Linda

Linda used to swear she never looked like that. Obviously she did at least once.

As I remember, the occasion was a party for a group of women friends who were each given a glamor treatment. The practitioner shampooed her, washed her face with a special soap, dried her face and blow-dried her hair. She then applied makeup like she might've for a movie star or starlet or an executive. Wow! And that was the result.

I wasn't there but she told me about it afterward.

Linda wasn't a pretty woman, not like a cheerleader is pretty, or a beauty queen, but damn she looked good to me!

I met her when we were assigned to work together as volunteers at some event. You'd think I'd remember the details! No, I remember Linda.

At the time, she was occupied in the slow break-up of a long-time relationship with lots of untangling to do. At the time I was living in Bell Gardens. She finished her breakup and let me know she was available, and I did my damnedest to make her unavailable.

Musta worked. I soon lived with her in North Hollywood.

Some time around then, my employer sent me to England for five days, and also some time around then, we moved to Encino. We stayed there thirty-eight and a half years.

Linda was a quiet woman, who would suddenly liven up and become the entertainer of the evening. She most often, in the beginning of our relationship looked like this second photo, her working at her computer. At the time she was a freelance bookkeeper who worked for several movies and for a drugstore then for a widow. After that she retired without explanation and I accepted that.

I don't know what there was about Lida that so attracted me to her and her to me. Maybe we just had the right pheromones. I just know that for those thirty-eight and a half years we were faithful to each other and quietly happy.

And then I found her on the floor of the bathroom, unable to speak and unable to get up. Everything after that was after Linda.

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