I haven’t posted anything in a long while because my life has been a little tipsy-turvy. But that’s actually a bit of a rationalization. I think another part of my reticence in posting is because the next part of my life introduces a very important figure, my first wife Erica.
It is a little difficult to talk about her, because — spoilers! — she passed away in 2005. In fact, the 20 year anniversary of her loss will be next Wednesday, the 14th of May. But it feels like I can’t wait any longer, and that it’s time to me to share this next chapter.
In the fall of 1994, I moved back into the lower campus dorms, specifically the Nerland hall. At this point, I already had good friends on campus and had become a lot more outgoing, so making new friends was a lot easier.
Our dormitory has a strict visitor policy — if you came over at any point during the evening, you had to check-in and give your student ID card (or driver’s license) while you were visiting. These check-ins were handled by students as a part time job. Easy work, most of the time (occasionally having to deal with a drunkard), but very long hours.
Erica was one of the students who worked the check-in desk (which makes it sound a lot fancier than it really was, just a table, chair and an index card box). She lived in the same co-ed dorm, but the men and women were split onto different floors. I was on the second, she was on the third. But the check-in desk was right by the entrance to the dorm lounge rooms, and I’ve always been a night owl, so I quickly became friends with most of the students who worked there.
It was a job that, especially in the late hours, offered a lot of time to talk. That’s how our friendship began to bloom. Before long, we were talking all the time, grabbing meals together at the cafeteria, she became a regular in my dorm room. But she still had a boyfriend back home in Boise at this point, so we were just good friends, nothing more.
At Thanksgiving, I travelled down to Anchorage to visit my family, but it was too long a trip for her to fly home to Idaho, so she stayed in Fairbanks. I gave her the combination to my room, and she had my (and my roommate Jed’s) permission to come and use my computer while we were gone.
In Anchorage, I missed her like crazy. I even accepted a chore to fix my stepsister’s computer for her, just so I could use it to exchange a few emails with Erica. And when I returned to my dorm and opened my door, I found her waiting there for me. It was just like you’d expect from all the romance movies. We immediately crossed the room to each other, and kissed.
I found out after the fact that she had spent the entire holiday in my room, often wearing some of my clothes (because they smelled like me), and sleeping in my bed. That was basically it for our courtship — from that point on, we were a couple. We had ups and downs, and both of us got cold feet about marriage at varying times, but we never separated or broke up.
She was everything I could have ever asked for: smart, funny, ambitious, caring and compassionate, capped with gorgeous red hair and blue eyes. When I met, she was pursuing a criminal justice degree, with plans to become an FBI agent. She had come to UAF partly because it was cheap and she got several scholarships, but also because it was a long way from Boise.
It turns out that she had a strained relationship with her long-alcoholic mother. Her mother had given her up to her grandparents when she was still a toddler, and she didn’t reunite with her until her teenage years, when her grandmother passed away from cancer. She didn’t get along with her abusive and also alcoholic stepfather; she told me that she had once pulled a shotgun on him to keep him away from her half-sisters, Jessie and Rachel. She needed a fresh start, and Fairbanks offered that to her.
Erica and a bunch of her friends wound up pledging for the local (and only) sorority on campus, Sigma Sigma Sigma. It was not like one of the sororities you might see on American movies or TV shows. They were constantly running below the mandatory minimum number of members, so they were far less choosy and picky about who tried to join. The Fairbanks chapter of Tri-Sigma (Zeta Mu, if I remember the chapter name correctly) trended much more to plaid flannel over shirts than cute little summer dresses.
The sorority became very important to her, and most of her friends in the next few years came from the people she met there. Eventually, she rose to become the president of the sorority for a year, although that was several years later.
After a lot of bouncing around, I finally found a major for my undergraduate degree. I started taking Social Work courses, and it just felt very natural to me. Both my mother and stepfather were social workers, so just the way they talked and interacted with me sort of trained me for the job in advance.
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