1970 Priscilla and I

I may have used this picture before.  Sometimes you look through the pictures and something will hit you, bam.  From the Ginsburgh mid century slide collection.

And won't this one do it every time?  That's me on the right.  I'm 18 or close to it.  My father has taken the day off (mercy!  never happens!) to take Priscilla and me to UCSC where we will be attending the next fall.  Maybe we are walking by the administration building.  I keep touch with UCSC in fact working on a project using alumni for the Crown College core course this quarter.

But here I am, I cannot wait to go here, I mean, bring it on!  People who knew me then said that I was up for doing new things, anything, let's go do it.  They say that I dragged them off to new experiences.  Huh.  Really?  I know why; because my parents did such a complete job of locking me up that I just was ready to go.

But there's Priscilla, even after all these years, my heart aches for her.  She died in a a spelunking accident at the end of that first quarter.  She was also raring to go but driven and reckless.  She stood out completely eccentric in high school and not in a good way.  She always had to be outrageous.  But that quarter at Crown, I think it was the happiest she had ever been.  Because she fit in to that eccentric group.  Smartest person I knew, I had no doubt she would grow up to some fabulous brilliant future.  I was sure of it.  I wasn't there when she died.  But I introduced her to spelunking, she begged me to go with her but soon I thought, why would I go into holes in the ground?  But she had a pink heart and she spent hours trying to tutor me in Honors Calculus.

I yearn for her soul, Priscilla....