Oh, Rona, this is an excellent story and visual! I learned a few new words and read some of the stirring sentences twice.
I was smitten with my Costa Rican Outward Bound instructor, and he knew it. During an ocean kayaking day in ferocious surf (as practice for whitewater river expedition), he got clobbered on the head with his paddle, and I gleefully stayed behind to drag him and his boat along the beach, and serve him rusty water from a spigot I found in a chicken clutch. He honorably held me at arm’s length and whispered, “Meet me after the course.” I then faxed him from Ecuador and Peru for the next two months when we visited a town, stinky and unshaven from wilderness trekking.
My longing almost hurt. The prospect of seeing him again kept my spirit aloft during extreme adventures that nearly killed a few of us. We reunited and stayed together 3 years and he proposed marriage.
I invited him to Chicago to meet my parents. My father had an obnoxious friend over one day and in talking he blurted out, “Just tell us—is he Black??”
Say and I exchanged love letters aplenty. His Spanish poetry made me swoon, and I was reading Neruda and thirstily learning Spanish, and trying to write odes to our unlikely, searing passion, too.
Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. I said, “I can’t ask you to convert, but go to the [one] synagogue in San José, and talk to the rabbi. I warn you, he will turn you away.” I told Say he’d be dissuaded three times to test his determination. But he came home and said, “That rabbi was a jerk.” My family put a lot of emphasis, shall we say, on us girls marrying in the faith.
Anyway, our lives were too different. He wanted me to live in CR and I was getting a master’s degree… I wanted him to live in the States, and perhaps be a paramedic.
Fast forward twenty years. I found my old boyfriends on Facebook and asked them to send my love letters back to me.
Only Say had saved the entire lot. He mailed them to me in a binder, with each one enveloped in a plastic sheath, arranged in chronological order, along with a pound of Costa Rican coffee. If I interleaved our letters, this would make a HOT book of mutual long-distance longing, that was doomed from the start.
Someday I will go ahead and interleaf my letters with his… They’re stored in my childhood bedroom in Chicago (I’ve lived in New York for 30 years). My daughters have got to discover this treasure someday.
Say and I keep in touch. We each married and had children with different people… but if a twin flame exists… we are living proof, and we know it.
“Is he black?” Your story and mine connect here. If a very few things had been different, you two might have married. It’s telling that you still have a bond.
Rona, this is nuanced and touching. You lived at the crossroads of class, race, politics, education, and teenage love. It was an extremely significant moment in our nation’s history and in yours as well. And you saved the primary source, those index cards. Such self-awareness. You were clear-eyed about your feelings for Bradley. So unlike most teenagers! (I was a confused and trembling mess.) I can sense your true presence here, akin to “stage presence” which you obviously had as well, playing Ophelia. Your powers of observation were already fully developed. A very thoughtful piece. Thank you so much.
Rona, what a tale and example of how far we've come (not that we don't have leagues left to swim!). I am enchanted that you kept Bradley's index-card, typewritten letter. I learned that my mother, not long before she died, discarded the journals she kept in college because she felt they were too full of silliness about boys. Fortunately, she kept many other written records, letters, and such, but how I wish I could have read those less censored journals!
Michelle, I laughed out loud when I came to the part about you asking your former boyfriends to return the love letters you'd written. And then I had to explain my laughter to my husband, who admitted that he still has a box with letters from several of his former girlfriends. I had forgotten this detail of what we keep in storage. We've been married more than 30 years, so they are of no consequence to me, but I still took the opportunity to rib him about it. 😅
My husband speaks tenderly of his high school sweetheart and for years maintained occasional contact. I have never been jealous. It’s partly in tribute to her that he became the man he is, and found me.
There are so many layers to this story, written in your ever-curious, beautiful voice. The fact that you kept the paper-clipped love letter really emphasizes to me how you always were a story teller, perhaps before you even knew. I feel safe in this exploration of difficult subjects of the time that still plague us today...meaning we still don't have all the answers. Whew. This feels like it should be a short story in a collection of your profoundly clear recollections of issues facing different periods of your life, how you dealt with them then and how you might now. It's simply brilliant. And sorry, unlike you, I didn't see the stories in any love letters I've received and sadly, didn't keep them!
