Back in Santa Fe for the summer, Blake and I moved into a rambling adobe house in a small compound off of Canyon Rd. That summer between Junior and Senior year turned out to be an emotional roller coaster that resulted in Blake’s* and my break-up in the first month of our senior year, and I asked Christy if she could recommend me for house sitting jobs to her friends. I couldn’t afford much for rent, since I already had paid for my room on campus, but I didn’t feel like living where I would constantly be reminded of all of the friendships that had been destroyed in the wake of Blake’s and my relationship, and I didn’t want to see Blake any more than I had to. She offered to rent their guest quarters to me for a small sum. It was mutually advantageous since they were traveling a lot. My dad agreed to help me pay for it, and also offered to come and beat up Blake. I accepted the money.
Looking back at that period in my life from here, I can see that I was a mess. This year, and the years that followed, were full of missteps and poor judgement calls on my part.
Although not consciously trying to become somebody else, that is what I was doing. I had always been a granola girl, crunchy, exactly what one would expect of a Colorado girl. I was an athlete, outdoorsy, and natural. I wore my hair long, often in a French braid, wore no make-up, and donned colorful casual clothing. I did not smoke, drank very little, and had been a dedicated student. Blake was my male equivalent, or so I thought, my destined match; some said we looked like we belonged together, which I mistakenly believed meant that we did.
The demise of our relationship had not been sudden; it likely began to erode the day it started in the first week of our freshman year, but it only became obvious to me in the first semester of our Junior year for reasons I did not understand until many years later. Blake ended up transferring to Annapolis for a semester, ostensibly to figure things out away from me. We had only half-broken things off though, and I went to see him over spring break, during which time we decided to make another go of it. In retrospect, that was a huge mistake. We spent the following summer tormenting each other with petty jealousies, and then the dam broke. At first it was a trickle of leaked lies, secrets that I was among the last to know, and then it was a flood.
After that, I broke it off for good. I had probably read one too many Greek tragedies at that point, pre-disposing me to dramatic expressions of mourning. I cut my hair short, started wearing a lot of black, and began my new less-than-healthy lifestyle as a smoker. I moved from one unsuccessful relationship to another. I did everything to distance myself from who I had been with him. I felt confused and angry.
In this condition, living in the guest quarters at the Ehrlichmans’ turned out to be less than ideal. Unlike when I was staying there as a house sitter, John and Christy were home a lot. I felt like they were too aware of me and my comings and goings. Christy was offended by my newfound habit of smoking, and had made it clear that she didn’t want me doing it anywhere in the vicinity of the house. I had also become a bit of a partier, and came home at odd hours of the night, or didn’t, and I did not always come home alone. John and Christy worried about me, which was something I didn’t really want. I felt cramped and watched over, and I sensed that they felt intruded upon, so I decided to move back on campus for my last semester.
One highpoint of living there that semester, was when my mother came to visit and got to meet John in person. They seemed to genuinely like each other, and why not? They had so much in common: a couple of years apart in age, both had five children, each divorced, both had lived through a lot of the same things in their lives. The age-set effect is a powerful cultural binder. In the end, meeting John, and talking to him humanized him for her just as it had for me; she shifted her perspective on the Watergate criminals. Good men can become bad men, especially ambitious men.
After moving out, I didn’t work for John and Christy very much. I was too busy with my senior thesis, and all of the other activities of my last semester, but I remained on good terms with them. I invited John up to campus when I learned that a prosecutor from the Watergate hearings was going to be on campus to discuss Executive Privilege. John wanted to be there. He and I sat together at the event in the front row. When the speaker came in, he and John met eyes and nodded in recognition at one another.
John’s presence at this event changed it from one in which a man on the “correct side,” the prosecutor, would be talking to an audience that completely agreed with everything that he would say to an event that forced the audience to seriously consider alternative views. Namely, we were forced to examine executive privilege in the context of Watergate from the perspective of the accused and convicted. Nixon repeatedly used cries of executive privilege to prevent the testimony of his closest counselors, not to protect them, but to protect his office. Throughout the discussion, John was courteous, even gracious, in his interactions with the college’s guest. Many people later said that he had really made it a great moment for them.
John and Christy were there for me in meaningful ways throughout the remainder of the year, inviting me over for dinner, and even attending my graduation ceremony, something my own father did not do. After graduation, I moved to Toronto to live with my new love, Will*, but that move was short-lived, and I returned to Santa Fe before the summer was over. Upon returning, I stayed with a guy I had met during my last semester, a handsome alum named Tom* who was several years older than I. I ran into him after I got back into town, and mentioned to him that I was looking for a place to live, and he offered a spot at his place. He was living in a cabin up in an Arroyo near the college. It was a wonderful place, but it had no electricity and no heat, so with winter coming, we were forced to find someplace else to live within a couple of months.
I asked John and Christy if we could rent their guest quarters. They agreed to it, and so we moved in and played house there briefly. I was not in love with Tom, and he turned out to be untrustworthy in some fundamental ways. I fled Santa Fe, seeking refuge with my mother in Denver, leaving Tom behind living at Christy’s and John’s. When he finally moved out of the Ehrlichman’s a few months later he left their place a mess. I ended up owing them money, and they never forgave me for leaving them in the lurch. That was the end of my friendship with them. I tried to make amends, but I never succeeded.
Christy and John ended up divorcing in the early nineties, and John moved to Atlanta. He remarried. I had completely lost touch with both he and Christy by that point. And then in 1999, two years after my own father died, I heard that he also had died at the same age as my father, 73. I felt sad that I had lost touch with him. He was not a great man, but he was a man; he had his flaws, just as I have mine. He was my friend for a time, and I will always cherish that.
I leave you, and this story with this quotation from John that I found in his NYT Obituary, a lesson for current times, children, and councelors:
”I abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to somebody else, and if I had any advice for my kids, it would be never — to never, ever — defer your moral judgments to anybody: your parents, your wife, anybody.” [NYT, 1999]
THE END
Note: This story is a recollection of events that took place nearly four decades ago. In creating this narrative, I have constructed dialogue that approximates real conversations that I might have had.
*Pseudonym
