This is the story we published about my experience speaking to Byng, Oklahoma School students about the day I covered the bombing in Oklahoma City.

Journey of Hope visits Byng School

The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum’s “Journey of Hope,” an effort to share the experience of the 1995 Alfred P. Murrah Building Federal Building bombing, came to Byng School Thursday.

Byng Junior High and High School students gathered in the school’s auditorium for the event.

“Our guest speaker today is one of your own,” Martha Beliveau, Museum Outreach Programs Manager, said to the student body, “Richard Barron from The Ada News.”

The program included videos explaining what happened on April 19, 1995, tributes to victims of the tragedy, a short talk from Barron about what it was like to cover the bombing for The Ada News and a question-and-answer session.

“The mechanics of newspaper production was very different in 1995,” Barron said, “but the actual journalism was the same.”

Barron described learning of the bombing on the morning of April 19, and immediately deciding to drive to Oklahoma City, of the look and feel of the site of the tragedy, and how he and reporter Roy Deering covered the aftermath of the bombing.

Each student was given an “Oklahoma Standard” poster which let students pledge to commit to an act of hope.

After the program, Byng’s FFA students placed mulch under the American elm tree, an offspring of the Murrah bombing’s famous “Survivor Tree,” which the FFA at Byng Junior High planted in 2018.

Journey of Hope is a program designed to travel to all 77 counties in Oklahoma to teach the story of April 19, 1995, and commemorate the 30th anniversary of the bombing.

This was my column for that day.

Picture This: What Was I Feeling?

I recently spoke to the Byng School student body as part of Journey of Hope, a program from the Oklahoma City National Memorial, about my experience as a journalist covering the terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

At the end of the session, organizers opened the floor to questions from the students, and they all asked good questions. I thought the most interesting question was, “What were you feeling as you covered this event?”

I thought it was an interesting question because I had no hesitation in answering: I was thinking about how I was going to do my job.

I think this is probably true for everyone who strives to do their work in situations fueled by stress and adrenalin. That can be everyone from school teachers to air traffic controllers to firefighters to nurses.

What we were feeling that day was the urgency of the moment. There was very real work to do, and we were all simply going to do it.

There were certainly moments of shock, especially when we in the media got our first in-person look at the scene and the enormity of the damage, but I, and all my other peers in the media, simply set that aside and started making decisions: what film, what lens, what angle, should I move, should I stay put, who can we talk to, who has more information.

Our feelings about the events of that day would wait.

My readers know me well enough to know that I am a very well-organized person, particularly when it comes to photography. Part of that is my devotion to keeping things neat (not, as some charmingly unwelcome critics have suggested, “OCD”), and part of it is my fairly sharp memory.

I thought of this as I was scanning some film recently, some of it from as far back as college in the early 1980s. This is the frame of the hour, a self-portrait (not a “selfie” since they weren’t a thing for another 20 years or so) made in my room in a rooming house in Norman, Oklahoma…

I rented the house with five other college-age students, and a man who wore a lot of camo and had us convinced he was a CIA operative. We each had a room, and shared a living room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and a weirdly partially-finished indoor-outdoor courtyard.

I could walk to class and/or the journalism school in about 20 minutes, and did so all the time, since I was often “broke as a joke” (a term I only just heard yesterday from my friend Robert) and didn’t want to scrounge for gasoline money.

I have other images from this era, of course, since I was trying to become a photojournalist, but this one probably has the best story to tell about who I was then.

I lived in this room for two years, December 1983 to November 1985, but to narrow the time a bit, I stopped shaving July 5, 1985 and have been bearded ever since, so it had to be before that.

So what do we see in this masterpiece on Plus-X Pan Film?

