed themselves. But Lydia still hasn’t forgiven me for leaving her, and there’s still been no contact between the two of us since some time in 1983.

(July 22, 1998)