Face Or Fantasy Judith Nakken   © Copyright 2024 by Judith Nakken

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

I lived in a fantasy world. Early on, it was escape from a dysfunctional childhood. As a teenager and young woman, it hid me from the world in which I did not fit. Finally, I fell into that world and stayed there, just to hide. Period.

Booze helped, of course. It was only when the compartments in my mind began to melt and merge due to sobriety that I became fully aware of my fantasy life. A painful sorting out of that life began.

Had I been to Hawaii and never left the hotel? Yes, verified by that 1957 husband. 

Had I seen Chichen Itsa? No proof, and I couldn’t even spell it. 

Did I see Sandy Koufax hit a triple by accident, the trainer running the bases after him with the jacket to protect that $35,000 elbow? Not verified in the record books. But the memory of Chavez Ravine, beer in paper cups and Sandy standing at 3^rd base being dressed is still so vivid, it must have been a single and a couple of errors. 

Did I play poker with Johnny Horton in his cousin’s rec room in Norwalk, or maybe Downey? I put this one in the “no” column because I had no visual memory of the “North to Alaska” singer himself.

On and on it went, the examining and discarding false memories, with a rare atta-girl when one was found to be true. After five years of this, I was fairly content with the remaining memories when I met and married my soulmate (and 6^th husband – sadly not a false memory.)

“OK, I’ll marry you,” I told him in April of ’74, “but vacation next year is over the 4^th of July and I’m going to a convention in Denver. Want to come?”

And so it was, in that first blissful year, that I began to tell him of a side trip I wanted to make, to once again see The Face on the Barroom Floor. “It’s in the old mining town’s Teller House, and it’s just painted about 3-4 feet on these old wooden planks…”

I stopped. Was it real? My grandma’s poetry book held the tales of Dangerous Dan McGrew and the Face I was describing. Halfway into hysterics, I copped to my quandary. “Oh, honey. I don’t know if that’s real or fantasy. I can see the face, but I think there was a picture in Grandma’s book.” He hugged me and vowed that it was OK, and to please stop crying. So I did.

Napping in the little cabover camper he’d rented for his pickup, I was awakened by a change in the rhythm of the tires. Sure enough, we were off the throughway and climbing. I went to the front window and rapped for him to pull over and let me up front.

“It’s a surprise,” was all he would answer to my question. I was lost in the unique Colorado scenery when we arrived at the ghost town, Central City. In 1975, as opposed to 1956 when I saw it with husband #2, it was enclosed with a brass rail around its square. But the Face on the Barroom Floor shone up at me in all her glory, exactly as I remembered it.

Remember, now, this all happened in the days before internet. Imagine the trouble my bridegroom went through to prove my memory and plan the side trip.

Is it any wonder that he was also my last husband?

(Messages are forwarded by The Preservation Foundation.
So, when you write to an author, please type his/her name
in the subject line of the message.)

Judith's Story List and Biography

Book Case

Home Page

The Preservation Foundation, Inc., A Nonprofit Book Publisher