Valentine

When I returned at year end from my trip to South America the Christmas mail was still waiting to be read. Nowadays, when daily mail consists mainly of advertising flyers and bills, the hand addressed envelopes, colorful foreign and “special edition” Canadian stamps create a charged air of curiosity and expectation. I was not disappointed.

In addition to the greeting cards, I received a number of Christmas letters with news from friends and family about their past activities and plans for 2007. Travel news tops the list of subjects. I was impressed by the fact that simple, local, “holidays at the cottage” are “out”, and multiple trips a year to the most exotic of places are “in”.

Gone also are the handwritten letters of the past, and ‘in’ are the templated, businesslike, word-processor generated family newsletters. The tools of our information society such as, cell phones, messaging, hotmail, bloging, U-tubing, MSN, VoiP, and the demand for instant communication have pushed old fashioned letter writing aside.

Handwritten letters demand a certain effort, skill and spontaneity. Above all they imply intimacy and exclusiveness. Unlike Christmas and New Year, when we celebrate family and friendship, Valentine’s Day is specially designated to celebrate love and romance. It is therefore particularly suited to the old fashioned craft of letter writing, a skill which I have had occasion to practice. This leads me to speak of my wife Adriana and to tell you how we met.

I was a student at Carleton University and decided, with 6 friends, to drive non-stop, in two cars, to Mexico City during the Christmas break. The real reason for the trip was to hike up the snow-capped mount Popocatepetl, a 17,888 ft volcano SE of Mexico City. After the hike I decided to take a local bus to still “off the map” Acapulco. Unlike the popular tourist destination that it is now, Acapulco was then a laid back town where I would sit around Hornos beach with the fishermen who set their nets out in the bay at sunset, and where I checked my rucksack at the Greyhound station over night, and slept on the beach.

Early in the morning, on one of those carefree days, a number of taxis pulled up to the beach and deposited more than 40 girls, who instantly transformed and enlivened my view of the beach. It didn’t take me long to follow them to the water and make contact. They were from Argentina, on a Rotary’s Club arranged exchange, and were to live with American families for several months at various locations around the US. Acapulco was just a stop over. Three days of contact with one of these lovely girls was not enough, so we exchanged home addresses and I was promised a letter once she knew where she would be staying in Miami.

That promised letter never arrived! But, with memories of a great vacation, I returned the following Christmas to Acapulco and from there I then sent her a card with the words: “Greetings from Acapulco – but it is not the same without you.”

When I returned to Ottawa I found a letter from Argentina telling me that she had returned to Argentina soon after arriving in Miami because her mother passed away. Comparing date stamps we found that the letter and card had crossed in the mail. The year of silence was forgiven and forgotten and, encouraged by the synchronicity of our first letters, we began a prolonged period of letter writing. At first we just replied to each other’s letters. Then the frequency increased and we wrote without waiting for a reply. At one time in the third year, Adriana returned from a holiday to find 21 of my letters waiting for her.

Long distance phone calls to Argentina, at $12 per minute, where prohibitively expensive, so the frequency of letters increased from one letter a week, to two letters a week, a letter every day and eventually to letters morning, noon and night.

Finally, in my last year at university, we hatched a plan to meet again, with the understanding that we would end the relationship if we didn’t click. When I met Adriana at the Ottawa airport it was on a bitterly cold January day. The heater in my Volkswagen bug wasn’t working and I had to wrap her in a blanket for the ride to the Mirador Hotel.

It didn’t take us long to re-discover our spark and we got engaged within three days. I bought an engagement ring at People’s Credit Jewellers with the inscription “Para Siempre” and promised to one day buy the diamond. Adriana flew back to Cordoba in Argentina to break the news that we intended to get married as soon as I graduated. Her father didn’t speak to her for the next three months but, in the end, when I arrived three days before the wedding, he sent his small private plane, a Bonanza to Buenos Aires, to pick me up. I had two return plane tickets in my pocket, bought with money I had borrowed from friends, because I was a student with no job and no money.

Three days after our wedding Adriana’s brother also married and we all went to Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro for our joint honeymoon.

I cannot end this story with the phrase “the rest is history”. No! It was the beginning of a tremendous adventure in married life. We have three fine sons and my brother in law has five children, two of whom got married last year. One of those weddings was the occasion for our December trip to Argentina. It was only later that I got “permission” to go on the hiking and hitchhiking trip to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. I cannot give you the recipe for a lasting marriage, but while I was on the hiking trip, in Torres del Paine, I met a New Zealand helicopter pilot, who mused, over a bottle of good Chilean wine, “The best way to keep a marriage intact is to make her like you”. I thought this was quite similar to the biblical proverb: “Give, and the receiving will take care of itself”. When I think about it, any problems we’ve had, generally occurred when I got those ideas the wrong way round. But happily our marriage has survived … so far!