My first boyfriend was Bradley too! Bradley Jones. 1956 in grade one. He walked me home from school. Yes, six year old children used to walk alone! (Mom was often busy with two younger babies at home. “Use your head” was my basic training.)
Anyway. Bradley called me his ‘raisin pie’. He was very devoted - holding my hand all the way - a man of six years already taking charge. I did feel loved and safe. One afternoon mom found us changing clothes in my room. You’d think we were going to have sex the way she reacted. He wasn’t black - just male. Although now I wonder why we were exchanging clothes. Maybe he just wanted my dress. Hmm. Hadn’t thought of this for ages until your wonderful story. To your much more important story though Rona, not until my parents moved from Montreal to Cleveland in 1972 did awareness of prejudice occur to me. Men were always presumed a danger - now black boys were double threat. If you could find one. The war had taken young men of all colours.
The U.S. was so wierd. My sister and I didn’t stay. Back to Canada- where the boys were.
Raisin pie! What a sweet endearment. I too marvel at the freedom kids had until the relatively recent past. At eight I was already walking into town on my own.
The notecards! How earnest and sincere he was. What I appreciated about this essay is your exploration of the contemporaneous context of interracial dating and your own critical self-awareness of your own race.
Oooh, Rona, thank you for this. I love reading it and a sheaf of sightly disorganized love letters past appeared, including ones I still have, and ones I burned. It will be fun to have a peek through it today. Letters seem to me to offer a thoughtful and expressive means to communicate. (My husband and wrote to each other every day until retirement - now it's more like twice a week, still a gift to write and read.)
You STILL write love letters to each other! What a delightful habit. I wonder if couples starting out today, in the age of text, write any letters at all.
Love this story. I didn't get a love letter but I received a watch from a Thai student studying at our local community college and working at the weekly newspaper where I worked while going to high school in small town Kansas. My father was horrified that I had accepted a gift from a foreigner with obvious evil intentions. Returning what had only been a gift of kindness hurt both of us.
Such a sweet personal memory, set in its own raw times. If our worlds were smaller, the personal would govern our lives. So much of literature reflects that experience, the submission or the rebellion, for better and worse. Thank you for sharing and thank you commenters as well. I have saved love letters, even those from my ex husband. The whole exercise reminds me of WB Yeats poem, "When You Are Old'.
Valentines Day 1981. Scene: a small but pretty Oxford college. I'm a fresher, and I've fallen properly in love for the very first time. My parents aren't going to approve of him, he's a Northerner, he votes Labour and he wears red desert boots. I adore him. In my pigeonhole I find a pretty postcard, I think it's an Impressionist painting Degas? And on the other side in his lovely handwriting, just a poem, one I've never read before, but will memorise and stumble through time and time again...When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes....
Sorry, Rona, I never replied to this when I first read it, but interestingly, it has stayed in my mind. You draw a very clear picture. I was left with two unrelated thoughts: i) I somehow felt very pleased that you didn't consider his behaviour to be sexual abuse. Young people take risks, not quite knowing what they are doing. As you said, it didn't cause you any harm. 2) I come from a good left-wing professional family but I am sure they would have had the same response back in the day. (My parents weren't particularly thrilled that I was marrying a somewhat prickly working class English guy - three strikes against him right away.) Finally, Reminded me of "Looking Who's Coming for Dinner".
Glad you appreciated my mention of sexual abuse, which I nearly left out because it seemed like a digression. The perils of dating have shifted so profoundly that I took the risk. Readers were going to think about abuse, and a writer must address what’s going to concern the reader. And I wanted to show how protective I now feel about Bradley.
Oh, Rona, this is an excellent story and visual! I learned a few new words and read some of the stirring sentences twice.
I was smitten with my Costa Rican Outward Bound instructor, and he knew it. During an ocean kayaking day in ferocious surf (as practice for whitewater river expedition), he got clobbered on the head with his paddle, and I gleefully stayed behind to drag him and his boat along the beach, and serve him rusty water from a spigot I found in a chicken clutch. He honorably held me at arm’s length and whispered, “Meet me after the course.” I then faxed him from Ecuador and Peru for the next two months when we visited a town, stinky and unshaven from wilderness trekking.
My longing almost hurt. The prospect of seeing him again kept my spirit aloft during extreme adventures that nearly killed a few of us. We reunited and stayed together 3 years and he proposed marriage.
