October 11th, 2006
Let me tell you a quick story about a man named Cecil, the headmaster of an English language school I once taught at:
Cecil grew up in the pre-World-War-II Canadian prairies. He was a teenager through the 1930s and 1940s, a time when there was very little money, possessions, clothes, or food, and life was very restrictive and religious.
For one particularly difficult year his family, being so poor, had to share a house with another equally poor family, pooling their resources to survive. In that house Cecil was the only teenaged boy, and the other family's daughter was the only teenaged girl. You might think that with all those teenaged hormones and their sudden living arrangement in very close proximity there might have been some surrender to their physical desires, but there wasn't: Both Cecil and his girlfriend were brought up in strictly religious God-fearing families, and they believed that it was one of the worst sins imaginable to not wait until they were married. So they made a plan to wait, then get married when they could.
Of course, that didn't stop them from thinking and talking about it. And they sure talked about it ... and planned ... and plotted. They would be together just as soon as they were older and could get married. They also thought that maybe—just maybe—they might be able to live somewhere out there in the harsh world alone some day, married and in love and consummating their bodily passions whenever they wanted. And so, with more than idle teenaged curiosity, they sat out on the porch of the shared house all Summer of that year talking about how it would be, holding hands, and even occasionally kissing ... all with parental knowledge, perhaps even parental blessing.
But lives seldom work out according to the simple lines drawn in the minds of teenagers, and such was the fate for Cecil and his girlfriend. The next year she and her family were able to drag themselves out of the abject poverty they had suffered thanks to the father's enlistment in the Canadian army due to its involvement in the outbreak of war in Europe, and also thanks to some success with the parts of the family farm they had managed to hold on to.
Cecil and his girlfriend stayed in contact, of course, but both of them met and married other partners in due course. As their fortunes rose through the years and decades, with burgeoning careers, rising wealth, and the birth of children and grandchildren, they remained close friends, writing letters, meeting for Christmas or birthdays when they could, each even making efforts to travel across the country to attend the other's family's weddings and funerals. And in this way their lives went on and they grew old ... not together, but certainly not as strangers, either.
When both were in their early 70s, they and their spouses went on a vacation together, and it was there that Cecil waited until a moment when he could be alone with his former girlfriend. It wasn't until the morning of the day they were to return from their trip that he finally found himself alone with her so that he could reveal a secret to her. It was, in fact, something he had carried with him all his life since that Summer when they sat on the porch and kissed and planned for the future they never had, and he wanted to tell her his secret before it was too late:
"You know," he said to her. "I've had a good life with my wife, and I love and cherish my children and grandchildren very much ... but I've never gotten over my love for you."
Without hesitation, she replied, "Well, don't you think it's about time you did?"
* * *
Now, Cecil himself told me this story when he got back from that vacation about 12 or so years ago. He was not a sentimental man at all, so I was certain that he wasn't going to burst into tears ... yet, all the same, it moved me to hear such a tale from a man so otherwise uninterested in overt displays of emotion.
- Rate my blog - Sign my guestbook -
Email me -
Go back to index