Goodreads asked Karen White:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Karen White As a child, I loved looking through my parents' yearbooks. Besides marveling (and laughing) at the old-fashioned hairstyles and clothing choices (not to mention the school clubs offered in the 40's and 50's), I loved reading the notes left by classmates. When I was in high school, I happened to notice for the first time an inscription left in my mother's college yearbook beneath a photo of my mother and the writer of the note wearing evening clothes. When I asked her who the man was, she told me she'd once been engaged to him.

I was shocked. As far as I knew my father was the love of her life. To my small teenaged brain, her life hadn't really started before she met Dad. Surely, though, I must have known otherwise.

Despite having been raised in Mississippi as a proper Southern lady, my mother made all-state band and traveled to Mexico playing the alto saxophone (an instrument that was banned from many radio stations in the 50's for being too "suggestive") and studied music and business in college. Following graduation, she moved to Houston, Texas to work for Standard Oil -- not something common for young ladies at the time. Houston is where she met my father and she married him at age 25--practically spinster age in 1961!

During her years as a single working woman, she budgeted enough to send money home (thus buying her family's first television set) and collected the most beautiful slips. A lady was never properly dressed without the right undergarments. I remember playing dress-up with those slips as a little girl, enjoying the silk fabric, the pleats, the lace, the details. My mother would catch me and scold me, then carefully fold them up and return them to the bottom of her lingerie drawer. Looking back, it seems to me as if she were somehow burying a person she'd once been, but wasn't completely ready to let go.

Of course, being the typical self-centered teenager at the time, it never occurred to me to grill my mother about the identity of the man she'd almost married, or why she broke their engagement. Or had he been the one to end it? And why had she never talked about it? Was it simply a growing apart or a difference in opinion? Or was it more tragic or even sinister?

But now I'm left to wondering. My mother has Alzheimer's and all of her stories and memories are locked away where I can't reach them and I'm left to ponder who that man was, and what really happened.

Being a writer with an active imagination means I can spin that tale however I want it to be. But I will always be left wondering about the mystery of my mother's first love.

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