My wifes modeling career

[jdviole2]

Just a short note for today. Two months ago today we were getting very near the end and I'm finding it hard to write much. To write I need to remember and remembering, today especially, is getting to me. Anyway. Just a few facts about Helena and then on to the photos. Helena loved collecting things. She didn't try to create complete collections but rather collected things she liked. I told her the word eclectic and she fell in love with it. She always worried that the way she decorated our house was messy. There was a bit of everything on the walls and in her curio cabinets. But then she learned the word and from then on would tell people that our home decor showed our eclectic tastes. She collected stuffed animals. She collected hand painted Russian Laquer boxes. She collected Netsuke, Japanese decorative carvings made of ivory (only legal forms) or wood, or bone. She collected Pewter figurines. Usually she liked anything tiny and intricately carved or painted. She loved coffee (I hate it). Though she like so much cream and sugar that I used to tell people to give her a cup of hot cream and add a tiny splash of coffee. She loved pastries, as long as chocolate was involved in their making. She loved beautiful exotic flowers, despite both of our inabilities to grow any ourselves. We both had the original "black" thumbs. We could kill plastic plants. She didn't like birds much. She got attacked by some birds at our house when she took our new kitten outside. The birds dove on her trying to kill the cat. She loved cats. She learned to love dogs after I came along. She loved the sun and hated it when it was cloudy. (I hate sun and love the clouds). She learned to love Roller Coasters, again thanks to me. As I mentioned in another post she hated snakes. She handpainted porcelain figurines. Her work was very precise and beautiful. She had a good sense of color and fabric. She did not like to drive. She had a drivers license and I bought her a car for her 40th birthday but she never really liked to drive. She was a good driver and on our trips I let her do a lot of the interstate driving. She didn't like driving in towns or cities. She loved to swim. Pools, lakes, ponds it didn't matter to her. I bought us masks and swimfins and she really learned to love skindiving. She wasn't a drinker but would occasionally have a sweet drink, like a Grasshopper, or some other kind of frozen drink. She didn't like wine but an occasional drink of Asti Spumanti would go down good. She loved to snack on chips and dips. She tried knitting and quilting but it was never a passion with her. She like to visit museums. She could appreciate many different types of art. She was a member of the "I don't know what is good but know what I like" school of art appreciation. She like a lot of the old masters and many impressionists. For some reason she loved Grandma Moses work. She loved hiking, as many of the photos I have posted show. She liked roller skating and ice skating. She loved sledding. She loved helping me with home improvement projects. She loved being married. Enough. Today pictures start with Helena striking a "captain morgan" pose on a Colorado mountain trail in the mid 80's. The second photo is a resting shot again from a mountain trail (wearing that beautiful blue outfit). The third shot is Helena at Knotts Berry Farm in California in the late 70's. (The temptation is to say "making an ass of herself" but I won't). The next three pictures were all taken in the late 70's also. The first shows Helena at the Farmers Market in LA. Examining all the fresh fruits. The next is also the Farmers Market but at a more favored type of stall for her, the sweets. Note the pleased expression. The last shot is from Sea World and is Helena enjoying one of our favorite pursuits, eating.

[jdviole2]

