1998

A Conversation with Elizabeth

Turkle Shery 1996

Introduction

Early in ’98 I unexpectedly received an email from Elizabeth who I hadn’t heard from for many years.  After receiving her email, we started to regularly exchange emails. The following are those emails that we exchanged from February of 1998 to March of 2000 then off and on in the following years.  At the beginning I only saved the emails that I received from her and did not save the ones I sent but later I started saving the ones I sent as well.  A few weeks after capturing all our emails into this document, I sent the document to her and she surprised me by saying she had printed copies of many, but not all, of our emails and what I sent her filled in some of the gaps, including the initial email she sent.  I was amazed that she had printed out the emails, but she had saved them for over twenty years. She then graciously offered to send me a copy of all the emails she had and a few days later I received a package in the mail containing an inch high stack of paper of the emails. I then scanned and converted them to text and incorporated them into this document.

Prologue

For those that haven’t been reading my story, a summary… (links to story highlighted)

I first met Elizabeth back in 1974 while going to zoology class at the University of Florida, and before the class was over, we were dating, well more or less.  The more I talked to Elizabeth the more I liked her writing in my journal, “I’m freaked out over Elizabeth. If dreams come true, then….”   But just when I thought things looked promising, she leaves with another man for a month in the Dominica. I was crushed but upon her return we again started seeing each other but on rocky grounds and her breaking my heart more than once, and once left her only to turn around and go back. Things had grown from bad to worse and even though she staying at my place, we hardly spoke to each other. After getting a new job offer, on the Bicentennial Fourth of July in 1976 that I left Gainesville and Elizabeth behind and moved to Melbourne Florida. Over the next couple of  years I saw her a couple of times when visiting my family in Gainesville and we exchanged a few letters but that grew less and less frequent and then not at all for many years.

Then in 1983 I encountered Elizabeth, and strangely enough, again going to class but this time at the University of Central Florida. The last time I heard from Elizabeth was a letter in 1985 when I was living on Easy Street in Melbourne Florida. She was living in Tampa Florida, attending the University of South Florida where she was working on a PH.D. program in Clinical Psychology and mentioned she was looking at going to other schools including one in Mississippi.

1985 card from Elizabeth

Thirteen years later, in February of 1998 I was working at Bell Atlantic Video Systems, a division of the Bell Atlantic phone company that was intending to offer television and streaming movie services to their telephone customers.  I was hired to help design and build the video server portion of their system but then Bell Atlantic merged with the New York phone company NYNEX.  NYNEX also had a video service they were working on so with the merger the video systems groups from the two companies were merged and as a result there were many layoffs of staff in our Bell Atlantic group.  I had seen the writing on the wall for several months and had been looking for a new job and was just about to accept one when I received an email at work, it was from Elizabeth.

 

Where in the world is Larry Mixson