38 YEARS

Yesterday I started my 39th year with the airline I work for.  On Oct 24th,1968 I stepped out of a car from LaGuardia Airport onto 14th St on the edge of Greenwich Village in New York City in front of a high-rise apt where I would be living with 8 other new Stewardesses!  

I turned native the minute my feet hit the asphalt!  It was thrilling to see steam filtering up thru holes in the streets, just like the movies!!  Imagine my surprise  when I found out it was from the sewers.

We were sweet, naive & I was so innocent back then. It was wonderful to live with black, white, brown, yellow - all different people together, getting along, very different from where I'd grown up. 

Marching around with hundreds of strangers everyday, it was easy to hide, an odd type of annonymity - nobody knows you, nobody even looks at you!  You don't have to wear makeup or even smile.  A welcome relief coming from modeling thru my youth, then beauty pageants after highschool for college scholarships, trying to proove I was worth loving & knowing. It was comforting just to blend in with the crowd & not be noticed.

I'd become a Stewardess to get to NYC to study jazz-ballet on Broadway with Luigi !  I was excited & looking forward to that.  Here I was, a young career girl, far away from my family (couldn't WAIT to get away!) on my own living in the Big Apple!  I loved my new job & all the fun people I worked with. I thought I was so grown up.

Soon all my roomates were dating & having sex.  I'd wait up all night for them to come home & beg them to tell me all about it, tell me everything!  Finally they told me to "just go out & get laid, for God's sake.."  I had missed my boyfriend back in Texas.  We were together thru college, but I was saving sex for when we got married. 

Finally I was given a trip to Houston, I called him to pick me up at the airport & we could barely wait to see each other!!  That night we finally went "all the way" much to his shock after waiting for so long.  I was estatic & so in love, couldn't wait to see him again!  Got another flight to Houston two weeks later & raced to call him & give him the news! 

Well, he wasn't there.  He'd flown to Hawaii with another girl to LIVE.  Seriously.

I was heartbroken & went into complete shock.  Not to mention, plummeted into the first of many clinical depressions to come.  How could this have happened to me?  After all 4 long years of loving & trusting this boy?  Especially after finally giving myself to him totally?  I started to begin to doubt there was a God.  If there was a God, why did so many bad things happen in the world?  Not just this, but all the other Really horrible things.  What was fair about life?  I also started to loose faith in everything I knew & believed about myself.  I lost focus & started floundering.  I wasn't even 22yrs old yet.