I spent most of today reviewing and cleaning the remaining pictures of Helena that I have. A lot of those pictures are mostly landscape pictures with a small image of her to give scale to what we were seeing. I have eliminated a lot of those as far as posting goes. I'm afraid they would not mean much to most of you who are exploring this thread. Also I am getting low on stories that I can tell that would be of interest to you. There is still a possiblity of finding more interesting photos of Helena (including possibly nude or semi nude photos) but I will not be able to look for them for a while. Anyway there are about 7 days of photos left and then I will be taking a long (hopefully not permanent) break from posting. Before I talk about todays pictures just a couple of words on beauty. When I speak of beauty I am talking about that quality that inspires you to gasp out loud when you see a photo or video of some person. Each of us has our own idea of what is truly beautiful. My idea of beauty may or may not track with your idea of beauty. As far as I see it there are three types of "beautiful" people. There are those that are beautiful in still pictures but lose that quality when you see them move and talk in person or on video. There are those that are beautiful in person or on video but lost that beauty when their image is frozen into a still picture. Then there are those who keep their beauty no matter whether still or in motion. In my opinion, in my "eye of the beholder", Helena fit into the third catagory. I found her as beautiful in still photo form as I did in person. I regret that I have no video of her. Her one appearance on local television occured before we had video taping equipment at home. The only moving pictures I have of her are two short (1-3 seconds each) snips of her in a 8mm film I made (both nude scenes). I have lost that film and hopefully have not thrown it away. I will be looking. Selecting pictures for posting here over the last two months has brought all the beauty I had known back to the front of my brain. It has been a great joy and also achingly sad. I had grown used to seeing her through her illness and it has been wonderful seeing her youth again with "older wiser" eyes. So lets look at some more pictures. I have selected and then rejected our first photo many times over the last two months. It doesn't show her face and is a pretty small image of her but for some reason I keep coming back to it. Anyway it is a kind of butt shot. Here she is walking into the Crater Of Diamonds park in Arkansas. The next is a resting shot from the early 80's in Colorado. Note the Denver hat she is wearing. It is one of the things of hers that I have not removed from our bedroom. I have left it hanging just where she left it after the last vacation we had. Number three is another rest from the late 70's this time also from Colorado. I really wish that could have been a nude. But even clothed I love it. Number four is the shot just after Helena drinking from the "goat skin canteen". I posted a picture of her drinking before and this is just after. The face she is making is due to the fact that the plastic liner of the bag gave a very nasty taste to the water. The next picture is Helena in Monument Valley in Arizona. Most people hire a native American guide to drive them down in a four wheeler but I told we could make it in our car. Well we did but it was the hardest drive I have ever had. We had to balance on two ridges with two foot ruts between them. We had to balance on those ridges over a winding road from the valley floor to the top while being passed by the four wheelers. Man I caught hell for doing that. Never again. The last shot is a contented Helena in a hotel room after a good day in California, also in the late 70's.

[jdviole2]

