Googling

I don’t remember what this particular assignment was, but a woman in one of my memoir classes wrote about an old love, the one that got away, the one she had thought about, daydreamed about, wondered about for years. She found him on Facebook, and wrote him. They planned to meet at a restaurant in New York. She laid out all her clothes on the bed and tried everything on before she settled on what to wear. She bought new shoes. She had her hair cut. She probably put on blush. Then she took the bus to Manhattan. She is seventy.

Her old love was every bit as nice as she recalled. They had a pleasant time, they talked about what had and what hadn’t happened, they talked about what their lives had been like. They drank wine. He told her he had been devastated when she left him to marry another man. But he was heavy and bald and had been happily married for years.

How on earth can anyone survive without a daydream? I wondered.

“What a terrible loss,” I said. “How can you stand it?”

“We can be friends now,” she said.

Before I got pregnant and married and my life zigged off in an unexpected direction, there was another boy I loved. He was handsome and kind and sexy and gentle. We met on the Amagansett beach, where I’d gone every summer of my life. Everyone knew everyone else, but this boy was a stranger. He looked almost like a man. I was seventeen, and looking good, and I got up and strolled into the water as nonchalantly as possible what with my heart beating so fast. I dove through a wave, and when I surfaced there he was. His eyes were merry, but they were old, as if he knew things I’d never know, but life still amused him.

I googled this old love, to reassure myself that he was still there somewhere, and perhaps remembered us those years ago. Although we hadn’t seen each other in over fifty years, and we had never slept together, I felt close to him. Sure enough, there he was on his own website, complete with email address. I wrote him a short note, ending with “I used to daydream about you a lot, a long time ago.” He wrote back. He said he remembered the first time he saw me. “You walked down the beach and into the ocean,” he said. This made me smile. “It was an electrifying moment. I followed you. We rode some waves. We made a date for that night. My next memory is of you leaning against a tree and pulling my body into yours in an embrace and kiss that I’ve never forgotten.” He said some more things, all of them nice. He too is happily married, has kids and probably grandkids.

He remembered what I remembered. It was like being on that beach again, seventeen years old. I could taste the air, see the blue of the water, remember the heat. I printed out his email. I lay around for hours daydreaming, a welcome remove from reality.

Then the lovely youthful feeling floated out of reach. I was seventy-one again, not seventeen. But I folded my friend’s email and put it in the special section of my wallet where I keep my Medicare card. It goes with me everywhere. Sometimes, on rainy days when I feel unlovely, I read it.