I invited him to Chicago to meet my parents. My father had an obnoxious friend over one day and in talking he blurted out, “Just tell us—is he Black??”
Say and I exchanged love letters aplenty. His Spanish poetry made me swoon, and I was reading Neruda and thirstily learning Spanish, and trying to write odes to our unlikely, searing passion, too.
Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. I said, “I can’t ask you to convert, but go to the [one] synagogue in San José, and talk to the rabbi. I warn you, he will turn you away.” I told Say he’d be dissuaded three times to test his determination. But he came home and said, “That rabbi was a jerk.” My family put a lot of emphasis, shall we say, on us girls marrying in the faith.
Anyway, our lives were too different. He wanted me to live in CR and I was getting a master’s degree… I wanted him to live in the States, and perhaps be a paramedic.
Fast forward twenty years. I found my old boyfriends on Facebook and asked them to send my love letters back to me.
Only Say had saved the entire lot. He mailed them to me in a binder, with each one enveloped in a plastic sheath, arranged in chronological order, along with a pound of Costa Rican coffee. If I interleaved our letters, this would make a HOT book of mutual long-distance longing, that was doomed from the start.
Someday I will go ahead and interleaf my letters with his… They’re stored in my childhood bedroom in Chicago (I’ve lived in New York for 30 years). My daughters have got to discover this treasure someday.
Say and I keep in touch. We each married and had children with different people… but if a twin flame exists… we are living proof, and we know it.
“Is he black?” Your story and mine connect here. If a very few things had been different, you two might have married. It’s telling that you still have a bond.
Rona, this is nuanced and touching. You lived at the crossroads of class, race, politics, education, and teenage love. It was an extremely significant moment in our nation’s history and in yours as well. And you saved the primary source, those index cards. Such self-awareness. You were clear-eyed about your feelings for Bradley. So unlike most teenagers! (I was a confused and trembling mess.) I can sense your true presence here, akin to “stage presence” which you obviously had as well, playing Ophelia. Your powers of observation were already fully developed. A very thoughtful piece. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Mary. I am clear-eyed now but wasn’t then and didn’t have the language to express my confusion.
I don’t know what I would have done in your situation. It’s a terrible place to find yourself in. Confusion is right.
I am bowled over by both of these stories!
Rona, what a tale and example of how far we've come (not that we don't have leagues left to swim!). I am enchanted that you kept Bradley's index-card, typewritten letter. I learned that my mother, not long before she died, discarded the journals she kept in college because she felt they were too full of silliness about boys. Fortunately, she kept many other written records, letters, and such, but how I wish I could have read those less censored journals!
Michelle, I laughed out loud when I came to the part about you asking your former boyfriends to return the love letters you'd written. And then I had to explain my laughter to my husband, who admitted that he still has a box with letters from several of his former girlfriends. I had forgotten this detail of what we keep in storage. We've been married more than 30 years, so they are of no consequence to me, but I still took the opportunity to rib him about it. 😅
My husband speaks tenderly of his high school sweetheart and for years maintained occasional contact. I have never been jealous. It’s partly in tribute to her that he became the man he is, and found me.
Yes....YES!! Exactly that.
There are so many layers to this story, written in your ever-curious, beautiful voice. The fact that you kept the paper-clipped love letter really emphasizes to me how you always were a story teller, perhaps before you even knew. I feel safe in this exploration of difficult subjects of the time that still plague us today...meaning we still don't have all the answers. Whew. This feels like it should be a short story in a collection of your profoundly clear recollections of issues facing different periods of your life, how you dealt with them then and how you might now. It's simply brilliant. And sorry, unlike you, I didn't see the stories in any love letters I've received and sadly, didn't keep them!
Yes, I always thought like a writer. Why does this matter? What is going on? I write knowing I will never answer all the questions on my mind.
Enjoyed this, there’s a lot here. Thank you….
Glad to hear it, Ethan.
My first boyfriend was Bradley too! Bradley Jones. 1956 in grade one. He walked me home from school. Yes, six year old children used to walk alone! (Mom was often busy with two younger babies at home. “Use your head” was my basic training.)