As I have mentioned before we went to two Worlds Fairs. One was in New Orleans and one in Vancouver BC. The fairs themselves were what you might call typical. Pavilions from many countries and states. Lots of cultural items. In New Orleans we did get to see the space shuttle Enterprise. That was pretty neat. In an earlier post there is a picture of Helena with the Enterprise. While we were there in New Orleans though the top thing for Helena was a visit to the Cafe Du Monde to get some beignets (square fried dough covered in powdered sugar). The beignets are served hot and even though I don't like coffee it was worth the stop. I wasn't sure if I would get Helena to leave the cafe or not. As I remember we skipped lunch that day since we were still filled up with beignets. We also visited some of the classic sights in the city (cemetaries, French Quarter). In addition we stopped several places on the way down and back to see things. It was our first long driving vacation and we had a great time. For the fair in Vancouver we flew. Jets on the way up. On the return trip from Vancouver to Seattle we flew a small turboprop airplane (seated 8) that made stops at several fishing camps on the way down. It was Helena's first flight in a small aircraft (and with a young woman pilot, no less) and she really loved that. We didn't have time to see much of Vancouver itself but had a really good time at the fair. The night before we first visited the fair we saw an interview on TV with the head of the fair. He catching a lot of flac because the fair wasn't making the kind of money people thought it should. During the interview he mentioned that the one thing that really bothered him was how the people were leaving trash everywhere and not cleaning up after themselves. So the next day we were having lunch in this dining area when I looked up and saw him coming down the aisle. I heard Helena say under her breath "trash". She quickly put all our lunch garbage in a pile in front of her. I called out how much we were enjoying the fair. He stopped seeing the trash ready for us to dispose of. He asked us where we were from and then asked what we had planned for the evening. When we said just the fair and the fireworks he asked if we would like tickets to the nights show. (Full disclosure the show was Liberace. We were not fans but more than willing to see a free show.) He gave us the tickets and went on his way. That night we showed up at the venue for the show. We showed our tickets to an usher and she led us down to the front center and seated us in a VIP box seat. It was pretty cool that night but we didn't have to worry the box was heated. It was fun watching people trying to guess just who the hell we were and why we deserved that sort of treatment. We never expected such great seats as a freebie. Helena maintained that it was her clearing up of the trash that cinched it for us. I couldn't argue that. After the show we rode on some of the rides. They had a parachute jump ride and we got there just before it closed. The ride lifted you up in a seat and then dropped you from the top with a fake parachute letting you float back down. We had been married for over 10 years by this time but still knew how to use the darkness and solitude of an amusement park ride. We made out. You got lifted twice for your ticket. We finished the two lifts and were still in a lip lock when we hit the bottom the second time. There was no one else waiting to ride so the operator grinned at us and sent us up again. We got two more rides before it was time to leave. My lips were a little sore by the time we started for the place we were staying. One other funny thing happened that Helena used to talk about. I have an ear for dialects. If I am around someone for a day or so I start to speak using their accent and manner of speech. (When I was in italy I toured around Europe and was talking to a man in Switzerland one day and he told me that he knew I was from Naples because of my accent.) So we were at a bus stop waiting for the bus back to the house we rented and three 20 something people from Vancouver sat down. They were going on about how they hated the Americans that were flooding into "their" town for the fair. They were disturbingly against Americans. The turned and asked us if we didn't agree. Helena didn't say a word but I adopted their point of view (hey at 3 to 1 against I wasn't going to start a fight). They talked to us for about 5 minutes before our bus came. We were back in the house before Helena told me that I sounded just like the three of them. Without thinking about it I copied their speech patterns and accents. They never caught on that we were from America. So that was the "fair" story. Here are todays pictures. The first picture is Helena at rest on the way to Blue Lake her favorite hike in the Rocky Mountains. The hike starts a 10,000 feet so before long you are above the tree line and into the tundra. The next picture is Helena ready for the weather. As I mentioned in an earlier post sometimes we encountered snow. She didn't let that stop her though. She never let anything stop her. The third picture is Helena raking leaves outside of our first house. Number four shows how Helena would do her best to try to improve the parks we visited. Here she is propping up a rock that was trying to fall on the trail. The next picture is similar to one already posted of Helena feeding a duck. Though she didn't like birds much this duck was so nice that she relented and spent some time feeding him. The last shot is Helena going up the front steps at her parents house. This was in 1975, we had been married less than a year when this was taken. She is wearing one of my favorite of her outfits.

[jdviole2]

I was reading a correspondence from a friend last night and something he said triggered something in me. He was talking about how the sight of a picture would trigger memories. That got me thinking of how my memory works. I was in the computer field and I always relate my brain to a computer. I store and retrieve memories just like a computer does. Sometimes I seem to have the memories locked away and need a password to access them. That is the picture, or sound, or smell, whatever that my friend mentioned. That password will then unlock memories that have been locked away, and those memories will unlock more until my brain is almost overloaded. That has happened a lot lately while searching all the pictures of Helena. Things I had long forgotten have come back. As an example. I had forgotten the days that she was taking some medicine and it caused her to gain a huge amount of weight. I found one of the few pictures I have of her from that time and it brought it all back. She was ashamed of the way she looked even though it wasn't her letting herself go and gaining the weight, but the side effect of the medication. I have posted that as the first picture for today, it was in 1985 taken in California. This is a picture that she would NOT have wanted me to post. However I have also posted the proof that it was only the medication that caused the bloating. The second picture shows her less than a year later after she stopped the medication and the "bloat" went away. This was at the Worlds Fair in Vancouver in 1986. (she still thought she looked fat). From then on she was very concious of her weight and would try to make sure she posed in such a way to appear thin in any picture. The most potent memory passwords for me though are the photos taken by Helena's father. I had thought her Graduation Picture had been taken by a professional photographer, based on the pose. However yesterday I found a bunch of old pictures of her and realized that her dad had taken all the graduation pictures. The third picture is from the set he took for her graduation. That was in 1970. She was 19 (due to her illness when she was a girl she lost a year and graduated late). After we met in 1973 she had her dad take a large number of pictures (for me). She only sent me a few and some of the others I have never seen. The fourth photo is one of those. The first time I saw this picture was yesterday. I fell in love with her all over again. She was 22 when this was taken. I had also forgotten how many "clothed" photos I had taken of her during her nude posing sessions. The fifth is another of those pictures, from 1975. I don't remember taking the last picture at all. It was probably in 76 or 77. She was dressed to go out somewhere. Helena never wore much makeup. I don't remember her ever wearing as much lipstick as she has on in this picture. Seeing so many unseen or unremembered pictures in one day did overload my brain. I think I will need to be careful not to find too many "passwords" for a few days. I will have to be careful of the music I listen to in case I accidently play one of her favorites. One of the first things I did when I started to clean the house was to dispose of her leftover perfume. I think the smell of that might just be too much to bear. Yesterday I turned to her chair to ask her a question. Felt like a damn fool. I'm finding the trick to the whole cleaning thing is to leave enough of her in the house so it is still her house, but not so much that I get overwhelmed when I enter a room. Its a delicate balance. I know that this will change some as time passes but she will never completely be gone. She meant too much to me for that to ever happen. This has been a kind of a rambling post, sorry about that. Tomorrow I will try to be back with some more concrete memories to share with you.

