What are memories? Technically they are events in a person's life that they felt had a purpose for taking place and worthy of being recorded. As we are exposed to an infinite number of micro events; the passing of a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year we are forced to limit what we will conscious choose to remember and the rest will simply become a faded memory of the past. In my own life I would learn that from my childhood autombile accident that memory would become more like riding a unicycle than riding a bicycle with many more ways to forget. A long time ago I chose to care for a friend, Audrey, but in her youth she was the source of much happiness in my thrities.

Around that time of my life I had spent twelve years pursuing a dream of someday graduating from the University of Washington's Business Administration department. It was during these early years that I would learn that maintaining a romance life would have too high of a price to pay and that I would not be able to have both if I ever wanted to reach the goal of graduation. Forced to choose I devoted my life to learning all I could, developing a better understanding of how my brain could retain information. Later on I would even come up with the analogy of brain damage as being like a top line of VHS video recorder but where the owner's manual has been lost. My potential is what I was exploring using my own interests to help determine my original direction. In this VHS example, without an owners mannual it was only through trial and error that its' features could be discovered and then reused at a later date.

As preparation for the commitment to learning, I was given a mother who was a school teacher and I was raised as a child to never be afraid to ask questions. What we learn and the timing of that learning can make all the difference in how we look back on our past and on how we will choose to make the present. As reaching this university goal would consume about twenty years of my life when I was able to devote my attention to a relationship my interests lied more in developing a committed relationship and perhaps someday getting married. And if we were ever going to have any children then how long my "biological clock" would be ticking needed to be a consideration as well?

My mother was a wonderful mother, but not a good example of what I would find in the world. By this time I had already had a great girlfriend that would move on in her own life and eventually marry another man; I had already a woman "that got away" where we would share good memories together when ever I would call her on the phone. I already held some very strong affection for this woman before she became married. As it was sad that anyone would "get away", I did not want my life to become a series of "those that got away".

When Audrey did come into my life I was absolutely "in Heaven" in how she made me feel emotionally, but there did come a time where how she felt about me was not equal in intensity as how I felt about her. I did not like the thought of once again Loving a woman who was not capable of Loving me and there came a point where, while not wanting to hurt her, I wanted to begin the effort of backing out of her life; to not be as close to her as I had been in my last serious friendship. I do not know why Audrey never asked me why it was that I was trying to back away, but as there came a point in our friendship that I felt the friendship did need to end, I began to express some of these concerns to her. To me it would be a great relief to hear that she had married. It meant that I met the conditions that God places on a vow made to another.

Audrey never realized that that was all I needed to know for God to release me from a vow of devotion I had once made to her. I do not believe that she ever understood how important a vow or promise could be and it would appear later that she would be very much frightened of me in the manner and in the wordage used in my last letter to her for the following twenty years. There would relationships that would come after her, but they would never be as special to me as my friendship to Audrey had been to me in 1984. Ten years would eventually pass before I would finally reach that point of graduating from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Administration but not before earning a second BA degree in Speech Communication.

Graduation for most people would normally be a wonderful moment in their life, yet because of the length it took for me to graduate it was just another day. All that I had originally known when I first entered the University of Washington in 1973 had long since graduated and had gone on to develop careers of their own and for some their own marriages would not be far from them. My greatest satisfaction would come when my degree certificates would arrive in the mail.