Anyway. Bradley called me his ‘raisin pie’. He was very devoted - holding my hand all the way - a man of six years already taking charge. I did feel loved and safe. One afternoon mom found us changing clothes in my room. You’d think we were going to have sex the way she reacted. He wasn’t black - just male. Although now I wonder why we were exchanging clothes. Maybe he just wanted my dress. Hmm. Hadn’t thought of this for ages until your wonderful story. To your much more important story though Rona, not until my parents moved from Montreal to Cleveland in 1972 did awareness of prejudice occur to me. Men were always presumed a danger - now black boys were double threat. If you could find one. The war had taken young men of all colours.
The U.S. was so wierd. My sister and I didn’t stay. Back to Canada- where the boys were.
Raisin pie! What a sweet endearment. I too marvel at the freedom kids had until the relatively recent past. At eight I was already walking into town on my own.
The notecards! How earnest and sincere he was. What I appreciated about this essay is your exploration of the contemporaneous context of interracial dating and your own critical self-awareness of your own race.
Glad you picked up on that, Jill. Interracial dating was a very big deal in those days.
Well-done! So many thoughts of the 60’s-70’s came to mind.
Oooh, Rona, thank you for this. I love reading it and a sheaf of sightly disorganized love letters past appeared, including ones I still have, and ones I burned. It will be fun to have a peek through it today. Letters seem to me to offer a thoughtful and expressive means to communicate. (My husband and wrote to each other every day until retirement - now it's more like twice a week, still a gift to write and read.)
You STILL write love letters to each other! What a delightful habit. I wonder if couples starting out today, in the age of text, write any letters at all.
So rich with implication and the only barely suggested: the unknown life of Bradley.
Thanks, Jay. Writing this was an exercise in suggestion.
So many things we don't know...because we don't take the chance ask.
Love this story. I didn't get a love letter but I received a watch from a Thai student studying at our local community college and working at the weekly newspaper where I worked while going to high school in small town Kansas. My father was horrified that I had accepted a gift from a foreigner with obvious evil intentions. Returning what had only been a gift of kindness hurt both of us.
Oh, I am so sorry. This really stings.
Such an interesting story to read. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you, Amy.
Such a sweet personal memory, set in its own raw times. If our worlds were smaller, the personal would govern our lives. So much of literature reflects that experience, the submission or the rebellion, for better and worse. Thank you for sharing and thank you commenters as well. I have saved love letters, even those from my ex husband. The whole exercise reminds me of WB Yeats poem, "When You Are Old'.
Yes. I think Bradley saw my pilgrim soul.
Valentines Day 1981. Scene: a small but pretty Oxford college. I'm a fresher, and I've fallen properly in love for the very first time. My parents aren't going to approve of him, he's a Northerner, he votes Labour and he wears red desert boots. I adore him. In my pigeonhole I find a pretty postcard, I think it's an Impressionist painting Degas? And on the other side in his lovely handwriting, just a poem, one I've never read before, but will memorise and stumble through time and time again...When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes....
Degas and Shakespeare! That’s more like it. I’m starting to adore him, too.
Rona, I love this piece. As per usual, your writing is layered and seeking. It’s a joy to follow the paths it leads you and us along.
Holly, thank you. I love your use of "seeking" as an adjective, a very Holly turn of phrase.
Sorry, Rona, I never replied to this when I first read it, but interestingly, it has stayed in my mind. You draw a very clear picture. I was left with two unrelated thoughts: i) I somehow felt very pleased that you didn't consider his behaviour to be sexual abuse. Young people take risks, not quite knowing what they are doing. As you said, it didn't cause you any harm. 2) I come from a good left-wing professional family but I am sure they would have had the same response back in the day. (My parents weren't particularly thrilled that I was marrying a somewhat prickly working class English guy - three strikes against him right away.) Finally, Reminded me of "Looking Who's Coming for Dinner".
Glad you appreciated my mention of sexual abuse, which I nearly left out because it seemed like a digression. The perils of dating have shifted so profoundly that I took the risk. Readers were going to think about abuse, and a writer must address what’s going to concern the reader. And I wanted to show how protective I now feel about Bradley.
This story really resonated with me. Why is it so hard for men to put their feelings down on paper....?
It was brave of him to do it. The last sentence of his letter, which I chose not to quote, was “Please excuse the typing Rona, I’m nervous!”