[jdviole2]

One of the places we visited was Sea World in California. This was in the mid 1970's before it gained the bad reputation it has today. Helena loved seeing the dolphins and the killer whales. She loved the penguins and almost everything else there. The only thing she really hated were all the seagulls that were flying around. At many of the exhibits they had vending machines that dispensed cups of sardines (raw) or other small fish (dead). You could feed many of the different animals by hand. One exhibit was some smaller walrus. She had been feeding them for a while and then decided to see if she could make them sit up by holding the fish up out of their reach. She did that and was very surprised when a one legged seagull swooped down and took the fish right out of her fingers. She wanted to scream out loud, but of course we were in public so she didn't. But that pretty much ended the animal feeding for the day. We went to a tank with a couple of dolphins. They would come up to the edge of the tank and you could reach out and pet them. They did some tricks too like standing on their tails and scooting backwards across the tank. The would attract quite a crowd. Little did we know they were planning a trick of their own. Helena was in the front row right next to the tank wall. They did their tricks and then swam right up to the edge of the tank. One dipped its nose into the water and splashed water all over the front row, Helena included. Now I have a big problem. I need to laugh, big time. Come on it was funny. Unfortunately Helena did not see the humor in the situation. I was being expected to show great compassion for her. I handled it pretty well, I thought. When we go her somewhat dried off she turned, looked at me, and said "well go ahead. Laugh. You know you want to". Guess I didn't handle it as well as I thought. Sea World was not the only place we had problems with birds either. When we would hike in the Rocky Mountains and stop for lunch we would be assulted by mountain Jays. They are very agressive birds, fairly large, and not afraid of humans at all. We would be eating crackers and peanutbutter and I would hold a piece of cracker over my head and let a jay fly down and take out of my fingers on the wing. I would also put a piece of cracker on top of my head and let the Jay swoop down and take it off my head on the fly. She hated every minute when I did that. She was afraid I was going to get bit or scratched. Never happened. I would also lay back and put a cracker on my chest and let the chipmunks come up and sit on me stomach and eat. Helena was somewhat afraid of any wild animals we encountered. (though most of them were pretty used to humans). The only really "wild animal" encounter she had was close to where we live. We were hiking around a lake just outside of town. At the far end of the trail where it bordered on a big stand of trees we saw a "teenage" deer. I don't know if it had been someones pet or not but when we stopped to watch, it walked over to us and let us both pet it. When we walked off it didn't follow us but it was a pretty neat thing to see. We came close to what could have been a bad encounter once in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We were in Custer State Park where they had suffered a bad prairie fire the year before. We hiked over to see the damage and were on the other side of a large hill, on the trail, out of sight of anyone when we heard something coming down the trail after us. When we looked back behind us we were really shocked to see a full grown bull Bison walking down the trail. Bison are not friendly animals and you are not supposed to get near them. Nobody mentioned them getting near us. I told Helena to move uphill off the trail about 10 meters and squat down. We both sat unmoving as the very large mammal moved past us. I would guess it was about 2 meters tall and probably 650 kilos or more. It was scary but basically he ignored us though he kept his eye on us as he passed. That same trip to Custer SP we ran into a herd of wild Donkeys. In fact they got between me and the car and settled down for lunch. I had to walk through the herd to get back to the car. Helena was worried for me but all they did was grab at my coat looking for goodies, apparently they get fed a lot of junk food by visitors. We also got to see a herd of wild Elk in Colorado once but were able to do that while eating breakfast in our motel room. They had come down out of the mountains and invaded the parking lot. By the time we were ready to leave for the day they had gone. We had lots of run ins with wild animals on our vacations but thankfully none of them ever turned out really bad. So for our pictures today. First off another "eating lunch on the trail" shot from Colorado probably in the early 80's. Note Helena is once more eating a pudding cup. In the next picture she is standing under a large variety of cactus in San Diego's Balboa Park. This was on the "skinny dip" trip. The third shot is Helena in her parents kitchen with the lamb cake she and her mom made for Easter. This was in 1974. Next another of her father's pictures. This one with her in a fluffy robe (I doubt she is nude under the robe, but if you want to imagine that go ahead, I am). The next picture is Helena at our friends time share condo in Arkansas. This was in the 80's. She had just finished telling me to put the camera away and stop taking pictures. That might explain her expression. The last picture for today is another with the hat. From 1975.