• At the very top left, the box with the brass hinges is a folding chess set. I was my high school’s Chess Club President and 10th grade chess champion.
• On the shelf below that is a jug with a black roll of film sitting in front of it. The black film is probably Kodak Technical Pan Film, and the jug is probably with it because it contains Technidol, the developer specifically for that film. Also on that shelf are books such as Richard Bach’s Illusions, Joesph Heller’s Catch-22, a Bible, and Windmills 1982, the OU English Department’s literary magazine. I also know that Second Skin by John Hawkes is on that shelf too because you can hear my friend Scott mention it on an audio tape one night.
• Three shelves down, you can see a grey camera bag with black webbing. I used that bag when I walked to class and only wanted to carry one film camera and a couple of lenses. I later took it to New York City in March 1985. My bigger blue LowePro bag is out of sight below and to the left of it.
• Barely visible at the bottom left of this image is my Sony Walkman Cassette player.
• Back to the very top of the image, on the middle shelf, that curved thing is an incense holder.
• On the shelf below that are some full journal notebooks in various order. I believe the one I am writing in is from 1984. In this image, I am writing with that Paper Mate pen, “The Pen” (link if you didn’t get a chance to read it.)
• The next shelf full of record albums will probably evoke a lot of interest in the post-Napster milieu, though at the time, it was just my music collection.
• My stereo is next, and among the most interesting items in this image for me, simply because it was probably the best hi-fi I ever owned, but one that I later sold to “upgrade” to stuff that should have been better but wasn’t. It included a small MXR 10-band graphic equalizer. If you took the end caps off it, it was the perfect size for hiding a bag of weed. The Technics receiver next to it sounded great, but suffered from the 1980s linear aesthetic, and I didn’t love sliding that stupid volume control up and down. Note that it is tuned to 100.5 MHz “The Katt,” a radio station I pretended to like because of peer pressure. The tape deck below it was the best I ever owned. It has a 90-minute Maxell “Metaxial” tape in it.
• My turntable is hiding behind me.
• On my desk is the world’s largest dictionary, placed pretentiously to imply that  as a writer, I would need it. Pencil holder, desk lamp, alarm clock, telephone.
• At the very top right you can see part of one of the three-way Marantz speakers my parents gave me as a graduation gift.
• Below that it the requisite Pink Floyd’s The Wall poster, which came with the album.
• The girl in the picture on the wall behind me is Melissa, playing the piano for me at her sorority house in Stillwater in 1984, which supports the timeline of this photo well.

So, that’s “The Room.”

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou

An important truth I have grudgingly learned over the years: most people are very happy to be very unhappy.

I thought about this for a long time after someone I once liked decided to set me straight about what a terrible person I am. It was sudden, unexpected, and intentionally cruel. It was abuse.

My first clue was when I wished her a happy birthday in a text message, and she replied, “I don’t feel very happy.” My second clue was when I saw her and told her she looked good, she declined the compliment.

Of course, there was a long history of clues about her, from the fact that all my friends, and even some of her friends, told me she wouldn’t be good for me (or anyone), to the fact that when she divorced and I asked her out years ago, she told me she “didn’t think she deserved” my affections “after what’s happened.”

Back to last month: It seemed like we were having a nice lunch, then she just suddenly laid into me, in the form of a 90-second rundown of what she hated about me, that was loud enough for other patrons in the restaurant to hear. As she berated me, I watched her open her purse and pull out a $20, which she threw onto the table to pay for her lunch, then said, “Don’t follow me out!”

It was surreal.

As I turned this all around in my head, I kept thinking about her actions, and the ways that we define sociopaths, and it really started to fit. Sociopaths lack empathy, don’t feel guilty about hurting others, are often impulsive and prone to fits of rage, and are often openly hostile in inappropriate situations.

And part of me wants to know why it would even be of interest to say these things. Why did she ever answer the phone? Why did she call me back? Why did she agree to see me? Why? If she really hated me all that much, why did she ever have anything to do with me?

Mission accomplished, though, right? One fewer person who thinks highly of her, one more excuse for hating herself, one more reason to be angry at the world.

Without question, her goal couldn’t have been to change anything for the better.

And, although it definitely isn’t my problem, she is one of the least happy people I have ever known.

It was interesting to see several people offer up explanations for her behavior, such as the death of a loved one or health problems, but those are excuses, not reasons, and that is one of the ways sociopaths continue to manipulate things, by getting adherents to believe their excuses.

I am also cognizant of the fact that part of why I was willing to put up with her was that she was cute. I know that makes me sound shallow, but at least I am admitting it.

