Love Story

Okay, people, it doesn’t happen often. And my age, I’ve seen it maybe once. So we’re lucky if it happens again.

But a love story like this . . . it’s one for the books.

She was my sister’s best friend in New York in 1970. Her apartment was across the street from ours. Her elder sister became my elder brother’s intense girlfriend. Her elder brother was my eldest brother’s best friend — you know the 70s. Beatles, Stones, guitars, long hair.

Her parents were wanderers — you know who you are. So when I moved to Africa, she moved to Spain . . . and we wrote those ridiculous things called aerogrammes to each other all the time. I can’t recall what we wrote, but no doubt it was whatever two slightly nostalgic kids who secretly were in love but weren’t allowed to be, by fate, by age, by circumstance would pen . . .

And then she disappeared. Slowly, as our lives diverged. She went there, I went to other places. We got old, slowly. So, when I got a phone call in 1985 I thought I’d seen the last of Virginie. But it wasn’t so. I was in San Francisco and so was she.

As a huge obstacle, I was living with someone at the time. It was almost operatic. We went out to dinner, with my elder brother at the wheel, whose previous love, Virginie’s sister, was to go on to become a doctor, then tragically commit suicide with her own prescribables. But we didn’t know that then.

And we held hands like kids in the back seat on the way to where she was staying, my brother being like an unwilling taxi driver.

And so we dropped her off and I went home and I was a tiny bit crazy with love. I wrote her a long letter that I intended to mail the next day — a day in which I was flying to Montreal. So I put the letter in carefully with my ticket and passport.

And went to sleep.

And somehow, the person I was living with saw it her mind to make sure I had my ticket and passport all in order . . . and guess what she found.

Needless to say, that was the end of that.

But then, I went off to climes like Japan and Virginie wandered and had a husband and kids that I didn’t know anything about because I was doing my stuff . . . and then two years ago she somehow found me on the Internet. And we began a near-constant email exchange . . . but nothing happened (she lives in France) until she decided to buy a ticket to come to Montreal. And it wasn’t until we’d been in the taxi from Dorval five minutes that I knew that I was going to be with this woman forever. You have been informed. Trust me, this doesn’t happen often.

Montreal will always be a priority for me but now France seems likely to be my new home. No firm plans, but . . . ya can’t stop love.