It’s an underexposed photograph, taken with the very first 35mm camera I ever owned, a Nikkormat FTN that I’d bought from my roommate, Lou Perlaky, who had gotten it from his father. I still have the camera; it still has Lou’s dad’s Social Security number etched into the baseplate. I had lots to learn about photography at that time, and because I relied on the in-camera light meter, which in this case was fooled by all the light coming through the windows in the background, I underexposed the film.
Recently, I have been going through the thousands of photographs I’ve uploaded to Google Photos over the last fifteen years or so. At the beginning, there was no limit to the number of photos one could upload, but that has changed, and as my available storage space nears its 15GB limit, I’ve been deleting work photos that I had archived. Along the way, I’ve come across photos I’d somewhat forgotten about, including those which I scanned from my old negatives. The above is one such photo, and my mind drifted back to those halcyon days.
I met Patty Haffner (I think she spelled it Patti at the time) at Bowling Green State University sometime in the spring of 1977. She was a dorm mate of my then-girlfriend Lisa Salisbury, whom I’d met the previous winter in a Popular Culture class. Because it was spring, there was a lot of sunbathing going on after classes, so I met many of Lisa’s Ashley Hall friends as we all soaked in rays at the southwest corner of Kreischer Quadrangle.
Lisa and I stopped seeing each other in the fall when it became clear to me that I was her on-the-side guy, but I remained in touch with a few of her friends. Before the break-up, in fact, I went to see Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger with Karen Klemencic at Blossom, an outdoor concert venue near Akron, Ohio. Karen lived in Mentor, to the east of Cleveland, which was sort of near Blossom, so I asked her to accompany me. I went to see Jackson Browne (and The Section) at Pine Knob, near Detroit, with Renaee Crippen who lived somewhat near me in Perrysburg.
But I digress…
Patty was somewhat… mousey, I guess, is the term.* She was small-ish in stature, had a quiet-ish voice, and an almost nervous demeanor. A great giggle. At the time we met, her hair was mid-back long, but — as the photo shows — she had it cut shorter as she neared graduation. (I recall thinking, “NOOOOO!” at the time.) She also was a smoker, which was annoying and kind of heartbreaking, and I have no doubt that I chided her about it from time to time. But I was still drawn to her.
During the winter quarter of 1979, I took Speech 102, a required course for my major in Visual Communications Technology. One of our assignments was to engage in two dyadic encounters, and then write a paper on our experiences. Patty was one of the two people I’d asked to participate, the other being a woman I’d just met in a photography class. (I’m pretty sure that the assignment required meeting with one stranger and someone with whom we were familiar.) As a matter of refreshing my memory about the assignment — as well as to see what I’d written about my encounter with Patty — I dug up the paper this morning.
The paper got a B, and deservedly so. A lot of my observations were not as developed as they could have been. This many years later, I find myself critiquing my own shortcomings as a writer, and completely agreeing with my instructor’s comments that I appeared “to be ‘hiding’ personal feelings and more in-depth analysis.”
(Also, I have never again used the word expurgation.)
I wish I’d saved the ten or so questions, or prompts, that comprised the exercise (apparently, I don’t save everything!) as it would be nice to have a clearer idea of the assignment. On one of the pages, though (see photo), I made note of one of the prompts:
“I think you should know…”
Reading this for the first time in years, I was somewhat surprised that I’d told Patty of my “deep, deep feelings for her.” I was quite fond of her, but I don’t recall the “deep, deep” part. It surprised me, too, that — as I wrote in the prelude — she had “come to be my closest friend in recent weeks.” I tend to have a pretty good memory with regard to my relationships with certain people, so I guess that in the span of almost forty-five years, I’ve forgotten most of the details that made up our relationship. I can say with almost a hundred percent certainty, however, that there were no hours-long phone conversations, no poems of yearning, no clumsy attempts to kiss her. There was never an ‘I love you as a friend but…’ conversation. Maybe I didn’t really want to know the truth — that she wasn’t interested — so I let it lie. Maybe I was sincere when I said that I didn’t want my feelings to “get in the way of our friendship.” Maybe that was all just pretend to avoid an eventual broken heart.
But this: “It was at this time she felt perhaps the same way as I, or that she was willing to discuss so much more…”
Which is not to suggest that she actually had similar feelings, but perhaps that the door was slightly open to something. She had suggested a second meeting to talk about things she said she hadn’t adequately discussed, but I refused. So…? That I dismissed a follow-up meeting is another surprise to me as — considering what I’d revealed to her — I think I would have jumped at the chance to see her again. So, now, just as my instructor wrote in her notes, “I don’t understand, there seems to be something underlying this.”