The bottom line, then, is for me to remain vigilant about abusers, gaslighters, and sociopaths, recognize ways to disarm them and keep them out of my life, all while still remaining open to, and able to recognize, real human interactions and intimacy.

“Richard, stop being infatuated with me!” ~Pam, October 1990

Today is the first anniversary of the death of Pam Hudspeth, a long-time friend, one-time girlfriend, and fellow journalist. She was just 58 when she died.

A couple of nights ago, I had vivid dreams about her all night. Lucid dreamers know how much that can color your thoughts, so for the past few days, she has been right here with me.

Journal, April 17, 1992: “Pam made a face when I told her I’d like to read her writing. Her whole life has unprepared her for the kind of openness I offer.”

Journal, Friday, May 1, 1992: “My hands smell like Pam’s perfume. And her soft voice touches me with illusion.”

That was just as the Dread Poets Society was coming together. It would be another month of writing and meeting to critique our writing that Pam and I would … hmm.

Pam wrote a lot. To put that in sharper perspective, Pam probably wrote more in a day that I do in a year, and that’s a lot, but Pam wrote in rants, like wild rainstorms of emotion, most of it anger.

Journal, May 13, 1992: “I think Pam enjoys loneliness,” Frank told me.

Journal, Friday, May 15, 1992: “Pam looked so beautiful to me.”

I made a note in the margin that night that said, “Pam apologized to Melissa, Craig and Frank for being what she phrased as, ‘a judgmental bitch.'”

Pam, I added in that entry, “is a puzzle, wrapped around a mystery, surrounded by an enigma.”

Later in the evening, Pam confided in me that, “I don’t know if I can ever be with anyone again. I guess that’s what’s bothering me.”

If I could have, I would have wrapped my arms around her and taken away all of her fear and pain and heartache and insecurity.

Journal, May 23, 1992: “I thought about Pam a lot today. If she were here, I would smile at her.”

By June, we were something of an item, but she struggled with it. At a Chautauqua event, for example, she wouldn’t sit with me, and wouldn’t say why. Trying to love her was always like that; she would only let me get close to her in fits and starts. As spring 1992 turned to summer, she tried to let me in more, and even shared with me a story about her life she had mostly kept secret. Afterwards, she said, “I never told that to a man.”

Then she would emotionally retreat, and getting back to her meant navigating barbed wire, then walking on eggs.

Journal, June 8, 1992: “Now, with the sweet smell of her perfume lingering on me from holding her for a long, long time, and the even sweeter memory of her face under the streetlight as I held her hands, I feel like our time together was too short.”

Journal, July 14, 1992: “Pam was so glad to see me. She smiled and held my hand… she had just come from her counselor, who had told her she and I have a ‘healthy’ relationship. She told me I open up a sensual aspect of her she’d never really known before. ‘I’m trying to think of anyone I’ve ever met like you,’ she told me. ‘But of course, there’s no one.'”

Journal, July 26, 1992: “She tells me that she’s not as excited about seeing me as I am about seeing her – ‘I look forward to it, but I don’t do cartwheels.’ Then she turns around and tells me our relationship is ‘very wonderful,’ and that she has pre-visualized our wedding.”

She seemed annoyed by my vegetarianism. At some point that summer, she left a message on my answering machine that I wrote down verbatim: “Meat loaf. Pot roast. Yankee pot roast. English pot roast. Cheeseburger. T-bone steak cut from the side of a cow. Round steak. Rib eye. Fillet mignon. Fried crab. Oysters on the half shell. Pork ribs. Barbecued beef ribs, dripping, glistening with barbecue sauce. McD’s Big Macs. Oooo, I have a deep voice! Hamburger meat, nice and lean and frying in a pan forever and ever. Pork chops. Chicken, broiled, baked, fried. Chicken noodle soup. Beefy vegetable soup…uh… (beep.)”

*************

A couple of months ago, I was flipping through old journal pages, looking for writing ideas for Open Mic Night, which I think of as “journal mining.” I found the entry in which I noted that Pam had gotten married again, just 20 months after she and I parted company. I got pretty mad when I did that little piece of arithmetic, since at the time of our breakup, she made all kinds of noise about not being able to be there for me, can’t be a in relationship, having a lot of work to do on herself, blah blah. Married 20 months later made that all sound like the usual breakup lies.

