1977 was primarily annus horribilis for me. Yet it was also the year I met my friend Deborah.
I was crashing at my sister Leslie and her then-husband’s Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC apartment. My job, such as it was, involved making telephone calls to get people to buy stuff. They were to resubscribe to TV Guide at a higher price than they would spend by purchasing it off the newsstand. And we collectively were pretty successful at it.
I also got people to buy the Annual updates for an encyclopedia, though I no longer remember which one. (Geek self-reveal: my parents bought the updates to our Encyclopedia Americana, and I read them when they arrived.) Other people sold Bulwark fitness gear.
I worked from six p.m. until midnight, never calling after nine p.m. in the locale I was calling. It was five days a week, so I had much free time.
I became friendly with a co-worker named Michael. Sometimes, we’d go down to Greenwich Village and hang out at the clubs or sometimes in a park.
I don’t remember where or how, but Michael met a young woman named Deborah. He was instantly smitten. They went out for half a minute before she broke up with him. Somehow, Deborah and I managed to become friends.
After I moved upstate – New Paltz, Schenectady, then Albany – we wrote or called each other. When I came to the City, I’d crash at her place.
Then she moved to Japan. I was a mediocre correspondent, and we lost touch. But through Facebook, we reconnected.
In-person
I told the story here about how I got some found money in 2018. Deborah was visiting friends in Connecticut. She drove to Poughkeepsie, and I took a train there. We chatted for about 90 minutes, then returned from whence we came.
In the last few months, I got to plan to see her again, longer than an hour and a half. That’s for another day, as I needed to tell THIS story to tell the NEXT one.
