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Chapter II

Tallahassee

It was his first time, her second. They had lived just down the street from one another in North Miami Beach, Florida, and had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance in August prior to the start of her senior year at FSU. Falling in love with each other came naturally for both of them. It happened almost immediately. They made love for the first time ten months later on an early May afternoon. She was back at Florida State University. He had gone there to see her. Tallahassee was a quaint small city. An English tutor cottage located on High Road just two miles from the FSU campus provided a storybook setting for their consummation. She lived there with her roommate of three years. They had decided to rent a cottage and get away from the close living quarters of the dormitories.

She was twenty, a slender creature, five feet eight, classic high cheekbones and the facial lines of an Ali McGraw. He was twenty-one, just under six feet with light brown hair and deep blue eyes set in a long, thin face. He had failed out of college the end of his senior year, a small liberal arts institution nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwestern Virginia. That failure jolted him into the stark realization that he needed to do something constructive with his life. He had spent most of that summer doing odd jobs while contemplating his future. In the December following their August meeting, he applied for a job with the North Miami Beach Police Department, was accepted, then decided not to take it. He took a lot of tests and was selected for the Navy’s NAVCAD (Navigation Cadet) program in Jacksonville, Florida. He turned it down because there was a six-month wait. Six months is an eternity at twenty-one. It was a decision he came to regret. Instead, he joined the Air Force. That January he left for Lackland Air Force Base. Even in the dead of winter, basic training had been a joke to him. He had lived and slept in tougher conditions camping with the Boy Scouts. Two months later he arrived at the Air Force Air Traffic Control School in Biloxi, Mississippi; that May he finished at the top of his class. The day he graduated he drove to Tallahassee to be with her. He planned to get stationed at Homestead Air Force Base, marry her, and start a life together.

As he lay beside her on that lazy spring afternoon he was amazed at how much he felt at one with her. He loved her without reservation, deeply, a love unfretted with doubt, a love that had yet to experience the harsh realities of having his emotions raked over the coals by a partner’s diminished interest spawned by separation, time, distance, and her meeting someone else.

Homestead was not to be; neither was a marriage. He was assigned to Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico. Six months after he arrived, he received a “Dear John” letter telling him she was getting married. It would haunt him for decades.