“That doesn’t count as a blog
post,” I tell him.
“Pardon?” He asks.
“That thing you posted last
night. That “happily ever after” nonsense. It doesn’t count as a blog
post.”
“Well then why don’t you write me
a guest blog post?” He challenges me.
And so I am.
* * * * *
1995
University College
University of Toronto
Downtown Toronto, Ontario
Canada
I am in my third year of my
undergraduate degree. This thing called
“email” is brand spanking new. There is
no internet en masse as we know it today.
There is no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram. There are cell phones, but they are the size
of a lunch box and prohibitively expensive.
When I listen to music on my commute to and from school, it is using a
yellow Sony Walkman accompanied by a bag full of cassette tapes. When I leave home, there is no getting in
contact with me unless I used a pay phone (remember those?!?) to call home and
check the messages on my answering machine.
This is the state of life, this
is the state of technology, or lack thereof, when I am “introduced” to Lawrence
Reiter.
As with all of my best
friendships, I do not remember exactly when or how our introduction came about. I do recall that a South African friend from
high school had a cousin who lived in South Africa and Lawrence was “friends”
with her cousin. Kind of like how Ernie
and Bert are “friends” on Sesame Street….
But I digress….
I had just received my first
email account in 1995. Very few people
had email in 1995. I received my email account
through school and somehow or other I was given Lawrence’s email account
information (or was he given mine) and we started corresponding, me from
Toronto and him in South Africa. There
was the huge time difference to contend with and responses most certainly were
not instantaneous (How could they be?
There was the torturous process of dial up internet to deal with….) but
somehow from this new technology a beautiful courtship was born.
Or so I believed.
These were the days before
Match.com and Plenty of Fish. The most
“advanced” technology in dating at the time was in the form of “tele-personals”
where you’d dial a phone number, listen to recorded messages and decide if you
wanted to leave a message in return.
<Shudder> These were the
good old days where you actually MET people, IN PERSON, and decided based on
that IN PERSON meeting whether you wanted to date them.
So I was quite enchanted when my
friend gave me Lawrence’s contact information (or did she give him mine?) and,
suffering from the delusional belief that we were being set up to live happily
ever after, we exchanged emails. Being
young and naïve, I didn’t find it creepy that he was constantly in a laboratory
at all hours of the day and night checking in on his “cultures”. We got to know
each other. As much as you can know
someone you have never met, never spoken with, who lives at the opposite end of
the world, in a completely different time zone and who is not, as it turns out,
completely honest about the minor details of his life. Like the fact that he prefers cock. But again I digress…..
What I wouldn’t do to have those
emails today.
Eventually, the day came when,
miracle of miracles, my beloved Lawrence, my future Jewish doctor husband was
coming to Toronto to meet me! It would
be love at first site, we would consummate our intentions and I would finally,
finally, live my happily ever after.
You can all stop laughing now.
* * * * *
It is 2008.
Downtown Toronto, Ontario
Canada.
Winter.
Snowstorm.
My second marriage.
My first child.
Lawrence is in Toronto.
He is moving here.
We are driving around with my
infant daughter in the Volvo Lawrence had just licked scouting out different
parts of the city for he and Keith and their fur babies to live.
A few months later, the big move
takes place.
And we all find our happily ever
after.
42.64
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