Vickee

Three important women—Jennifer, my first wife; Janice, my second wife; and Vickee, an old Minnesota flame—died in a year. I didn’t think of them as forming a trio until Mike said that maybe getting involved with me was turning out not to be such a good idea. Mike and I are the only people on Earth who knew all three of them and, so, are in a position to make such an observation.

I had had an online exchange with Vickee some months earlier, and I learned of her death online. Vickee and Mike were out of touch anyway, and he doesn’t do social networking, so I figured he wouldn’t know she had died; he didn’t.

Mike lives in Saint Paul, so I sent him the specs on her memorial gathering in Minneapolis, because I thought he’d want to go, and he asked me to write something about Vickee that he could read on the day. I was merely trying to do a friend a favor by passing on useful information, and here I had another job to do. This one sounded reasonable, though, and I agreed to write something and send it to him in a timely fashion.

Then I forgot. Like a bombed-out building, my mind is pretty much open to the elements these days, and I didn’t record anything about writing a couple of paragraphs about Vickee in Calendar, or Reminders, or even on a little piece of paper, thus ensuring that I was gonna do no such thing.

Here’s what I would have written, classic Vickee: In the late-’80s, Mike the Software Marketer was involved in some kind of negotiations with Barbara Sher, author of Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, and insisted that all his friends take a crack at her book. One of the exercises Sher suggested was “Your Ideal Day,” where you wrote out how you envisioned a perfect day, from getting up in the morning to retiring at night, and Vickee and I agreed to do it.

I liked writing up my ideal day, and I included a morning workout on my private velodrome followed by a massage and then a romantic encounter with the possessor of what I referred to as, I think, a smoothly muscled thigh. That’s all I said about the woman in my ideal day, but Vickee said that no thigh of hers could possibly be described as smoothly muscled, and decided that my ideal day obviously didn’t include her so she quit me, and we were friends from then on.