The Most Ambitious Women I Ever Met.

I don't mind admitting I fell in love with Betty the first time I saw her.  She was the dean of students at TSD and I saw her out the office window of the high school boys' dorm where I worked.  I never dreamed we would date but a year later, she agreed to go hiking with me.  Thus began my knowing her as someone just as wild as me without the loss of innocence.  She was willing to go with me on all the adventures I dreamed of, from repelling, traveling, and hiking, to art-making and having family.  She saw me through to salvation.  We have danced in abandoned ballrooms in the Peabody, hiked to the tree line of the Grand Tetons, camped a month above the Artic Circle, drug our children all over the Western world, and traveled trails and one-lane roads lost in jungles of Costa Rica and the Alps of Italy.  Her elegance never leaves her, from leaping into ice-cold mountain streams to sitting with college presidents for lunch, she has always startled me with her beauty, her happy kindness, and her all in all the time spirit.  She has been the salvation God has often loaned me to save me from death, sorrow, and despair.  Her wildness is her, not a part of her, she is wild, wildly elegant, wildly truthful.   She knows not herself this way as a butterfly knows not its beauty…they just are.  She is the serenity of innocence, a substance of kindness, and gives herself to me to share in all of her, all the wonders of her unknown ambitions.  

My lover skiing two days ago at 71.