Kare

 I worked with a girl named Karen, although she let some close friends call her "Kare".  She was a 19 year old art student.  She also was a gourmet cook and sewed a lot of her own clothes.  She was a pretty girl, and I fell in love with her.
 At the time I met her, she was in another relationship with a guy who abused her.  I wanted to take her away from all of that, but for a time he was a hard habit to break for her.  I have seen that with others along the way in my life with girls who are in love with abusers.  Kare was better than that.  So, we started hanging around together. 
 She looked a bit like Farrah Fawcett, who was big on "Charlie's Angels" at this time.  Since Farrah was from Texas, some people thought that Kare was Farrah.  We would be walking through a mall, and people would stop her wanting her autograph.  Sometimes, Kare would blow them off.  Other times, she would sign Farrah's name to a paper as a laugh.  There are a lot of fake Farrah autographs in Ft. Worth.  Other folks wanted to take her picture, and she got very paranoid about that.  So much so, that she refused to have anyone take any photographs of her.  She said that it would freeze a moment in time, and time was meant to be more fluid.  I do have a picture of her from a candid shot someone took of her that is in her college yearbook.
 When Kare was 16, she was in a bad car crash that put her in the hospital.  She had to have surgery, and she died on the operating table.  The doctors brought her back to life, but she lost some oxygen to the brain.  Consequently, she didn't understand words over two syllables.  It made it a little hard to talk with her, but we made the best of it.  She was also a feminist, and she got me involved in NOW.  It was strange for me, because I was a bit of a chauvinist, but she changed that in me. 
 One thing that Kare and I enjoyed doing was going to clubs and being the last ones there as they closed.  Last call for alcohol.  There were times when we would literally be crawling out of the door of the clubs very drunk.  It scares me now to think of us getting into a car and driving home, but we did.  We were invincible. 
 When I told her in 1979 that I was moving back to SC, I had a hard time with it, and she did too.  She told me that she had an uncle in Atlanta and would come for a visit.  She never did.  I miss her a lot, and I know she is married and happy now.  I'll write more later about how she helped me in 1978 with a crisis in my life.  She was a very special person.