A Love Story -- Before Social Networks

My Love Story, Before Social Networks

The tale of a man who traveled across two countries and an ocean to follow the love of his life.

Read more: http://www.rd.com/true-stories/love/love-story-before-social-networks/#ixzz3GUeK4RLz
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sometimes when I’m watching old movies, I can’t help dwelling on the crucial plot devices that have been lost to, well, devices. The missed call, which today rings in our pockets. The long-lost love, who now lives forever in our Twitter feed.

Consider Doctor Zhivago: A chance sighting of Lara on a city street leads Yuri’s heart to rupture as she disappears before Yuri can reach her. Had the Internet been around during the Bolshevik Revolution, Yuri and Lara never would have lost each other. They would have been Facebook “comrades.”

Consider the plot twists in our own lives, moments that hinged on uncertainty, when all information was not laid out before us. Modern technology has made our world smaller and our lives easier, but 
perhaps it has also diminished life’s mysteries, and with them, some sense of romance.

In the summer of 1991, without social networks to tether us, I felt such heart-bursting longing for a woman I loved that I traveled across two countries and an ocean to make sure she would not wander out of my life. It was only in her absence that I was able to appreciate the depth of love I felt.

I met Joelle in March while I was still in college. She had recently graduated and was knocking around Peoria, Illinois, her hometown,
figuring out her next step. After two chance meetings, we began going out. Before long, we were rarely apart.

We spent less time with our friends, who could not track the electronic footprints of our relationship. The outside world fell away, and it became just us, slowly unlocking each other’s secrets, which in those days were not posted on “walls” for anybody to scroll through.

But our time together was coming to an end. Before we met, I had planned a summer backpacking adventure across Europe, and Joelle had been talking about a move to Chicago. I told her I would write, and I gave her the address of a friend in Wales, where I would be with my parents at the midpoint of my trip.

After landing in Frankfurt, Germany, I visited the Roman ruins in Trier, spent the summer solstice in Strasbourg, and saw a rock concert in a soccer stadium packed with 50,000 Germanic-looking bikers in Basel. In Budapest, my ancestral home, I heard church choirs and stood before masterworks of art. It was beautiful.

And I was miserable. I could not have been lonelier. All I could think about was Joelle.

Sitting alone on a bench outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, eating street schnitzel, I wished I were in Peoria, sitting across from her. I wrote her letters as if I could will her into my trip—long, heartfelt missives.

By the time I reached London to rendezvous with my parents, I was inconsolable. The distance between us had become unfathomable, and my spirits sank to a depth I had never known. I sobbed and pouted and slunk around London for three days.

Finally, my father suggested (insisted, really) that I just call her.

So from our hotel room in London, I called Peoria. Except that Joelle wasn’t in Peoria. Her mother told me that she had packed up and moved to Chicago. My letters, she said, were sitting there on the table, unopened.

I called Chicago next but was unable to reach her. There was no answer, no machine, no voice mail, no caller ID to show the missed call. Just a landline ringing in an empty apartment. There was no way of knowing where she was or when she would be back. I became gripped by jealousy, panicked by the idea of her settling into a new life.

Here I was in Europe, weeping in front of relics for all the wrong reasons, and she was gallivanting around Chicago meeting people? It seemed ludicrous to admit I somehow thought she might hang around Peoria, waiting for me, but that was, it occurred to me, exactly what I had expected.

My parents and I drove to Wales the next day, and when there was no letter from Joelle waiting, I broke down into a blubbering mess. My body was in Wales, surrounded by craggy green hills and bleating sheep, but my heart was in Chicago.

My parents put me on a train back to London to catch the next flight home. At Heathrow, however, I was told that the round-trip airline ticket my parents had bought me could be used only out of Paris. So it was off to Dover, where I caught a ferry across the channel.

The boat was filled with fellow students, and as we staggered off in Calais and rode the night train to Paris, I regaled them with my tale of woe.

Forget it, they said. One guy said that he was meeting buddies in Pamplona to run with the bulls and that I should join. A girl was headed to France to wait on tables and lie on the beach. “Come with,” she offered.

“No, no,” I said. “If I don’t get back, I’m going to lose her.”

I was roundly ridiculed, and they said I would forever regret cutting short this once-in-a-lifetime trip.

In Paris, I headed straight for Charles de Gaulle Airport. I’d be in Chicago soon. All I had to do was get on a plane.

But I couldn’t get on a plane. Inside the United terminal, it was utter chaos, with people 40 deep at the ticket counter. I would not be getting on the next plane—or any other.

Exhausted, I lugged my backpack toward the trains, tears in my eyes. What a disaster. Stuck in Paris for three weeks! Could things be worse?

