I didn’t recognize the bag and I didn’t remember giving anyone a shoe bag from my college so I hedged on my response. Then I got back, “not even a guess who this is? That LaRose etiquette.” Well, LaRose is my mother’s name, so the person knew my mother, but I still had no idea on who it was until he told me it was Jason.
And I was floored. It was an old boyfriend from when I was in my twenties. He and I had kept up for a few years after parting ways but had lost touch as he’d moved away for a different job. Once I realized who it was we started a flurry of texting, asking each other how things were going in each other’s lives. He mentioned a few minutes he had discovered he had a degenerative eye issue. I said I had eye issues on this end as well.
Deciding it was too much to type through, we got on the phone. Same voice. Same laugh. It was like no time had past. He was always a happy person and still was, despite having a rare, possibly unique retinal issue he regularly traveled around the country to have checked by experts in the field (sound familiar?).
He and I talked all about vision, discussing his situation and my daughter’s and their similarities. We got into braille and how he had considered learning it as he will eventually be blind but that he was dissuaded from doing so because of the technology available.
I told him all about my children and husband. He told me about his wife who is now his ex-wife and his current girlfriend. We both asked about each other’s parents, whom we’d gotten to know well when we had dated. We caught up on friends we had had in common when we were together. He has a grown daughter now and some of our mutual friends have children in college. Has it been that long? Has that much time really passed?
What was the most striking to me was our general outlooks on life. We were young when we dated, but we both seem to have evolved to the same place in thinking about life. He said something that was singular to me, because it’s the same thing I believe and say to people: we all have our things. In my case, I have a bad spine and a blind child, everything else in my life I can’t complain about. When he found out he was going to be blind in the future he said it knocked him back for about three weeks but he got over it and moved forward. It reminded me of what it felt like when my daughter’s vision loss happened. It was awful at first and remains ever present, but it’s not insurmountable. And there is more to life to be happy about.
We laughed so many times on the phone I can’t count. I think we could have caught up for several more hours but it was getting late and I had to put my daughter to bed. He said he comes to our area for basketball games. We planned to get together at some point in the future, perforable before more than twenty-five years passes again again.
The Big Boy Update: My son came downstairs this morning and said, “I made this for you, mom.” He’s made many things with the Tubation tubes before, mostly in the gun and sword vein. This is the first time he’s made a heart.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter and I are in Detroit today for an EUA with her retina surgeon tomorrow. She and I had a nice day traveling, eating chocolate and ending the night having Krispy Kreme donuts at 9:30 at night before she had to stop eating due to the upcoming procedure. She likes coming to Detroit, maybe it’s because of all the sugar.
No comments:
Post a Comment