In an email on August 1, 2022, Pam wrote, “Richard. You are the ONLY man  – I could feel like our ENERGY … when we got to hug each other after nearly 25 years … I’ve never EVER in my life felt safer with a man – and that man is YOU. MY WHOLE LIFE – YOU have been the SAFEST, uncurl, loving, lovely, allowing my stupidity, being there no matter what .. ..I just had to tell you that because I’m not sure I ever did.”

Her friends and I know that the best song to go with her life and death was The Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands by The Indigo Girls…

“With the half logic language of the sermon she delivers
And the way she smiles so knowingly at me gives me the shivers…”

Yes, the way she smiled at me; that lyric is exactly right. Pam knew it too. She just didn’t know how to put down the weight, and stop being the girl with the weight of the world in her hands.

There is a song by This Mortal Coil called A Single Wish. The lyrics to it are difficult to hear, and neither the liner notes nor the internet seem willing to define them. So I decided to write them down as I hear them.

 

I wonder, alone here
The sound
The living now
The longing’s end
It’ll end in tears

And now as follows
Let’s hide a single wish

The living love, forever
Oh, no, it’ll end in tears
It’ll end in tears

I just returned from a trip to Arkansas, the central purpose of which was to attend a memorial dinner for Pam Hudspeth, a fellow journalist and one-time girlfriend who died in November at age 58.

I will have much more to say about her, especially the things she wrote, later.

I made a few notes about the dinner, but my insights are tenuous at best when it comes to her life. I thought I knew her, and she thought she loved me, but those are black-and-white definitions of what could only be described as a dark grey relationship.

My romantic time with Pam was dark and difficult, and was shaped, as many parts of my life are, by music. Among other music I discovered in 1992 was k. d. lang’s album Ingénue, so that season ended up being called Season of Hollow Soul from the song from that album, and expresses very accurately how I was feeling at the time…

“Fate must have a reason
Why else endure the season
Of hollow soul
The ground on which we leave on
How strangely fuels the season
Of hollow soul hollow soul”

I entered my romantic relationship with her feeling lonely and unhappy, but emerged from it feeling energized and optimistic, partially because I was learning to fly.

Dinner was hosted by Pam’s long-time supporter, caretaker, benefactor, housemate …there aren’t actually words to accurately describe their relationship… Dr. Bill Ashmore. We all met at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Rogers, Arkansas. I was just two minutes late for the designated starting time of 5:30 pm, but was the last to arrive, which seemed odd to me.

Guests included Pam’s father Phil and his wife, Pam’s son Dane and his wife, Pam’s longest-time and best friend Stacy and her husband, and other friends and co-workers, for a total of 15 of us around the table.

We discussed her life, how we met her, our thoughts about who she was and what she did. It was cordial. Stacy talked about how she only ever knew her as Elo, but no one seemed to recall why. I told them that Pam told me it stood for Electric Lips Orchestra.

After I spoke, I said that I was really in love with her at the time she moved away in 1992, and more than one person chimed in that she felt the same way, but that’s very revisionist. If you could have seen and heard her at the end, she was very distant and ready to be done with me.

At the end of the night, her son Dane gave me a tiny vial of her ashes, which was thoughtful.

The next day, Dr. Ashmore invited me to take a tour of her room and her things, which was also very kind. It didn’t yield any pearls, but I saw a few interesting artifacts of her life. She had a couple of recent photos of me on her walls, which was flattering.

Those who know me know I have been cleaning and reducing my material footprint since my wife died two years ago, so I only took a couple of small souvenirs. One of them was the green and gold notebook she and I wrote in at the very start of the “Journal Project,” an idea of mine in which writers write something – the start of a short story, a few pages of poems, other creative ideas – in a note book, then send it to the next person. It can work as a group, or just between two writers.

Here is a little bit of something I wrote in it…

There was the smokey haze of late spring and early summer. There were Friday nights around tables with beer and cigarettes and pretentious poetry.

As winter had faded, four of us gathered to read what we had written.