[jdviole2]

During that three week period between our first meeting and my proposal Helena and I talked constantly (OK between the times when our lips had better things to do). One of the things she told me was how she had always wanted a cute nickname when she was little. The fathers of the other girls at school called their kids Princess, or Sweetie. Helena's dad (and he meant this as affectionate, he just wasn't very good at it) called her "barn smell". He never knew but it really hurt her. I asked her what name she wanted to be called and she said I would have to decide. Well I couldn't decide on just one. So to me if she wasn't Helena (or Helen) then she was Princess, or Kitten, or Pumpkin. I think I finally made up for all the years of "barn smell". In a very early post I mentioned that for Christmas one year, at her request, I bought Helena a toolbox and set of tools. Here's why. When we bought our first house, like most newlyweds, we didn't have a lot of money. Unlike a lot of newlyweds though we didn't want to buy an expensive house. We got what is called either a "starter" home, or a "handymans dream" or a "fixer upper". All of those terms mean there is a lot of crap that needs to be done. I have limited skills with tools. My best quality as a handyman is that my repairs hold. They are sturdy, but they are definately not pretty. I repaired a sink drain once and couldn't keep it from leaking. I ended up with a ball of Plumbers Putty the size of a softball around the joint. It didn't leak anymore because I think the water evaporated before it could penetrate the thickness of putty. Like I said sturdy but not pretty. Helena figured that for a lot of things she could do better than me. Plus she wouldn't have to wait until I got home to get something fixed. So she asked for the tools. She became very good at home repairs. She would tackle any and everything except the electrical stuff. She would not replace a switch or outlet. That was OK though since my area of expertise happened to be electrical. We were a good match. I very seldom had to do any repair work in the house, or outside of it either. She handled both. Very occasionally I would come home and the tools would be laying out on the table. I knew then that one of three things was going to happen. Either I would show her how to do the repair she was having trouble with, I would make the repair myself, or we would look up the number of a plumber,carpenter to do the work. When I would show her how to fix something she would never forget and could do the same kind of repair next time herself, and much better than I could. Before too long some of the other people in the neighborhood were asking her to come over to fix things for them. She loved that. The best part of that first house was that it was in such bad shape that anything we did to it, no matter how inept the job, was better than what was there originally. She loved every part of repair work except the plumbing. She could do it great she just didn't like doing it. When we moved into our new home the only stipulation she made of me was that I was not to EVER try to repair the plumbing. I was allowed to shut the water off at the main if there was a leak but I always had to call a plumber to fix things. I made the concession gladly. It was funny sometimes to pick up the shopping list and see mixed in with the butter, milk, and bread the entry for a 1/4 inch open ended crescent wrench. My Princess/Kitten/Pumpkin was a hell of a repair man. Today's pictures start with Helena somewhere in LA in the late 70's. The next shot is one taken by Helena's dad in 1974. The next shot is Helena at Disneyland in 1976. Another shot of the Easter Lamb. She did the decorating herself and seems pretty proud of it. It was her first attempt at anything like that. The next shot is in downtown LA in the late 70's. The last picture is another from her dad. He was trying a "fashion" shot and I don't think Helena looks particularly comfortable with the pose. (Still looks pretty to me though)

