I didn't attend this wedding. In fact, for a long time, I didn’t even know Delma existed. And she had lived right across the street from me!
Based on this slide's date imprint, this wedding likely occurred in May of 1967, so, I would have been about 11½.
Delma Estrada is the eldest daughter of Alfredo and Filiverta Estrada (we knew them as Freddie and Bertha) who lived in a house across the street from us when I was growing up. Freddie had two brothers who also moved into the neighbourhood at about the same time (one next door to him and the other two doors down in the other direction) and many of the children growing up in their households were the same age as my brothers and I, as well as every other kid on the block, so many of us — to use a term from those days — ran around together.
It's very possible that Delma was already living on her own when the Estrada families moved onto Utah Street, which is why I wasn’t aware of her at the time. I think she was my brother Bob’s age (who is nine years older than I am), and he wasn’t living at home in 1967, so it’s very possible that she simply wasn’t around. Or… being eleven years old and all, I might have been too busy playing baseball or round-up (a more grown-up version of hide-and-seek) to have noticed her.
But as regards this photograph, Delma isn’t really the story. The story is her sister Olga.
Olga was a year older than I, and I knew her and would occasionally “play” with her around the neighbourhood. She was just another kid on the block, really, and since she was a girl, she didn’t take up much of my attention. And although she was Catholic, she attended public schools whereas I attended Catholic schools, so as we grew up, we saw less and less of each other on a daily basis.
Fast-forwarding to probably the summer of 1975… I would have been 19½ or so, and while washing my new-ish used 1974 Super Beetle on the street, I heard a voice (the sound of which I can still hear in my head… very Debra Winger-esque, raspy, squeaky) calling out to me and I turned to see Olga sitting on her porch swing, laughing at whatever it was she had just said.
I finished what I was doing and walked over to join her.
Quickly, we became the best of friends. We spent a lot of time together that summer, often just sitting on her porch swing talking and laughing. I shared my Martin Mull and Jackson Browne records with her and she tried unsuccessfully to turn me on to Uriah Heep.
She worked at St. Anthony Villa, a Catholic orphanage on the other side of town, and I was working at Commercial Aluminum Cookware (now Calphalon) when it was located in the heart of downtown Toledo. We each were making our ways in the world while still living under our respective parents’ roofs.
Indeed our friendship became very intense in the first couple of weeks as she intimated to me that she thought she might be pregnant. Until that point, I had no clue that she was seeing someone (he was a friend or roommate of her older sister Mina’s boyfriend), so I was rather crushed. It had been feeling like more than a friendship to me. I was seriously free-falling into love only to be provided an ACME anvil to cushion my landing.
She soon found out she wasn’t pregnant, and we went about business as usual on the friendship front. Unfortunately (for me), her relationship seemed to be developing. It was especially disconcerting since I often sat on my porch playing guitar, whence I could see when Steve or Dave or Thomas — or whatever the hell his name was* — came ‘round to pick her up. What further made things difficult for me were the stories she told about him… stories that painted the picture of a not-so-very-wonderful guy. It was killing me.
I can’t recall where in the chain of events it occurred, but we finally went out on what I believed was a date. (Maybe she’d stopped seeing what’s-his-name… maybe I thought she had… whatever.) I don’t recall much about the day except that we ended up at Inky's on the north side of Toledo. Inky’s is a family-run Italian restaurant near where my dad worked. As a family, we had pizza there once a month or so since my dad did work for, was friends with, and golfed regularly with the owner, Frank Incorvaia. Great people. Great food.
It was a nice night. We had fun. We went home. We kissed on her steps. I trembled.
I don’t know why, but we never went out again. I suppose that she sensed my inexperience. It might have been the third time in my life I’d kissed a girl, so no doubt there was no comparison between what transpired for her that night and, well, what almost gets one pregnant.
Still, I remained in pursuit, while at the same time being able to read the writing on the wall.
At the time, Commercial Aluminum Cookware shared a building with a few other businesses, one of which was National Super Service, a manufacturer of industrial vacuum cleaners. At some point, I’d heard that they were hiring and I suggested to Olga that she apply. She hadn’t been too happy at the orphanage and, I thought, wouldn’t it be great to work in the same building! She applied and was hired. And much to my chagrin, our relationship — whatever it was — began its decline (read: came to a screeching halt).
Not long after starting at NSS, she began seeing one of her co-workers, Jeff, a very quiet, likable guy. He and I didn’t interact all that much during working hours, but we were acquainted with each other. Sometime in 1977, they married. I had begun college by then and attended the wedding with my girlfriend, Lisa Salisbury, whom I’d met at school. I went to visit Olga and Jeff once after they’d been married and I think that was the last time I saw her. She eventually took a job with Jobst Institute (whose claim to fame was having manufactured space suits for NASA), in whose parking lot she died. Or so I was told. My mother mentioned it in passing to me over the phone while I was at school, so I never heard anything about what had happened. I’ve never had the opportunity to ask her sisters or cousins. When she was younger, she had injured her head in her high school swimming pool and I was led to believe that her death might have been somehow related to that. Her obituary noted she’d died after a long illness, so… cancer of some sort?
I still have a piece of fabric that she gave me. At the time, sewing colourful fabric around the bottoms of the legs of bell-bottom jeans was a thing. It was something she did. It’s the only tactile reminder I have of her.
A candid picture of herself that she had given to me wore out years ago from being in my wallet, but just as I am able to hear her voice still, I am still able to see that picture of her beautifully big-toothed smiling face. It is a face and a picture that I have forever tied to Jackson Browne's "Fountain Of Sorrow"... from his all-too-hitting-close-to-home Late For The Sky record.
I think of Olga every October 13th, her birthday. Until I found the above high school photo, I conjured what I’d remembered in the long-lost photo I’d kept in my wallet for so long.
A few years after she died, I had a dream in which she spoke to me. "Don't worry," she said, "everything is just fine."
Now the things that I remember seem so distant, so small
Though it hasn't really been that long a time
What I was seeing wasn't what was happening at all
Although for a while, our path did seem to climb
— Jackson Browne (Fountain Of Sorrow)
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*Thinking now about this, I'm pretty sure it was George. (ptp, 2013)
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