Lost and found love

Can't wait to hear them Joe.

Me too.

Today I'm seeing- not my first 'love' but my first sort of sexual experimentation partner - I guess that's what I would call him- yeah, I'm seeing him for the first time in thirty years today.

It was sort of complicated. His brother liked me and I really had more in common with his brother but my sister liked his brother, and I really did love this older guy who loved me but couldn't really have anything to do with me without risking arrest, and as he was a stand-up guy, he followed the rules...
Well, this left me with raging hormones and no outlet.
So I had this friend named V. who was extremely good looking and well-built. We got along famously as friends and laughed at all the same things.

Eventually, it got tactile.

Anyway, his sister is helping my mother with her cleaning, etc...and he heard I was here and he's dropping by today. His sister says he looks pretty much the same, has kept all his hair, his eyes are just as blue, etc., etc.
I said, 'What did V. do after highschool - I can't remember seeing him again after I went off to university.'
She said, 'Well, he was a Chippendale dancer to put himself through school...'

That gives you some idea of what he looked like then....I'll have to get him to do a few moves today.

But I hope it's not too weird to see him. No chance of a love match though. He's married - and anyway - we never had the same level of intellectual curiousity about the same things. It was mostly just mutual sexual curiousity and teen-age discovery.
But what a trip this will be. My mom will be watching so I'll have to try not to blush too much. She had no idea what we were doing when we used to sneak off together.

Coincidentally, there is a book that is going down a storm over in the UK, which is exactly about this sort of thing.

Reviews.....
The Times: "A wonderful, wonderful book"

The Mirror: "Destined to be a modern classic"

Etc etc.

It's called "One Day" and written by David Nicholls.
In a nutshell.... it's about two people and twenty years...."15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on this day next year? And the year after that? And every year that follows?

So far I've read about a third of it, and am hooked completely.

Sounds like a very interesting and romantic read.

Aidan, good luck reconnecting. I'm sure it will be interesting to see how the two of you have grown. CD was also my first sexual experimentation partner but we had a strong friendship before that all started and it grew into a very loving and attached relationship. I think I was the luckiest girl in high school that year we were together. I don't think we would have lasted at that time or at any of the other times that we reconnected just because we were so young, but we've managed to maintain whatever it was about us that allowed to be close friends. So no matter what, I'm happy to have him back in my life.

But above all I find the situation itself fascinating and almost unbelievable. Apparently it's not really uncommon, though.

Alright osso, we're going to have to nag Joe I think. I'm dying to hear his story.

The Two Story Story
(The following is all true, only the names have been changed because this is the fricking Internet.)
Part I
It was April 1965. Yes, that long ago. Joe and C hardly knew each other at that Catholic High School. They had talked just a few times backstage at Drama Club during rehearsals for Life with Father. That's all; except for that one time when he started doing his 'If I was your father' bit and had her sit on his lap while he faked reading her a bedtime story from his history book. It was a nice moment. They laughed a lot. Later, she wrote about it when she signed Joe's yearbook.

P. was in that play too. She knew Joe a little better; she was one of the bunch who went to Howard Johnson's for fried clams on Fridays with him and three or four other girls. Joe liked to hang out with girls, girls in groups or one at a time, but let's not get distracted. P wrote in Joe's yearbook on the night she finally met R.

Ah. R. was shy and he had nothing to be shy about. He was tall, a good athlete, really good looking with wavy hair. So wavy the nuns teased him about it mercilessly. He hated that and he was counting down the hours and minutes until he could leave that high school behind when, on yearbook signing day, P. asked him to sign her book and he said he would if she would let him take her out on a date.

They went out on a date, then two more, then, when they went off to college, they saw each other about every other weekend until almost Thanksgiving when P told R that it wasn't working for her. (sigh)
So, they stopped seeing each other. It hadn't even snowed yet.
=====
Early Summer 2006- That's forty one years later, but who's counting?
A woman is driving through the backroads of Connecticut when she spots an incredibly beautiful flower garden in front of a huge white farmhouse. She stops and gets out to have a closer look. The blossoms are huge and varied, clustered here and there in bunches with splashes of every color possible. Just as she is thinking about going back to her car to get her camera, the farmhouse's owner walks up and says "Hello." He is tall. He wears bi-focal glasses and a hat that seems a little too small for his head and hair.

They start to talk. Mostly about flowers and weather and such, about her not getting her garden started early this year because she was out of town. She mentions the town's name, it's about 10 miles from where they are standing. He says he went to to school in that town and says the school's name. She says

"So did my sister, P."

[Compression of events]
Emails are exchanged.
She is now a divorced grandmother living in Dallas.
He's a widower who's owned his own business and been working on his 300 year old farmhouse for twenty five years.
She was so happy to hear from him.
He was shyly dumbstruck and unbelievably happy to have found her again.
Her divorce had been a hurt-filled sour affair; the passing of his wife from a long term illness had been a brutal, soul exhausting, losing battle.
There were a few trips up from Dallas to the countryside of Connecticut and then,
then she decided that it might work.
And it has.

-----The upstairs is nearly finished, the kitchen has a few things left to do and they can't keep their hands off each other.
Part II

2010 January
When he got back from another Christmas in Florida, Joe booted up his computer. He had been on Facebook for about six months seeking out friendships or interesting people and his 45th high school reunion would be coming up in October, so that was a good reason for connecting with some of those folks. Right? That leaves out the part about his twenty year marriage disintegrating two years before, but let's leave it at that.

