How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo

with a soldier serving a tour of duty in a developing country with unreliable Internet, a Peace Corps volunteer, or someone serving a long prison term.
    And lucky them. Because they’re forced to communicate via writing they’re able to ascertain, over time, their beloved’s true character. I’m not talking about discovering his likes and dislikes or most embarrassing moment in middle school. I mean learning whether he possesses the ability to see and love them for who they are, support them in their goals to do whatever, and make them laugh. ¶¶
    It’s essential to know this about anyone you think you might be serious about, and really, the best way to gauge this is over time, without the interference of pesky hormones. This shouldn’t need to be said, but there is no correlation between a guy’s washboard abs and his ability to champion your fondest hopes and dreams. I wish I could find a more elegant way of saying this: People in passionate long-term relationships put up with a lot of shit from one another. That’s just the way of it. You can learn how to communicate better, or add spice to the bedroom, or make time for weekend getaways that feature a hotel with en suite hot tub, but people can’t escape their essential personalities. And neither can their significant others.
    I’m belaboring this point so you can see why O’Keeffe loved Stieglitz, and continued to love him once he started behaving badly. For all of his off-putting qualities, no one on earth believed in her vision and her genius more profoundly than did Stieglitz, and because of that he was irreplaceable.
    But how, you may ask, with letters long dead and e-mails about to exhale their death rattle at any moment, can you begin a meaningful correspondence with someone? What is the would-be writer of love letters to do? There is an answer, but I suspect you won’t like it: video games.
    I met Jerrod, my own Glorious Bit of All that’s Human, playing EverQuest. ** I played a high elf magician and he played a wood elf bard, and one day our avatars “met” in a zone called The Estate of Unrest, where we were each killing ghouls, zombies, and reanimated scarecrows. There’s a heavy chat component to these games. In between slaying two-headed ogres and raising your sewing skill by “making” the same cloth hat four hundred times in a row, there are hours of typing back and forth. Not letter-writing, but just as time-consuming. “Mozi” and I quested together and chatted every night for months. The courtship was Victorian even by Stieglitzian standards. In the event he was an unemployed pothead in a stained T-shirt living in his mother’s basement, I was reluctant to give him my real name. I was smitten by his sense of humor (on many occasions I really did LOL), his California roots (like me, he grew up in a tragically dull suburb), and the clincher, the fact he knew that “a lot” was two words. †† Finally, I told him my name. That was ten years ago.
    The greatest aphrodisiac is vitality.
    By the time she’d settled in Canyon, Georgia was a full-blown eccentric. You’d be hard-pressed to find a woman so astoundingly herself, not just of that time, but of any time. In a bit of fashion synergy that echoed what was going on in the same decade in the atelier of Coco Chanel, half a continent and an ocean away in Paris, Georgia wore only straight, sheath-like black dresses. She tromped around wherever she pleased in flat, mannish shoes. The only time she changed her footwear into something more dainty and acceptable was when she wanted to resist the urge to hike for miles out into the prairie, or scramble up and down the rocks at nearby Palo Duro Canyon; high heels were for self-hobbling only. She was known for the spot-on impersonations she did of other teachers, her biting wit, and her knowledge of something called cubism.
    She was as on the fringe as they