[jdviole2]

Helena loved to visit zoos. We tried to see the zoo in any city we visited. We saw the LA the San Diego the Little Rock, and the Henry Doorly zoo (in Omaha NE). She didn't have any special animals, she loved seeing them all. She did find some she really attached herself to though. In Omaha they have a walk thru rain forest. There are two levels an upper level looking down on the animals and a main walk thru at ground level. Of course all the animals are behind descrete screens or across moats so that you don't have access to them. While we were on the main level walk she stopped, with her mouth wide open. When I looked where she was pointing I saw a Golden Lion Tamarin clinging to a tree trunk just off the main trail, not behind glass or screen. (By the way the trees are made of wire mesh and concrete and painted to resemble trees. You can't tell the difference) Tamarin's are small primates. The Golden Lion Tamarin is aptly named. It has a mane around its neck and looks like a small male lion. She didn't try to pet it or anything just admired it. When we got to the end of the trail we found a docent and told her about seeing the tamerin. She told us that they couldn't keep him in his enclosure. No matter how they secured the door (short of a padlock) he would figure out how to open the door. She asked us if he had bothered us or rushed us. We told her no and she said as far as she knew he never had bothered any guests. Helena talked about that many times after that and always when the subject of zoo's came up she brought out that story. In the different zoo's we visited she was able to get close to many animals, apes, Orangutan's, lions, tigers, and Giraffe's. Again in Omaha she got to feed a Giraffe. They were in an outside enclosure and would come up to the fence and stick their heads over. She got a handful of grass and held it out and the Giraffe took it from her hand. I found out later that when she was a girl the family visited a zoo in Chicago and she got to pet a Giraffe's tongue. It was a lot of fun just watching her interact with the animals. She looked like a little girl, her eyes wide open and bright, and a huge grin on her face. She never refused a trip to the zoo. In her last month alive we were planning things to do and the one thing she mentioned was that she wanted to go to the zoo again. Of course, she never made it. I'm not sure if I could go to a zoo anymore. I'm afraid all I would see would be her and not the animals. I must have some pictures of her somewhere with the animals but I haven't found them yet. I do have a picture of her and the giraffe when she was a kid and am posting that as my first picture of today. She would have been about 8 when that picture was taken. The second picture is yet another Helena resting on the trail picture. Probably from the early 80's. The next picture shows another clothed shot from one of her nude photo sessions. This would have been in 1975. Next another of the pictures taken by Helena's dad in 1970 from her graduation shoot. A word about those pictures. I have been unable to find the negatives for those shots. The scans are from very small 2 X 3 inch prints. He used very heavy paper and they are badly curled and creased. I took out the curl with heavy weights on top during the scanning but can not do much with the creases. The next picture is another of his shots of her from late 1973. If you look close you can see her engagement ring. I didn't have time to buy one before I returned to Naples so I bought one there. It is a 1/2 carat diamond solitare in a twisted european setting. I bought it on the Nato Base in Naples. When we went in to get it sized it drew quite a bit of attention from the jeweler. She told him where I bought it. He pulled me aside and asked what I had payed for it. When I told him, all he would say was that I should get it insured for 5 times that amount. The last picture is another one taken before we went out (sometime in 1975 or 6).