It's going well. There's the invitations from a couple of the basketball players, some of their wives, some of the girls from his old neighborhood and there's P.
(Wow, she lives here now? When he saw her five years ago, she was living in Dallas.)
He asks and she tells the story about the flower garden and her sister stopping and life with R. They both start messaging back and forth while playing Farmville.
Then one night, just as he is about to shut down his computer after playing a great word in Scrabble, he sees a friend request from C.

He punches Accept and then sends her a "Hi, how have you been?"
She replies that it's been a really hard last two years.
Then nothing more.

Joe waited a little while then wrote:
and his phone number.

[Compressed Version of the Facts]
There were long talks. Long talks about infusions and treatments and stem cells.
A reading and re-reading of her CaringBridge page.
More talk and more poetry.
There was the odd sound of laughter in Joe's apartment until he realized he was the one making the sound.
Then he went back to Florida for a couple weeks, but C and he still talked once in awhile. They talked about him coming up to Connecticut for a weekend. They talked about how she was trying to start running, how, a year ago, she couldn't walk without a cane.
He told her that he would come up to visit when she could run a 5K.

She sent him pictures of her garden and said that P and R had volunteered to take her the forty miles to her quarterly infusion and they had all had the idea that they should come to the city together to see me. That sounded like fun.
More long talks.
Joe went to the Outer Banks, North Carolina. He took pictures of the moon, he took pictures of the sunrise. He did a lot of running.
He tried to do a lot of thinking, but he couldn't get the poetry out of his head.

He called her and told her to pick a Saturday in August for the invasion of New York.
=====
It was a nice visit.
Lunch on his roofdeck, a tour of the West Side's Highline.

Very nice.
What he couldn't tell at the time was he couldn't wait to see her again. That his brain kept saying "You've got to have her."
What she didn't tell him was when he hugged her hello at Grand Central Station that morning, an seismic shock had coursed through her and was still ringing in her ears when they said 'goodbye' that night.
==
So, he called her and they started comparing dates. Two weeks from then was no good, she had a treatment. Three weeks from then was no good, he had a race to run to qualify for the Marathon.
Four weeks from then was no good because
---Stop, Joe said, "Come back this weekend."
"Okay." said C.
==
Now what?
He's been up to her house and garden about as often as she has come to New York and that's been often.
She showed him the tree, a quarter of a mile from her front door, which marked that farthest she could walk a year ago.
They went to the reunion together and danced until the hotel shut the lights off, then went with the others to the bar until the bar closed. They made everybody happy to be around them.
She came down to watch the Marathon and came back to go to his family's Thanksgiving in New Jersey.
And Christmas at her house
And New Year's at his.
And, you get the idea.
==
Postscript:
Not that it matters, but C had her last infusion a couple of weeks ago. It's gone.
<shhh. yes. It is.>
She's running three miles now.

She says at that reunion five years previous, Joe had swept her off her feet while dancing. He does not remember that.

Joe was reminiscing with some friends one night about what C. wrote in his yearbook, about what a nice moment that had been.
C. said she hadn't any memory of the bedtime story or what she written, so long ago, in 1965.

Joe(never shut a door)Nation

Dear Joe <so happy> Nation

warm and fuzzies - C is so beautiful - so glad you found one another

Love Iz <wipes tear> zie

Beautiful, J. Just beautiful. <wipes eyes>

Joe has earned his happiness. and along the way, he has earned happiness to a few other folks, too.

Yes, Joe certainly does deserve all the happiness in the world. He's a good
person and has a great personality on top of it.
---

FreeDuck, good luck with your high school sweetheart!

That's lovely, Joe!

I wonder if this is a fairly new phenomenon? People moving away from where they grew up (and so not just continuing to run into each other and either something blooms earlier, or there isn't that rush of recaptured feelings) plus the ability to reconnect via Facebook and such. That's not a brand-new ability of course, people have had the White Pages and phones, but still, it seems to be a different level. It's harder/ weirder to pick up the phone and call someone out of the blue rather than to just send a friend request to a person you knew back in the day, along with many others you knew...

Two beautiful stories, Joe. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell them here. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

Yeah I'm thinking the internet first, even before facebook, made it easier for people to find one another. Then enter Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, etc... and it probably really blew up. I could probably still have found him without FB but it would have required more work -- remembering his parents address, looking up their number, calling them hoping they would remember me (they do, fondly, to my relief). He had been looking for me on facebook as well but I wasn't on until about 2 years ago and didn't post a profile pic until about a year ago. That was about the time that he exited facebook. His brother, thankfully, has a very distinctive name and was easy to find.

To Joe's story, I think there is something about going through tough times that makes us want to seek out the comfort of old friends. I really wasn't looking for romance, I just wanted my best friend back.

Whereas I had a really, really awful reunion with an old school friend, courtesy of one of those "school reunion" sites, Free Duck.
He'd been a really sweet, idealist friend from my senior high school days who had somehow morphed into a right wing think tank leader!
We had become polar opposites. Never the twain shall meet.
To make matters worse, he had developed amorous online/phone tendencies!
It felt best to leave that old friendship lapse.

OMG, thank you msolga for reminding me how easily things could go the other way. I guess that's part of what I find so interesting. The changes people go through over a 15 year period -- especially when that period covers your 20s and early 30s -- what's the likelihood you will still hit it off with someone you knew from that long ago. Amazing stuff! Hilarious story, thank you.

I bet u can find a communist dating service for your delight, Comrade Olga.

Thank you for your thoughtful advice, David.
I will keep it in mind for possible future reference.
I know you meant well, but you've misunderstood. I was talking about reconnecting with an old high school friend, rather than looking for love.
You know, like getting back in touch with that really nice budding Eva Braun from your grade 5 class?

OK, Comrade.
Good luck with that.
Sieg heil or whatever it is that the commies like to say.





David