Have you ever been in love? Have you ever experienced that wonderful delirium that is all consuming and mysterious? When it happens, it is easily identifiable..
..
..
unless it happens when you are 7 years old in grade two.
That's when it happened to me.
I didn't know what it was then, but now I recognize, it was, indeed, true love.
It started on a day long ago in France on a military bus.
The bus was big and a dark kaki colour It was our magic carpet that took us air force kids from the apartment complex to the activities at the base.
I remember the first time I saw him.
It's as vivid as if it were this morning.
I remember all the details as clearly as looking at a snapshot right here, right now.
He sat down in the front of the bus.
All I could see was the back of his round head with its neat crew cut and the shoulders of his grey woolen jacket with white ribbing along the neck.
The back of the seat blocked the rest of him.
But I had seen enough to know that he was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
His name, I was to discover, was Mac Prescott.
The next four years of my life were consumed by thoughts of him.
I lived in anticipation of the next time I'd see him.
And when I did, I didn't know what to say.
Words escaped me.
It was as if I didn't have any words left.
But I was able to watch.
Like a hawk, I stared at him from the girls playground at school, when he was playing marbles.
I followed his baseball games and sat with him like a velcro twin on the bus.
Speechless, practically, but, oh, I was so happy! The in between times were long and full of angst.
We had no way of communicating when we were apart as we didn't even have telephones, so our meetings were very haphazard.
No one had any idea the turmoil going on inside of me.
It ached.
It longed.
it stressed.
It rejoiced.
But most of the time, it just filled me, filled me till it overflowed.
Since I didn't understand what was happening, I didn't know how to handle all these emotions or how to behave.
I remember, clearly, (keep in mind I was 7-8 years old,) opening my overlarge, bigger than me, more like a door, bedroom window.
I mean this was a third floor apartment.
The French didn't have an eye for safety, then.
I digress.
That night, through my opened window, the bright full moon shone down on me.
I sensed that we, that moon and me, shared an awesomeness, inexplicable and all absorbing.
When I was 11, the inevitable happened.
News came that we had to move back to Canada.
Canada was only a name to me and meant nothing.
France was my home.
With Mac.
It was hard getting on that ship to be swallowed up by the never ending sea.
Well, I did know we would be bound forever and I would never marry anyone until I saw him again.
Never.
We wrote letters in our young adolescent years.
But life got in the way and the letters dwindled.
The last letter I got from him, Mac was telling me about his new bull dog.
He named it Christine.
The high school years passed and we totally lost touch.
But he was always there in the back of my mind.
It was my stubborn Aries loyalty that held me prisoner to my promise.
I wondered if I'd ever see him again.
The year was 1969, the last year of University completed.
I was packing up my belongings in my locker which was located in the tunnels of Carleton.
They had turned into lifeless echo chambers in the absence of students.
I heaped my belongings in my arms said good-bye to my locker and started walking down the long stretch of hallway.
I passed one person approaching from the other direction.
The maps and cardboard tubes he was carrying covered most of his face.
The clicking of my high heels on the cement floor echoed loudly and made my presence very obvious.
I was a bit conscious of this so I looked down as we passed.
I don't understand what made me do what I did next.
It wasn't a conscious decision.
I stopped, turned and called out, 'Mac Prescott??'He answered to his name by turning and looking at me.
I felt it necessary to introduce myself.
Of course he remembered me.
We chatted, but again I was not sure of how much to say because he never knew how I felt about him in those long, lanky days of our childhood, and he had never said how he felt about me.
So our conversation was polite.
When it was done, we went on our empty ways.
I later regretted my reserve.
My questions were still unanswered and he had slipped away again.
In 2002 there was a reunion of the 2 Wing 'brats' as we were affectionately called.
Maybe he'd be there! Well, he wasn't, but friends of his older brother, Jim, were out to track Jim down.
We found Jim's number in the phone book and we called him.
I left a message on his recorder that I was looking for Mac, this person that had had a profound effect on my life.
A year went by without a word from Mac.
I had gone to the brats' 2 Wing web site and put a search on for him.
At this point, I wanted a resolution of our past, I wanted him to know the effect he had had on me.
It just felt so unresolved, so open ended.
It was just another day in the fall of 2003.
I did my usual morning routine of checking my email.
Well, there it was.
An email from Mac Prescott.
He politely asked if I were the person looking for him.
My name had changed from Fripp to Dorothy, so he wasn't sure exactly who I was.
We shared profuse emails, analysing, questioning, answering.
It was a welcomed closure of a loose emotion woven into the tapestry of my life.
We now keep in touch every couple of years.
I was only a child.
But I was right.
We would not part, not completely, for the rest of our lives.