[robert368]

She is quite the cutie, you are very lucky to have spent time with her. Really like your tribute

[jdviole2]

Helena loved to shop for clothes. She had what I considered very good taste as far as knowing what she would look good in. Though she never trusted her own feelings on that subject. She always wanted to have someone along to help her decide what to buy, if anything. She and her mom would go out almost every Saturday and go shopping. She very seldom bought anything but it was a nice outing for she and her mom after we got married. I didn't mind since it gave me an afternoon to be by myself. Unfortunately her mom died at a very young age in 1979. Helena asked me if I would be willing to come along on the shopping trips and take her mom's place as advisor. I only had two conditions. The first was that we weren't going shopping every Saturday. We had to do other things too (like the Zoo for instance). The second condition was that I was going to be brutal in my opinions. Her mom would say that a lot of things looked good on Helena and then sit patiently by as she tried the same things on over and over, switching back and forth until she finally decided what, if anything, she wanted to buy. I didn't think I could stand that (unending love or not). We put it to the test quite early. Not long after her mom died she wanted to go shopping. I think she missed her mom very much and wanted to try to relive something. I reminded her of my second condition and she assured me that it would be OK with her. So she is in the changing room with a bunch of clothes and I am waiting outside with a sales woman. Now the role of the saleswoman is to say that everything looks good on a person, the more expensive the better it looks. Helena comes out in an outfit that really didn't suit her at all. She asked how she looked. The saleswoman said it looked good on her and I told her it made her look like an overfed hippo. Helena goes back in to change and I notice the saleswoman is staring daggers at me. I told her, "hey I just saved us two hours of agony". Helena came out a few more times and finally I told her that the outfit looked really good on her. That outfit became one of her favorites. She told me later that my appraising style took a bit of getting used to but she liked it, and liked my taste. I got so that I could buy clothes for her on my own (blouses and such like, I never bought pants or things that really needed trying on) and we never had to take any of them back. Helena liked mostly casual clothes. Jeans, T-shirts, things like that. At home she wore mostly jogging suits. But when she got dressed up to go out somewhere she did make herself look extrememly nice. As I mentioned in an earlier post she didn't wear much makeup but just enough to accent what she had and make up for what she thought she didn't. I was always proud to be seen with her whenever, and where ever. For myself I don't care how I look. Striped pants and polka dot shirts would be fine with me. Helena always worried how I would look and picked out the clothes she wanted me to wear. Don't get me wrong I know what goes together, and what looks best on me, I just don't care. I think some of our friends were a little disappointed in me at her funeral when they saw how I dressed her. I put her in jeans and her all time favorite T shirt. She wouldn't have looked good in her good clothes anymore anyway. She had lost so much weight and the clothes themselves were so out of style. I hope and I think I know she would have approved of my choices. I have a matching T shirt that I am putting away so I will have it to wear when my time comes. That way we can go together. (Even though some friends were disappointed many more of them thought the jeans and shirt more than appropriate and laughed when they saw them). Our first picture today shows the problem with candid photography. It shows Helena at the trial garden again shot from a distance without her knowing. Wouldn't you know she closed her eyes just as I shot the picture. In todays digital world I would just have shot again but when you had to wait for the film to be developed the time had long passed. Anyway I love the top and wanted to see another shot of it. The second picture is Helena at Disneyland in the late 70's. The third picture is from her dad taken in 1974. I like most of his shots and hope I find the negatives soon, since the prints don't really do her justice. The fourth photo is Helena resting in Colorado in the early 80's. I like watching her hair style change over the vacations. She really only had two styles. One was long and one was short. She fixed her hair in many different ways depending on how it fell that day. The fifth picture is also from her dad in 1974. The last shot is similiar to ones posted before. From California.