What did we write? Whatever it was, it better be brilliant to impress the company.

One of them, Melany. She was a tomboy. She drank too much and smoked too much weed. Once when she was pretty wasted, she walked over to me and talked for a minute, then, as she started to walk away, reached up with one finger and brushed the hair out of my eyes. Oh. Melany.

Then, Hank. If Melany was too… hm. If Melany was soft and attractive and vulnerable, Hank was equally angry and volatile. His stories were full of symbolism from the Old Testament, full of fire and brimstone. Hank was on fire.

Hank and Melany cracked open another beer and blazed up another doobie, and argued about the motivation to write.

And then, Pam.

Through the smoke and the fire and the yelling and the endless theories about this voice and that structure and which simile, Pam.

Across the table from me she sat, and I was lost in her pearl-black eyes.

She replied at length, so it seemed like an excellent idea, though she only used it as a journal, and never made any effort to create a narrative from it.

“Richard always wrote – never failed. It was part of his day, an important part. His words were opaque, and later, when he was just writing to me, his words – poetry, story, letter – each were like white feathers falling from the sky, landing gently in the palm of my hand. Scrolls, full of past, present, future.

“Richard, loaded with his camera and camera bag, would glide by and lean over, resting his head in his hands on top of my computer, and stare at me. His hair a soft red, eyes ice-cube-tray blue, small freckles running over the bridge of his nose, and always, ALWAYS with a huge smile.

“His photography was palpable, no matter the subject. God I loved looking at ALL of his pictures, feel what they conveyed to me. I would have filled the walls with every single photograph he took. I would have asked for the ones I could taste.”

Pam shared the Ella Henderson song Beautifully Unfinished with me a couple of years ago, saying it was her song about me…

“… ‘Cause every time I’m with you somehow I forget to breathe
You got me like a rag doll,
Now I’m dancing on your string
And I keep trying to figure out who you are to me
But maybe all that we are meant to be
Is beautifully unfinished, beautifully unfinished…”

The song that ended up being about Pam the most comes from when she moved away in 1992, Don’t Go Away by Toad the Wet Sprocket…

Mackenzee Crosby invited me to have lunch with her at The Red Cup, a vegan coffee house and restaurant in Oklahoma City. She is hoping to move to New York soon, and despite her repeated invitations, I’d never managed to make it up there, so this was her last chance to share the experience with me.

Mackenzee and I have been friends since for more than a decade, since she was in junior high. She took my class in 2014. Right before the pandemic in 2020, she photographed Abby and me at home for a college project. In 2021, she spent her newspaper internship at my newspaper (you can read more about her internship here [link], and here [link]). During her internship, I wanted her to write a column. My column is called Picture This, so I wanted hers to have an appealing name. After bantering twenty or so names, she loved the sound of Ellen in Grey. Her middle name is Ellen.

One running photographic laugh between us is that she is very nearsighted, and as I get older, I need readers to see up close. As a result, when she puts my camera to her eye, everything is blurry, and when I put her camera to my eye, everything is blurry.

Mackenzee is also an aspiring poet and author, and I’m always glad when I get to read something of hers. She and I were part of the open mic scene in Ada, and during the pandemic, we both took part in an amazing one-night reading called Esoteric Verse (here, link.)

After lunch, we walked east toward a cathedral she admires, then over to a spot on Western with a couple of graphic features she knew would make pictures.

Early on her internship, Mackenzee invested in a Fujifilm X100V with its fixed 23mm f/2, a camera that has gotten rare and coveted since being introduced. I have a Fuji X-T10, which I brought with my 18mm f/2 attached, so we were both shooting in a similar set.

I am excited for her that she’s moving to New York, but I also know I’ll miss her being close by.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

How am I happy? It’s an interesting puzzle, isn’t it? I am a happy person, and I expect I will be happy for the rest of my life. But how, especially after witnessing the illness and death of the love of my life 19 months ago, can this be?

I thought about that after a search of a cloud storage folder yielded, accidentally, the transcribed journal of someone I knew and dated in the early 1990s, who took her own life in early 1994.

