Kay and I first met in high school. I was a senior and she was a sophomore, and it was flirt at first sight!! It was September 1978. I wanted to be Kay’s boyfriend, but she was taken. This was a pattern that would recur as the years went by. However, this did not keep us from becoming good friends. I was no fool, or so I thought, and wanted to spend as much time with Kay as I could! We had great times together whether her boyfriend was around or not. She was always fun to be around and our times together were filled with laughter.
The school year ended without us ever getting together and I left in the fall to go off to college. We stayed in touch for the next three years via letters and phone calls and would see each other when we were home for breaks. Kay had broken up with the high school boyfriend, but I was not around. By the time I graduated from college in 1983, Kay once again had a steady boyfriend (There’s that pattern!). Eventually we started to drift apart as each of us graduated from college and began our ventures into the working world.
After not having seen each other for some time, we ran into each other in the late spring of 1986. Kay told me she had had a boyfriend (Stupid pattern!) and was moving to New York City to run a restaurant. When we left each other that day I felt a deep sadness. I let her walk away without making any effort to stay in touch. I felt that I had lost her forever. It turns out I was more of a fool than I thought.
Fast forward to the fall of 2001.
The events of September 11 led me to reassess my life, as I’m sure it did for many people.
I had moved to NYC in the fall of 1987. Now, I was forty. Single. No one to come home to during those very difficult days. I realized that I needed to make changes in my life. I started to wonder about people I had cared about who had drifted out of my life and I thought of Kay. I had looked for Kay in the past, but I could not find her in the NYC phone listings and her mother had moved away from Rochester, as had her brother.
On November 11, I went to our high school alumni web site, where I started digging. It was not long before I found Kay’s listing. The good news was that she had registered, but the bad news was she was living in Arizona, and she was married (There’s that lousy pattern again!). I figured I’d send her an e-mail to say hello and catch up after all the years. Over the next six days we exchanged e-mails until Kay finally picked up the phone and called me. As it turned out, she was in the process of exiting a bad marriage.
We spoke for three hours that first day and we have spoken every day since. It was not long before I flew out to Arizona to bring her back to New York. On the cross-country drive back east, I proposed the first night out of town, and we were married in 2002.
Since then, we have made a life for ourselves here in New York. We made a decision early on to have children, and that choice was the first step in a very long journey (More on that journey another time.). For the first time on that journey, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and are reasonably sure that it is not an oncoming train.
And we know that the source of that light is our daughter.
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