Ruth Ann was nuts. Not raving mad or anything. But someplace off the beam, out in left field, as they used to say. No question about it. Just about anybody who dealt with her in those days had to agree.

Personally, I knew it only too well, having spent plenty of time among truly crazy people back in those days. Sick, troubled people. Most of them, I'd met or observed during a stint in a mental institution, a few years earlier. As a patient, not an employee or visitor, I have to admit with all due honesty. Voluntary, but a patient nonetheless.

We met in the mid-1960s, a couple of years before the counterculture became the big thing in much of the country. Ruth Ann was well ahead of them in terms of living life as an outsider. Way outside. What might be called an outlier in today's fancier times.

Why had I taken up with her? Mainly, because she was there. She was no great beauty. Too skinny to attract a lot of notice, but cute in kind of an oblique way. Bright red hair. The lush kind you hardly ever see. Sometimes, I could hardly take my eyes off it. Never seen a woman quite that redheaded, before or since. Yeah, red "down there," too, I learned before too long. I knew you'd be wondering about that.

Ruth Ann never worked anywhere for long. She got jobs easily, but none of them paid well, or were even semi-permanent. Just a way to amass a small nest egg for the next stretch of non-employment, whether sticking close to home or on the run.

She ate little beyond French fries, washed down with Pepsi-Cola, but always insisted on having enough money to pay her insurance. Health insurance, in particular, though she seemed to be in amazingly good health considering her limited diet. Since I considered insurance companies to be the pariahs of the universe, I couldn't quite grasp her fealty to them.

Ruth Ann didn't care much for sex, but gave in now and then. Bed sessions were nothing to get excited about. They didn’t necessarily take place in a bedroom, either, except during periods when she was living at home and her parents were out for the day. Or, during the time when I had my own apartment rather than occupying a bed at my mother's place.

Some grappling took place in whatever car she happened to own at the time. You probably won't be surprised to hear that. It was the Sixties, after all. Trouble was, except for the time when we first got together, she nearly always drove small cars, and often brought her dog along. The limitations were obvious. This was not the kind of threesome that might prove entertaining. All in all, I could take or leave dogs, but leaned toward the latter, especially on the road.

Still, I'd had so little experience with women, and even less good experience, that occasional time spent in her company – with few clothes present – was good enough for me.

When we had sex, which wasnt often, she would insist that coupling not be quite complete. That way, she could tell herself that she hadn't really had sex at all. Hadn't quite gone "all the way," as they used to call it. Just the preliminaries. "Not all the way in," she sometimes pleaded.

I went along. Going part of the way (close enough, truth be told) was sufficient.

She could have been called "frigid,"I suppose. Worried about her reputation. Which was strange, because she claimed to have been forced out of the small town she was living in, not long before we met. Supposedly, that expulsion stemmed from an altercation over somebody's boyfriend. She practically bragged about having been tagged as unwanted, shunned, and ultimately ousted from that community. "They ran me out of town," she explained one evening.

If her story of ejection was true, I don't know how that concern about reputation came about. Didn't make sense. Of course, with Ruth Ann, not much did.

Like I say, odd, especially since she seemed prone to putting herself, at least occasionally, into position for serious misbehavior. Who were "they," anyway? No telling.

Weird as she was, Ruth Ann changed my life. It's true. Over a couple of years, in our sporadic, tense – even combative, ostensibly boy/girl relationship – I went from someone who rarely left my neighborhood to an intense if short-lived existence as a veritable vagabond. By the time we split up for good, I'd turned into someone who was always ready to head out to parts unknown, at a moment's notice.

That's because Ruth Ann was a traveler. A rambler. An adventurer. ...

Note: This story is intentionally incomplete at this point, intended to serve as a sample.

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