She had been in a relationship when I met her, so that might have been part of my hesitance. That I had romantic notions suggests to me that her relationship was a little shaky, but I don’t recall ever talking with her about it at any length. I don’t recall having ever met her boyfriend, and I didn’t know much about him other than that he was a teacher. (There actually is more that I won’t get into.) It might have been one of those nebulous (to me, at least) on-again-off-again things in which she had expressed doubts about him but that they weren’t strong enough to end it.
Moving on from the wouldacouldashouldas…
The most vivid memory I have of Patty and of being in her company (besides the above frozen-in-time photograph) is of an evening she came to my apartment in probably February or early March of 1979. (That my paper is dated 21 January bears that out somewhat.) I don’t recall the occasion. We probably drank some wine. If we had dinner, it was likely pizza. We sat on the floor, our backs against the front of the couch, with music playing as we talked. I recall turning all the lights off specifically so that we could listen in the dark to Graham Nash’s haunting “Cathedral” on the Crosby, Stills & Nash record, CSN. (There are some songs that require total darkness, Tom Waits’ “Putnam County” is another.)
It very possibly was the last time I saw her. I visited her once in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, but I think that was two years earlier, while on my way to or from the aforementioned Arlo Guthrie show. Since I didn’t take photos as obsessively back then (yay, cellphones!), I don’t have any record of my day-to-day activities. I scribbled occasional thoughts and mostly lame poetry into a blank book, but it wasn’t anything resembling a journal. I found an entry today that might have had something to do with her as it was addressed, “Dear friend,” but I can’t say for sure.
Thanks to a Newspapers.com search I found that she’d gotten her marriage license the last week of March 1979, and a search at Ancestry revealed her marriage date as 7 April. Eventually, she moved to the Houston, Texas area, where she taught, had two daughters, got divorced, and then remarried. I’ve gathered that she was a step-mom, too. I sent her the photo via Facebook shortly after I had scanned it, but she didn’t respond. I also sent her a note not long after Lisa Salisbury died since I figured she wouldn’t have known. Again, nothing.
So, today, when I came across the photo again, I opened Messenger to look up when it was that I sent it to her — nine years ago! My second note, about Lisa, was dated February of 2016. When I clicked through to her Facebook page to see if there were any recent updates, I found that it had become a memorial page. Patty had died. Based on comments her daughter made on a photo, she died in the spring of 2017. Her last public post was on 21 May of that year — a picture of her granddaughter. I couldn’t find an obituary for her anywhere. Scrolling through her Facebook posts, I found she had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, and had other health issues, but a few of the photos she posted of herself suggest she might also have had cancer. Which makes me think of all the cigarettes she smoked.
In addition to the picture of Patty, I took a “still life” photograph that day of her cigarette butts in an ashtray, her coffee cup, her mini-stack of books (and what looks to be a pack of cigarettes), and her legal pad. I can only make out “Computer” and “Data” at the top of the pad, and maybe “March.”
Despite all the years of not being in touch, I’ve long cherished that we were friends at some point in our lives. I often wondered what became of her. Scrolling through her Facebook posts and seeing her daughters’ comments, I can only guess that all in all, she had a pretty good post-Bowling Green life. But I’m sad that she’s no longer in this world, regardless of whether or not we reconnected. And that’s why, I guess, I’ve spent the better part of a day writing this, and another couple, now, making edits… to grieve a little, I suppose; to memorialize the relationship — whatever it might have been — in some way. Each of us passes in and out of so many people’s lives — just as many others pass in and out of ours — that it wouldn’t surprise me if Patty barely recognized my name when it showed up on Messenger in 2013. Perhaps she did and her memories of our relationship were so completely different than mine that she didn’t think my notes warranted responses.
The thing is, regardless of the depth (or lack of depth) of the relationship, she existed in my life as I did in hers. We are forever changed in ways small or grand.
Whatever reason or reasons Patty had for not wanting to reconnect, she’s gone now. I hate that. A lot.
*After writing this, I looked at the few public photos Patty had on her Facebook page, and they reminded me that when she smiled, her narrow, angular face sort of took the shape of Italian puppet, Topo Gigio, including her slightly buck-y front teeth, so perhaps my description of her as mousey is indeed apt.
Postcript (23 November 2022): While I was in the process of writing this tribute, I sent a note to one of Patty’s daughters via Facebook, along with the photograph of her from 1979. I didn’t really know what I expected to gain from that other than maybe thanks for having a photograph of her mom that she’d never seen before — I know that experience so well. Since we weren’t connected on Facebook, however, I had no idea if she’d ever see the message much less respond. Today she did, and she clued me in on a few more details about Patty… that she taught Reading and English at various times to grades 8 through 12, that her date of death was 26 August 2017, that her cancer (leukemia) was indeed related to her years of smoking.
