To Al, from Cathy

I've been sitting on this for a couple of weeks now. I recently went through a trunk of the last of my dad's possessions. Well, actually most of the things, including the trunk, weren't really his possessions. For a couple of years before his stroke, he bid on random storage unit lots that were being auctioned for past due rental fees.

I'm not quite certain what he hoped to accomplish. For the most part, the stuff was the kind of junk that you would let go rather than pay what you owed. Occasionally he'd find something, like my antique brass theodolite, that was really worth something. So I went through everything, piece by piece, separating out my dad's things that I wanted to keep and discarding the rest.

And then I came upon this in a wooden box:





Thirty-four years ago tomorrow, Cathy sent this postcard to Al at the Ohio State Reformatory. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Since my dad found this in Daytona, I have to believe that Al came to Florida after his time in the big house in order to get back together with Cathy.

The fact that Al kept this for so many years makes me think he couldn't have been all bad. But that he did leads me to believe that she ended up being the one that got away... That this postcard, received at a down and out part of his life, was the only part of her he had left to hang on to.