…And suddenly you know that it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of new beginnings…

Now a year of memories after arriving here in South Africa…Dedicated to the Love of my Life…Mr. P…A remembering of our first meeting…Atlanta, Georgia

Superbowl LIII…the American football championship was being played for the first time at the Mercedes-Benz stadium the day of my arrival in Atlanta… February 3, 2019…

When our first meeting was planned…it happened to fall on the day of the biggest and most grandiose sporting event of the year…Atlanta, Georgia in 2019…that fact did not even register with me in the slightest…not being a sports aficionado in the very least…I know…I know… a cardinal sin…especially in the Midwest…

American sports…all this booing…drunkenness…dressing in spandex suits…irate fans spending hours defending their favorite athletes…noisy plastics horns that make the decibel level unbearable for everyone…subjecting themselves to the unbearable tortures of cold and heat…yelling at the television as though that’s going to help change a score or motivate their teams…start fires when they win…slaves to superstitions…

I digress…Driving into the 9th largest city in the US…Atlanta…my heart began to stumble over it’s own rhythm…my gut started to knot into a ball of tight rubber bands…thoughts swirling into a vortex of irrational thoughts…concentrate…I had to concentrate on finding the Airbnb that P. had booked for me…

Feeling like a Martian on Venus would be an apt description of the confusion I felt in trying to locate the entrance to the apartment complex…kept going around and around…and around…I know that I am directionally challenged…but still…this was ridiculous…so I admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to come out well in the search and gave up and called…

I had no expectations…mentally picturing something such as a “Bed and Breakfast” type of place…I had never stayed at an Airbnb before…the photos of the room were simple yet clean…the host claimed that the place had “good vibes”…and it was afterall the Superbowl…

I found the entrance and my stomach fell to the floorboard and then out the door…hanging unto the bumper as I traversed the empty cracked grey parking lot between the sordidly dingy red apartment buildings…everything that your mind conjurs up when the term “ghetto” is used…

Pulling into a parking space…I reluctantly sat…resisting leaving my car where I feared that I would return to find nothing but the black shell of the remains…

…slowly I opened my car door and transcended the rickedly narrow black staircase to the second story and timidly knocked on the flaking back door…

The door was opened and I entered a small kitchen that was stacked littered with a hodge podge of items…kitchen utensils…counters of food…not a great first impression…

…the hostess…pleasant enough…soothing my jitters just a tad with her few pleasantries as she showed me to my room at the end of the short dark hall…

…In a manner of minutes…it became peripheral to the knowledge that I was going to meet Mr. P soon…would there be any “chemistry” or just a budding “friendship” that would fade with time and distance…there was no way that I could figure out the answer…I had tallied everything I knew and had felt during our year long emails sent and received…the Whatapp messages and photographs…the voice memo’s that had continued to intrique me over time…I had been incapable of calculating the end result…

…I sat at the edge of the bed and my hope…and made the call that I had arrived and was settled in…we made a date to have our first supper togather…I felt my heart beating in my throat…the unquenched life long desire for a true romance bubbled through the long lonely years…surfacing in tremors and fear of just another huge disappointment…hope springs eternal they say…maybe…possibly…

Waiting was an eternity…but the knock at the door came…

I remember that he seemed to fill the doorway…tall and handsome…nicely fitted jeans…just like I like…

As natural as the sun rises and sets…he opened his arms and I ran into them…Time stopped…and then he wrapped his arms around me…and for the first time in my life…I was home…he was the place that I had searched for all my life…

Everything dimmed and fell away…this is where I was supposed to be…

“It is a splendid thing to think that the woman you really love will never grow old to you. Through the wrinkles of time, through the mask of years, if you really love her, you will always see the face you loved and won. And a woman who really loves a man does not see that he grows old; he is not decrepit to her; he does not tremble; he is not old; she always sees the same gallant gentleman who won her hand and heart. I like to think of it in that way; I like to think that love is eternal. And to love in that way and then go down the hill of life together, and as you go down, hear, perhaps, the laughter of grandchildren, while the birds of joy and love sing once more in the leafless branches of the tree of age.”
― Robert Ingersoll, The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child