Fifty Years from Riverview

Coming back to December 2023, Stan’s brief email convinced me I’d found the right person. After I’d sent him a capsule summary of my last few decades, further notes were exchanged before he would remember me and be willing to share any confidences. I related to him a few salient incidents, including my first shouted words, “Welcome to Suffolk Street,” since he seemed to be touched by my greeting at the time. That may have awakened his memory. He said, “It’s coming back to me, bit by bit.” And then the flood gates opened. He told me his first wife was Angelica. I was right! They’d divorced in 1983, same year as us. He’d remarried and divorced, then lost his third wife to cancer. He could not find contentment in marriage. He finally accepted he was gay, and had been happy with a male partner for nearly 20 years. He shared with me the name of their village on the east coast of New Brunswick where the locals were congenial, and they had a spectacular view of the Northumberland Strait. I hope they’ll continue in this state of enlightenment and fulfillment for many more years.

It’s astonishing and beautiful to me that within the lines of a few emails, and sometimes reading between the lines, Stan and I were able to share a meaningful sense of the shifting rhythms of our past 50 years, and a little taste of each other’s life experience.