But as I left the United terminal, I found myself in the British Airways wing. I was facing three smiling ticket agents.

“You don’t happen to have any seats today?” I asked.

“We have seats,” one said, “but the plane leaves in 20 minutes.”

The one-way ticket cost twice what my parents paid for my round-trip fare. I glanced at my credit card: “For emergency use only.”

I bought the ticket. This was the part I didn’t tell my parents.

At least not until four years later, on the night before Joelle and I married. I confessed it after my father told a roomful of friends and family the tale of the despondent boy who chose love over bleating sheep, Roman ruins, and all the wine in Paris.

Read more: http://www.rd.com/true-stories/love/love-story-before-social-networks/#ixzz3GUejZpGC

Lady of the Library

The Stranger Who Changed My Life: 

Lady of the Library

The elegant woman didn’t seem to belong in these stuffy old stacks. But the book she handed me transformed my world.

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At ten years old, I borrowed a book from the library that had the word mistress in the title. Granted, the cover art featured a gilded carriage reminiscent of Cinderella’s, with sparkles that flashed in the spokes of the wheels. My mother did not notice this book amid my stack of 20 until I was at home reading it. The book was confiscated, and we went back to the library. I remember how embarrassed I was as my mother explained that I needed reading material that was different from the book, ahem—she cleared her throat and looked down—that we had just returned.

The librarian on duty was the antithesis of the stereotype. She was tall and thin with short auburn hair swept back from pale, high cheekbones. Her eyes were large and green. Instead of glasses perched on the end of her aristocratic nose (you could just tell that she had an aristocrat in there somewhere), she wore a quarter-size, filigree-framed magnifying glass suspended from a braided gold chain.

Holding up one elegant finger, she looked down at me and smiled, walked from behind the counter, and beckoned for me to follow. We skirted the clunky computers with their green screen savers and crossed the tiled hallway to the carpeted adult fiction section. She was dressed simply in sage-colored slacks and a flowing floral blouse. But her walk was so graceful that she could easily have qualified for a part in a musical with Fred Astaire.

She walked down an aisle through the S’s, tapping a fingernail against her even, white teeth. “Here you are,” she said. Looking at her, one would have thought she spoke with a proper British accent. Instead, her pronunciation was honey-dipped and distinctly Southern. Deeply Southern. “It’s called I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. The same author who wrote 101 Dalmatians.”

I felt far too old for dog stories and villains as hyperbolized as Cruella de Vil.

“It’s very different from 101 Dalmatians, though,” she said, registering my disappointment.

I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I was skeptical. I mean, the title alone was weird. I Capture the Castle? It sounded like a bunch of dumb kids playing King of the Hill.

I took the book home, curled up on our window seat, and started reading: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring—I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad I mustn’t write any more of it.”

I was hooked. Absolutely hooked. I had a henhouse. I wanted to be a writer. I loved to scribble in strange places and felt insecure about my poetry.

I never told the librarian how much that book meant to me. How it spurred my writing dreams to the point that I took journals on hikes through the woods and paused to jot down notes in the crook of an old tree near a clear, cold stream.

Two weeks ago, I drove two and a half hours to meet my mother for a Christmas luncheon in a quaint tea shop in my old hometown square. I don’t often take my young daughter on road trips by myself, as she needs someone to entertain her if she is not asleep. This combined with a two-hour traffic jam that awoke my daughter, because the car stopped for traffic, to set my nerves on edge.

I had just finished thawing my nerves and my hands with a cup of coffee in the tea shop when I looked up and saw her. I saw the auburn-haired librarian who had changed my life. Sixteen years had passed, but—for a moment—time stood still. There were a few more crinkles around her eyes, and as she crossed the polished hardwood floor toward a table draped with imported English lace, she might’ve moved just a bit more slowly.

And yet she still possessed that transcendent beauty, that refined grace not quantified by age, symmetry, or fad. A lump blocked my throat as, from her neck, I saw a filigreed magnifying glass suspended from a braided gold chain.

My teacup clattered to my saucer as I rose to my feet. I moved toward her—all knees and elbows and energy—and blurted, “You work at the library! You once showed me I Capture the Castle! I’m a writer now! That’s still my favorite book!”

The woman paused and smiled kindly. But then she tipped her auburn head. I realized that dementia or something like it had kept her from understanding me. My face flamed. I stepped back. A woman who resembled the librarian and was probably her sister took her by the elbow and led her gently away.

As I watched her go, her stride just as light as I remembered it, I wondered how many lives we change without realizing what we do is significant. For all that woman had really done was lend me a book. But it had captured my world.

Article taken from rd.com

Read more: http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/stranger-who-changed-my-life-lady-library/#ixzz2vvCH3zyu