In that journal, which I discovered only after she died, I found a potent sense of depression, despair, resentment, self-contempt, and misanthropy. Why? What drove her to such bone-crushing lows?

There were certainly the unambiguous signs of anxiety and clinical depression, and certainly some very serious post-traumatic stress disorder. She couldn’t sleep or eat well. She was disinclined to reach out (at least to me.)

In her journal (which she wrote as letters to me, which all started, “Dear Richard”), she wrote again and again about wanting to die. “I’m afraid no one will ever love me again, and I will be alone all my life,” she wrote. “If I live to be forty and am still alone, I think I will interfere with my destiny,” she later wrote, though at that time, she was 43.

One of the least-accurate things she wrote was that she was, “easy to get along with.” She was about as “easy” as a nuclear war. The reason that I stopped courting her was that she was so hard to get along with.

But okay. Doesn’t all that describe me to some degree during various periods in my life? Sure. But now am I alone, living with the echoes and memories of the most amazing love I have ever witnessed, let alone experienced, yet still smile and eat and work and love my life.

It’s too easy to write her off with “she was crazy.” Is the real truth that we are just blobs of delicately-balanced biomass? Are we all just “one trade away from humility,” to cite the movie Wall Street?

Three months before she killed herself, she wrote, “You know NOT ONE IOTA of the pain I live with daily. You are NOT forced to live my life. So LAY OFF.”

I knew fragments of that kind of pain when I was younger, but I dealt with it. She was consumed and destroyed by it.

What, then, do we think and do about this? I will ponder further.

Updated, September 2024 to include the fifth writing group.

Many of my readers will recall that I have been writing in a journal for most of my life. September 5, 2023 marks the 45-year mark. As I thought about this anniversary, I began to think about breaking it up into various periods, a kind of lifelong chronology of my writing.

1978 really was a different time. No internet. No cell phones. No air conditioning in schools (at least not in mine.) The top five television shows were Laverne & Shirley, Three’s Company, Mork & Mindy, Happy Days, and Angie. I watched the first four, but I have no idea what Angie was. We must have liked another show on another network, because I even watched the intro on YouTube, and I’d never seen even a single second of that show.

Anyway, the journal got started as an assignment for English II class in tenth grade. The first thing I wrote was the date on the second line of the first page, “Tuesday, September 5, 1978,” in a handwriting that might best be described as resembling Comic Sans.

So, what might the epochs of Richard’s journal be called? I’ll take a stab at it.

1978-1980: The Innocent Age. This was a time in my life magnified by the drama and innocence of being a mid-teenager, unspoiled by the crush of adulthood, yet with a  decidedly distorted perspective about life. I felt emotionally isolated, but also thought it all revolved around me and my feelings.

1980: The First Writing Group. I took a creative writing class in eleventh grade, and decided I was going to be a brilliant novelist before I turned 18. I wrote a lot, but it wasn’t very good. I got my girlfriend and my best friend interested in writing, and they joined in, sometimes giving each other writing assignments or challenges.

1981: The Chatter Box. By this point in my writing, I was doing a daily writing dump. Anything I could think of went on the page, and while it kept me disciplined and literate, it was emotionally empty, often falling back on a sense of humor I culled from M*A*S*H reruns and Peanuts comic strips.

1982-1983: The Dark Age. By the time I was a freshman in college, I thought of myself as a deep thinker, and honestly, I kind of was. I listened to a lot of music with deep lyrics, and cobbled together an elementary philosophy. As a result, there were many nights I didn’t write anything at all in my journal. Two important deaths, both college friends, happened during this period, but I breezed over them in my journal with a kind of arrogant nonchalance.

1984-1985: The Days and Nights of Private Drama. By the time I was 21, in the summer of 1984, I was starting to express real feelings about my life in my journal, including a very powerful sense of loneliness. It was a valid expression, since I was alone in a lot of ways during that period.

1986-1988: The Bridge. I started dating a fellow journalist in the summer of 1986. It started with late night breakfasts and sitting out under the stars on a bridge over an interstate.  She and I were both young and not very good at being in relationships, and if I had listened to her, I would have heard she wanted out, and if I listened to myself, I would have heard that I was into someone else more than her. It was a hard breakup, but it needed to happen.

