Loving Laurie

- Strephon Says 34 Loving Laurie

Strephon talks about his first great love, Laurie, his loss of her, his reconciliation to his loss, and the lessons he has learned that he passes on to other lovers of love and life.

This is Strephon Kaplan-Williams.

A letter to my First Ex Wife

I did not dream about you directly, Laurie, but I dreamed about being with a loving, beautiful woman living together in Oakland, California.

Interesting how we pick our places. This one had gardens outside the windows.

The place where you and I first made love, Laurie, had a garden and morning glories outside my bedroom window.

Such beautiful lovemaking that was, my lovely Laurie. You were a virgin all of eighteen. We had been dating several months and doing a lot sexually, yet not the full making love. I had kept hesitating. I thought that if I made full love with you, you would then be open to wanting other men. My analyst said, either you do or you don’t do it. So I resolved myself and went ahead with you into the full relationship.

You wanted, at eighteen to explore a sexual life. But we had fallen in love, so passionately in love and so had to be with each other completely. And so, marry we did in a civil ceremony.

That afternoon of the first time, with the gentle rain and the morning glory vines outside my glassed in bedroom window, you looked in the mirror and saw your naked self with me directly behind you and said, ‘now I am a woman!’ So much feeling we felt for each other and the moment, so much feeling.

It is over forty years later, Laurie, and I don’t know where you are, sort of gone forever in the world of millions of people. The last time we made love together was twenty-eight years ago. It was a different world then, Laurie, a different life also.

Laurie, my first great love. Laurie, Laurie, Laurie! Is it even good for me to think of you like this, to think of us like this?

Sorry, Laurie. I am so sorry, Laurie, that I did not make a great first husband for you. I am so much more loving and open now in my early seventies. We only lasted five years together before you fell in love with that American painter in India when you were both on a Fulbright scholarship together and I was in Spain trying to write my first novel.

And I am writing still. I am writing and rewriting my life. Yet, where is Laurie? Where is my first great love?

How your parents hassled us for my not being Jewish, especially your mother, invading us even after we were married.

My father was a bastard, a coward then. He had hidden from me and the world that he was born in Russia Jewish, and had immigrated to America as a child. I had a Jewish grandfather and uncles and an aunt that I never knew until my father’s death at my age thirty. But by then, Laurie, you were asking for a divorce and refusing to let me know where you were.

I was absolutely devastated. Does one ever get over how the morning glories outside ones youthful window only bloom for a day and then wither?

Does one ever get over life and into death? Wait, that is unfair. Now I have a lovely and intelligent love partner again, my second great love. But it has taken almost the forty years to find her.

I dreamed of love and life, Laurie. I dream of these a lot. I dream sometimes of the past, Laurie, but I dream of it as the present and the future.

I am sorry, Laurie. I am so sorry. We did not know I was half Jewish, and that would have maybe made it all right with your parents. We had those two abortions out of the passionate intensity of our love, but we had them to give ourselves the ability to go through college first.

The I Ching oracle said, ‘Preserve the family.’ We did not. Sorry, Laurie, sorry I was not strong enough to do so. Horrible! Horrible! Horrible! These were to be the children of our great love together. I allowed the abortions to happen.

Even seven years later when we got back together again you were a different person, as I was also, and it did not work out. I tried to love you then, Laurie, but your sickness had taken over.

What a life!

Now it is twenty years since the last time I visited you, Laurie, in your poverty apartment in Oakland, afraid of the dust and the city world because of your sickness syndrome.

The connecting was over!

I had failed our bonding, as you had also.

My life had to move on. I did move on.

Yet who forgets their first great love? Who forgets true love?

And who cries at the opposition that life and others, and oneself
even, throw at that great love?

I had my two children by a second wife. That is another story. Life move on. Live moves us on, struggling and crying out like an angry, little boy who has to go to school now, whether he wants to or not.

Angry, little boy, Strephon, masking the hurt!

Yes, that was me. Now I just hurt for the losses in my life. Now I just hurt and know that some things will never heal completely.

So, goodbye, Laurie. How does one say goodbye to a great love? One says goodbye only by living life the more fully with a present great love?

You can’t go back to the old life, can you? You can’t go back. You must always go forward. You must always go forward.

The lesson is there. What is the lesson, what is the teaching? The lesson is there.

If you only knew. If I only knew at the time to do the right thing, to live my life the better, to live more truly from love, to not let adversity and difficulty overwhelm me, would I still have my losses?

Yes, we must always accept our losses in life. Yet still, yet still, we can always do better. We can not be so arrogant, arrogant and too sure of myself as I was. We can deal better with opposition and adversity.

I ran from some of it to my deep regret. We can all learn to better protect a great love. In my weakness and arrogance I lost you, Laurie. You wrote me those horrible letters about what you did not like in our relationship, but by then it was too late, according to you.

You could have done better, too, Laurie, much better. Look at you also, Laurie, how you went downhill. I recovered. I went uphill again. I climbed the long road. I made something of my life. I went on to love again, to have a life, to give value back to the world.

Where are you now, my Laurie? For me you are not just the past. For me you are a person still, someone I have connected with.

We have not seen each other in twenty years. The old phone number did not work anymore years ago when I tried to call you on your birthday, one day before mine, April first.

Know that I love again, deeply and soul to soul with my present love
partner.

Know the road to life has been lonely and difficult. Love has been at times lonely and difficult. I have been lover to other significant women in my life. I have been lover and loved, yet not fully like then, until now.

The first great love? That does not go away. One’s mistakes almost kill one. Yet great love, our great love, Laurie, gave me hope and courage in life itself.

I must forgive myself, they say. I must forgive the past? Yet, the past was me! Why should I forgive it? Why should I forgive a great first love?

This is Strephon Kaplan-Williams living his life now and as the future comes, this twentieth day of August, 2006