Saddle Shoes

This story began with my mother’s brief acquaintance with a man she met at a wedding while she was still in school. He played drums in the band and commented on the saddle shoes she was wearing. They spoke on the phone regularly and may have gone on one or two dates.

During one call, his questions became disturbing. He asked whether she had ever thought about killing herself or murdering someone. She was shocked, ended the conversation, and never spoke to him again. She did not mention him to her family for many years.

Decades later, after I had finished college, my mother received a letter from the man. He wrote that he could see she was happily married with children, then named every member of the family, including my father, and mentioned where my father worked. My parents had moved several times and my mother had no social media presence, so she could not understand how he had found her married name and current address.

She also learned that someone had repeatedly called her college alumni association trying to obtain her contact information. The association had refused to provide it. When she told me the man’s name, I realized that he had sent friend requests to me and to my siblings on social media.

I searched his public profiles and found music pages containing songs he had recorded. One song used my mother’s first name. The lyrics referred to her beauty and the saddle shoes she had worn, even though he had known her only briefly many years earlier.

A family friend who worked as a private investigator looked into the man. He had changed his surname and moved through several states under different names and occupations. There was no known criminal record and he had made no explicit threat, so there was little that could be done. My mother was nevertheless afraid to stay home alone because he knew where she lived.

The man still occasionally sends friend requests to members of the family. No one knows why he resurfaced after so many years or what he wants. The uncertainty is what makes the situation frightening. A person who barely knew my mother somehow tracked her family, address, and personal history, then wrote music about a detail he remembered from their brief acquaintance.