Two Excerpts from my Memoirs

Here are two excerpts from the memoirs of Pat Otterness

I Could Have Been a Contender

I graduated from Brevard College with an A.A. Degree (Awkward at Arts) when I was twenty years old.?My English teacher, Eston Roberts, asked me to drop by and see him before I left, so in I went.?Eston and I had had a somewhat combative relationship, and I had often referred to him as Toadface Roberts in my underground newspaper, the Brevard Toilet Paper (readership about 6-10 people).?I thought I was a great wit back in the day.

To my utter surprise, Eston asked me if I would write to him in ten years, because he thought I would be famous.?Bemused and confused, I agreed to write to him.?His words went with me in my heart over the long years afterwards, when marriage and babies and desperate times filled my days with everything but fame.

It was not until I began to have my iris articles published, a great many years later, and I had become a large frog in the small pond of the iris world, that I decided to finally try to locate Eston Roberts and fulfill his request.?I had no belief that he would even remember me after so many years.

My letter, and an article I had enclosed with it, were greeted with so much joy and appreciation, I was blown away.?Yes, he remembered me!?Fondly, I might add, which was even stranger.?He and I began a regular correspondence which has continued to this day.?It was Eston who had introduced me to the concept of metaphor, and metaphor is his hobbyhorse.?We have never been able to agree on the subject, but we have both enjoyed the joisting of our various ideas that clash so wildly.?Eston, I think, connected me to a past promise I had all but forgotten: I could have been a contender.

My Baldness

When I was in my senior year at the University of North Carolina, an odd thing began to happen to me.?My hair began to fall out.?This progressed throughout the summer as I finished my degree and married my boyfriend, Don.?By the time we had been married a few months, I was completely bald.?Not just the hair on my head, either, but eyebrows, eyelashes, all my body hair except the hair on my lower legs was suddenly gone.?The irony wasn’t lost on me that I still had to shave my legs, adding insult to injury. This was not the way I had hoped to begin my marriage.

I began seeing a dermatologist, who gave me steroid shots in my scalp that did nothing at all except cost me money.?I was told that I had allopecia universalis.?This basically meant I had lost all of my hair.?Nobody knew what caused it, and nobody knew how to cure it.?I was able, with the help of my grandmother, to buy a human hair wig that looked nice for a while but grew increasingly unattractive with time.

Soon after my marriage, I became pregnant with my first child. My labor with him was a long one, and very painful.?He was born in a very small hospital, and nurses were afraid of my baldness and did little to make me more comfortable.?As a result, when my husband first saw me, he asked me why they had put Vaseline all over my face.?It wasn’t Vaseline, of course, it was just oil from my skin that no nurse had bothered to offer to wipe away as I labored with my son’s birth.

My baldness continued, although some hair grew back in … and then fell out again.?I went through several bouts of this over the next few years as I had a second child, and then, finally, a third.?By this time enough hair had grown back that I could manage with a small hairpiece on top to cover the remaining bald spot.?My hair had grown in very fine and white, though, and I tried to dye it at home.?Big mistake!?The dye I chose was far too dark, and I looked terrible with dark brown hair. I am a natural blonde, but I was an odd looking brunette until my hair finally grew back and returned to its natural color.?For years afterward, my hair would fall out in small patches and I would fear the return of total baldness, but that never happened.

I can’t begin to tell you the emotional toll those years of baldness took on me.?Bad enough that I had the disfigurement of scoliosis, but adding baldness furthered destroyed my self-image as a woman.?I learned, over time, to just grit my teeth and accept what I couldn’t change, but it was a hard lesson. One of many in my life.