1988-1989: My Time in Exile. I tried to move to another state to be with that girlfriend, but when it didn’t work out,  I moved back to Oklahoma. It felt both like I had been exiled, and that I was living in a self-imposed exile.

1990-1991: The Second Writing Group. Three other journalists and I got together every other Friday night to trade short stories and novel chapters. We were all writing well during that period.

1991-1992: The Season of Hollow Soul. I dated a beautiful, young, creative, and at least somewhat troubled fellow journalist during this time. We were only together a few months, but I was really in love. The k. d. lang song Season of Hollow Soul came along just then and became an anthem for our break-up.

1993-1998: I Flew Away. During this period I was flying all the time. Airplanes were cheap to rent, and I had disposable income and spare time. My journal is full of fun entries about flying.

1999-2000: The Third Writing Group, Robert’s Frost. I briefly, and with difficulty, dated an endocrinologist who told me she wrote poems and stories, so we formed a writing club called Robert’s Frost. It was her, me, and four other writers I knew. We all wrote some pretty great stuff for the short time we kept it going.

2003-2004: The High Road. Abby and I met and fell in love, and my journal is all over it. She even wrote a journal for a while. Our first vacation was called The High Road, but that very phrase ended up describing our whole relationship. We got married in October 2004.

2005-2015: Diamond Days. For a while, one of our web pages was called Diamond Days, and was an expression of how happy our lives together were. We loved being married, we loved traveling together, and we loved each other. The journal, and, by then, this blog expressed that without doubt.

2016-2019: The Fourth Writing Group, Open Mic Nyte. I started attending an interesting group in 2016, and open mic venue at a local coffee house. We all read, sang, performed, or showed our art, and it was amazing. I wrote all kinds of great stuff during that great period, and often read passages from the journal itself, and I wrote about the sessions in my journal.

2020-2021: The Isolation Journals. My friend Mackenzee crafted some poems during the early pandemic under the heading of The Isolations Journals, but I like that title enough to steal it. During this period, we all faced the difficulties and missteps of the pandemic, and this period marked a sharp decline in my wife’s health.

September 5, 2023: Abby died in March 2022. The journal has it all there in black and white, but it’s not easy to look at those pages. But I am still writing.

2024: The Fifth Writing Group, First Monday Spoken Word Open Mic Night. This group has caught on big time with the writing culture in Ada, and it seems like more fun every time we meet. I am our defacto photographer, and I always read.

Here is a strange truism about journal writing that has not served us well: I wrote things in my journal in tenth grade that would have gotten me arrested and/or medicated 25 years ago, 15 years ago, or today. If anyone in today’s social network scene posted some of the stuff I wrote back then, the schools would go on instant lockdown.

That seems like a reasonable course of action, but the truth is that has the effect of driving self-expression underground, where it festers and builds instead of being expressed and dealt with, and I wonder if that is a contributor to more violent trends now than in 1978.

And it’s not that I was broken and violent. We all have broken and unsettling thoughts and feelings when we are inundated by the cruelties, and hormones, of teen life, and we can deal with them, or we can bury them.

Finally, today I finished my current journal volume, number 56, and tomorrow will start the next one. Question: what can I do to amp the creativity in the next one?

It is with a sense of amazement that I admit I am about to turn 60. That means that I moved into the Adams Center Dormitory on the campus of the University of Oklahoma 42 years ago.

42 years is something to ponder. The world has changed so much in that time, as have I. That’s the reason I think it’s a mistake to do anything permanent, like get a tattoo or have a baby, when you’re 18. What on earth was I into when I was 18? Hi-fi stereo? Camaro vs Trans-Am vs Z280? Melissa?

Wait, wait, wait. Before you go off on me for advising you when to have children, yes, I know tons of happy people who had children at a young age, including my late wife Abby, whose daughter was born when Abby was just 19.

But with health care improvements and increasing lifespans, I happen to think it’s a smart move to wait until you settle into adulthood before you take on parenthood. According to healthline.com, for example, “Experts say the best time to get pregnant is between your late 20s and early 30s. This age range is associated with the best outcomes for both you and your baby. One study pinpointed the ideal age to give birth to a first child as 30.5.”

