This was the weekend after Teresa Young, my high school girlfriend, and I graduated from Pine Bluff High School and went with my family on Memorial Day weekend to Greers Ferry lake. That's us water skiing above, an unfocused photo because it was taken from the shaky speedboat pulling us. My mother is in the middle photo, walking to the boat dock from the lake house, and Teresa and my brothers Arch and Greg are floating in inner tubes near the boat dock in the top photo. I don't have any other photos of Teresa, and only had a few when we were together. My dad took these photos (they're slides, actually). Teresa and I managed to stay together, with a few short-term breakups, from October 1970 until about a month after this photo was taken. I went to work as a copy editor for the local afternoon newspaper, the Pine Bluff Commercial (a summer job), right after this Memorial Day weekend was over. The hours were 7:30 to 5:30 Mon-Fri. Even with a full hour for lunch, this was nine hours a day (overtime pay was just part of the job). I also had to work every other Saturday from 3-11 pm, since the Sunday paper was of course a morning paper. During the week, I hated getting up at 6:30 or so, and my having to go to bed early made it difficult for Teresa and I to stay together. We broke up at the end of June and got back together in August, after my job at the Commercial ended. But in September I had to go to Hendrix College, 75 miles away, and Teresa and I only stayed together a few more months. There's more to the story that occurred almost 20 years later, but this isn't the place to tell it.
