Number 123: Pollock of my childhood: Best bodysurfing beach in the country!  Powerful waves!! But beware the dumpers when inexperienced!!!   Once caught – you’re out of control, disoriented, swirling around, face forcefully pounded into the sand, painful, out of breath.

Pretty much my experience when Sheryl left for Ulpan, Israel, April 1982, a few short weeks after our relationship blossomed, cut and blossomed again.

We easily forget! Today – instant connection: iPhones, e-mails, internet. At that time public callbox phoning was expensive, to be arranged somehow in advance.  Communication to my beloved far away was through letters, sometimes tapes, that took any number of days to arrive!  Our correspondence was emotionally fraught, often about crises we didn’t know were already resolved, encapsulated in unopened letters not yet arrived!!

“Never seek to tell thy love, love that never told may be. For the silent wind doth move, silently invisibly. 

I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart  – trembling cold in ghastly fear ah she did depart….”   (William Blake)

May and June of ‘82 were the long months, peppered with dumpers, uncertainty, angst. Reading those almost daily letters now, first time in four decades, I reflect on Blake’s advice not taken and how fortunate I am that she did not depart.  It certainly felt it was going that way….

For an eternity I was:

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony”.  (Samuel Coleridge)

Then suddenly “Well – I think I am coming back!”. Sheryl, after much tape listening, letter reading and reflection, decided on 4/07/1982. She was not taking the Kfar Shmaryahu American International School job applied for and offered. More important to “risk it all” and check whether our relationship could work!

Engaged a few days after Sheryl’s November return, the emotional whirlwinds of the last few months well behind us, Sheryl walked up the aisle at the Baxter on 16/01/1983.

Bashert! After almost 39 years marriage – our destiny!! But there was a time when it seemed not certain!!!