But back to my younger days: the two things that remain in my life that I loved in 1981 are writing and photography.

I thought of all this because one of my college roommates, Carey Johnson, who at that time we knew as “Chip,” sent me a couple of photographs of the dormitory where we lived, Adams Center, and the strip mall across the street from it, Stubbeman Village, being demolished.

Adams Center was a complex of four red brick towers that, along with Walker Tower, dominated the skyline of the south part of the OU campus. Stubbeman Village was right across the street to the west.

Help me remember, Norman people: Stubbeman Village had two restaurants:  Mr. Bills and Pinocchio’s, the Half Acre Food Store, a video game arcade, and a movie theater, where my friends dragged me to see the terrible animated sci-fi fantasy Heavy Metal. Later that same year, my first girlfriend Tina took me there to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. What else was in Stubbeman Village?

I was doing a lot of changing and growing, and screwing up, in those days, and while some of the friendships I forged remain to this day, others I carelessly squandered in my arrogance. I was moody and mopey and hard to get along with (please don’t mentally say “and still are”), and I took college much less seriously than I should have, so I didn’t really get enough out of it.

One thing I did manage to create and nurture in college was my love of writing and photography, which have become some of my strengths as the years have passed. During my time in college, I remember that I couldn’t wait to get out of journalism classes and go do some journalism.

But now, the buildings where our young lives were lived, fun was had, and mistakes were made, are dust. I like to think that some small of us, maybe just traces of our DNA, remain in that dust.

I haven’t had a huge amount of time off in the last few weeks. Today is Monday, and while I often have Monday off at my newspaper, that’s the day I teach photography, so it’s not really a day off, and as it happens, this was the only day my newspaper could arrange for a gym for our all-star basketball game, so I’ll be covering that this evening.

I try to fit projects into the gaps and cracks, but often enough I get inspired by something else, from the weather to sunsets to brilliant conversations, and today was no exception: as I was cleaning out and archiving files in my iCloud drive, I came across this photo:

I’d been looking around Google Maps for this and that, and why I thought to navigate to my first girlfriend, Tina’s, house, I don’t know.

Still, it brought back a spitload of memories, mostly positive ones, about my time with her and this house. She and I dated from the middle of my junior year in high school until the end of my first year in college.

Of course, the rabbit hole of Google Maps lead to the rabbit hole of my own journal.

I first went to Tina’s house in November 1979 because Tina stopped showing up in class, and I found out she’d been in a car crash. I helped pick glass out of her hair.

I can picture the inside of the house: the dark, seldom-used living room on the right side of the photo, the kitchen and dining room in the middle, and the den on the left side. Tina’s bedroom was at the back on the right, and it had bright red shag carpet, and she had a bright pink velour bed spread. A trio of shelves above it displayed her Smurf collection.

There were a lot of long goodbyes on that front porch, winter and summer.

Since I wrote in a journal, she gave me a copy of Jay’s Journal (since debunked as Mormon propaganda), which I read cover-to-cover in a couple of days.

We woke up February 9, 1980 to find a foot of snow on the ground. I walked to Tina’s (one mile in the snow) where her mom and siblings joined friends for pizza, then session after session of snowball fights.

“I never had so much fun in my whole life. We were rolling around on the grass when I saw an airplane fly over, so I yelled, ‘air raid,’ and we both ran and hid under George the bush,” I wrote later that year.

In October 1980, she had an operation on her elbow. My journal doesn’t say why, but her arm was in traction with a drain tube in it. I have no recollection of that at all.

On another occasion, we were horsing around and I dove out that front window, breaking one of the panes with my heels. I wasn’t hurt, and had to buy a new window pane, but I remember that moment perfectly clearly.

She considered Dan Fogelberg’s Longer as “our song,” though I did not. I took her to see Fogelberg in concert in Norman in early 1982.

She worked at a toy store in the mall.

She had an older brother and a younger sister. I don’t remember much about them. Her mom and dad were divorcing at the time, but she and I stayed in the margins of that as much as possible.

As far as I know, there are no photographs of us together.