[jdviole2]

Helena dreaded her 40th birthday. Not, as you might expect because it meant she was getting older, but rather all the attention that might be shown. In our neighborhood and with our circle of friends, there was a good possibility of some kind of special attention being directed at her. She really didn't want that to happen. She asked if we could take a late vacation over her birthday week. I agreed and we planned a trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota. We drove her new car (an early birthday present) and I filled the car with other gifts (a new SLR camera, binoculars, some jewelry) and her favorite desert (Tiramisu) and two bottles of Asti Spumanti on ice. We had a great week, seeing and doing a lot of things. We had a second encounter with Bison, this time a whole herd. We were standing on the edge of a 3 meter dropoff on the left side of the road watching a herd of bison moving toward us. To our surprise the herd split in two with one half moving up the road where we were parked and the other entering the ditch right behind us. The only thing between us and the bison to our rear was the edge of the dropoff, and the only thing on the right was her car. The bison were somewhat taller than her car so it was quite exciting. After they passed they turned and ran (RAN) up a very steep hill. It was fascinating to see an animal that large, on its relatively tiny legs run so rapidly up that hill. We turned the car around to see if we could find the herd but they were long gone. We turned around again and saw a bobcat sitting on top of a rock looking at us. We tried to get a picture but the cat disappeared into the brush. The next day we visited Mt Rushmore and saw a large male mountain goat calmly eating grass in the median of the parking lot. We visited Wind Cave. (Full disclosure here, Helena hated caves. When she was a kid she was in a cave and hit her head hard on the rock ceiling.) This cave is very large with good walkways and very beautiful formations. Let me digress for a second and tell you about another cave she visited with me. It was in Missouri, in the Ozarks. We were on this tour (another pretty good cave with only one place she had to duck her head) and the guide pointed to a huge crack IN THE CEILING of the cave. He asked if anyone knew what it was. Given the location of the cave I guessed that it was the New Madrid fault, that caused a huge earthquake in Missouri and Illinois in the 1800's. I was right. Pretty scary to be underground standing on the fault line where scientists say a new quake could very well happen at any time. OK back to the birthday trip. We hit some tourist trap gift shops. Helena liked to look around but she never bought anything there. She prefered to find her own souveniers. On the way up to the black hills we stopped in the badlands in Nebraska (much smaller than the Badlands in South Dakota) and I showed her the fossilized remains of early mammels. Though you are not allowed to remove any fossils from the area one accidently ended up in Helena's pocket. It joined the many I had accidently picked up when I was a kid. Finally we returned home. We had left the day before her birthday and this was almost a week later and she thought she was safe. When we pulled in I heard her say "oh crap". A "friend" of ours had driven two metal fence posts into our front yard and hung an giant sign proclaiming that Helena was 40. I couldn't stop laughing. I told her that if we hadn't gone on the trip she could have taken the sign down soon after it was put up. Instead everyone had a full week to enjoy the fact that she was 40. She did not see the humor in the situation at all. Though she had no proof (our friend left no trace) she really read the riot act to our friend the next time we saw him. He of course denied any involvement. I took a picture of the sign but after our first showing I was instructed to remove it from our slide presentation of our trip. Helena didn't have alergies but was very sensitive to pollen, and dust. In the spring we would open the windows at home to let in the fresh air. Then somewhere in town a flower would bloom and Helena's nose would instantly plug up and we would have to close the windows until the next winter. When she did work outside she wore face masks. In the first picture you see her in her "bio hazard suit" working on raking the leaves in the fall. This was probably in 1995. The next picture shows her in a museum (I think it is in Michigan) around 1983. I had forgotten how stunning I thought she looked in those white pants. The purse is her favorite. I recently put it in a box for disposal. It would have too many memories to keep. The next picture is an earlier shot of Helena. This was taken by her dad when she was 12. Just beginning to develop the look and expression that would steal my heart a decade later. The next picture is Helena and our first cat in our house in the early 90's. He was a fat cat. The painting on the right side of the photo is one of mine the other one was done by her dad. He was far better than I am. The next shot is the last (as far as I remember) of the swimsuit photos from the "skinny dip" trip. This was the last I took and she was ready to strip. If you look good she was very near a nip slip on the left breast and the right one was on its way out too. The last picture is another of Helena at her favorite spectator sport, outdoor eating. And she has her favorite food, Chocolate Ice Cream. I'm not sure where this was taken but from all I see and remember it was in California in the mid to late 70's.