First Love - Last Love
I don’t think I had ever been in love - true love - before I met the woman who would become my wife. We were both living in Paris in the same student residence and we met ‘par hasard’. It was fantastic from the first. We were gobsmacked. Neither of us knew what to say or to do. And we tried again and it was as good as the first time. What impressed me the most, apart the sex, was that she recited from memory the story of the Iliad - she was a classical scholar after all - during a week of nightly love making. We spent the year in Paris, two students, enjoying a Parisian interlude that was fated to end when we returned home.
But it didn’t. I wanted her and she wanted me and despite the distances and the consequences, we tried to get back together. I was able to find work for her teaching French to Cajun kids in Louisiana. I found a job as a TV news camera man for a tv station in Lafayette. The honeymoon continued. Not without problems, like sleeping in a motel room with roaches, but we were young. She loved teaching. I loved my job, but I knew it had no future. I went back to University, to study premed courses in order to qualify for Graduate school. I applied to a school in Dallas and I was accepted.
Meanwhile we lived simply and cheaply. We were happy to live together as man and wife, but not married. And we lived in Louisiana, a place that revealed it charms to us slowly but surely. I had visited over the years, to see my mother, and it had never left a lasting impression. But now I really lived it and loved it. The antebellum houses, the Cajun culture and the city of New Orleans that was down the road where we would spend weekends. It was great. A dream.
I proposed to her on a river boat, under a full moon, in the middle of the Mississippi. (See picture.) How romantic can you get? She said yes! See her here
