December 17, 2024

Hi, Pat. I'm sitting here in north Texas reading Christmas cards, working on my blog, and watching / listening to Dana Del Rey videos on YouTube in the background. 

It's a Yorkshire evening outside: pitch black, light rain, a bit of wind. It reminds me of our brisk midnight walks along the River Nidd twenty-two years ago (?).

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Reminiscing 

On my public, main blog, I just wrote the following; it's in draft. It won't be posted for several days.

Although it was the "original" that haunted me for years, I would rather listen to Lana Del Rey's cover.

I had probably just experienced the most intense three months of my life up to that point in my life, and even at age 73, that summer may still be the most intense, most complicated three months of my life. I was on my way home, late August, via West Virginia, late summer, 1971. John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads was the hit song that summer, released in the spring of 1971. I was torn between staying on the east coast and returning home to the Dakotas. I really had no choice, but it was incredibly difficult. To this day, I wonder how it would have been had I taken the other fork in that road.

Link here.

I graduated from high school, like you did, in the spring of 1969.

I attended Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD, 1969 - 1973, before going on to medical school, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, starting in the fall of 1973.

The most intense three months of my life I refer to above were the three months I spent selling dictionaries door-to-door in New Jersey. It was a most intense summer -- had it been just selling dictionaries it would have been "enough." 

But it was also the summer I met the first love of my life, though she did not know it, and we saw each other in passing maybe a total of 90 minutes that entire summer. 

It was the most difficult thing I ever experienced leaving New Jersey: she did not know how much I had been smitten, and I did not even say good-bye when I departed. For two years, I thought of no woman other than she. 

Two years later I traveled along to Europe, hitchhiking from North Dakota to NYC, to catch Icelandic Air, to Luxembourg. It was a trip I had to take, to see Europe on my own, on "$4 a day." But deep, deep down, I took the trip  with the hope that I would see Linda again when I got to the New York City area.

I did and we reconnected. For the next two years -- maybe eighteen months -- we had the most intense, geographically-separated relationship possible. 

We separated for good after eighteen months -- she was graduating from medical school and headed to an internship. I was starting my clinical years and she decided it was time to "take a break." She said it was temporary; I saw it as permanent.

I often wonder how it would have turned out had I taken another fork in that road.

The same I often wonder about you and me.

Circumstances are such that it was for the best. No regrets. But I think about you often. In fact, not a day goes by that I'm not thinking of you.