Sunday, 2-25-96
10:13 AM London
4:13 AM E-Town
It’s Sunday morning. And so far is a lazy one… just the way I like `em! I am still in bed. Ron is still sleeping. So I decided to write some about this weekend.
I met Ron at Waterloo Station Fri. night & then we popped into the pub where Joanne works to surprise her! It was a nice lil reunion for the 3 of us & Joanne was just getting off work, so she had a drink w/ us.
Then she went off to plans she already had & Ron & I headed back to Pembridge. I gave him a little tour of the house & then we hung out in my room for a while, chatting & looking at camp pictures! Lori arrived back from working out & hung out w/ us while she packed for Paris. Also, lots of my housemates stopped in to say hello & chat for a bit.
They all seemed to enjoy Ron, especially cause he was British & they could ask him culture questions.
When Lori was ready for bed, Ron & I went down to the kitchen for a snack & hung out w/ people there for a while. We camp upstairs about 1 AMish & were soon asleep (Ron brought his air mattress and sleeping bag to sleep on in our room).
Lori was up before the crack of dawn, getting herself together & out the door for her week field trip w/ Cordwainers to Paris. I will miss her company, but enjoy the time to myself in the room over the next few days…
Ron & I got up about 9 AM & laid around lazily & chatted before getting up. Then we had a real gourmet breakfast of cereal out of little boxes w/ out milk! We showered, got dressed & by 11 AM or so were off to Leicester Square! We had decided Fri. night to go see a matinée, on Sat. afternoon, of a show or musical here. We also had made plans w/ Jo to meet her for lunch. So we waited for almost an hour for our tickets & by the time we got up to the box office were left w/ few choices. Jo had met up w/ us by then & suggested we see “Blood Brothers.” We took her word for it & paid £19.50 each for our tickets, good tickets I must add, but expensive — they were even discount at that price!
Jo took us to a cheap, but fairly good, Italian sit down restaurant for lunch. I had pasta which was okay., but was served w/ mushrooms, which I ended up picking out & then still tasting while I ate… We all ate & drank hot chocolate & reminisced & chatted. It was really nice & afterwards we walked around & window shopped until Jo had to leave for work.
Then Ron & I continued to stroll about the Leicester Square/Oxford Circus/Soho area, as we had to be at the theatre by 3:45 PM. We wandered in & out of little stores & even played a money game at an arcade where you drop 10p coins in & try to win more coins back! We won some back once until Ron was out of 10p coins! We also spent a great deal of time in a greeting card shop looking at “Name Key Chains” & cards! Yes, we are easily amused…
We arrived on time to the musical & found our awesome seats in the Stalls (10th Row)! The musical was wonderful & we both throughly enjoyed it! It was about a woman who is poor & has too many kids, than she can really afford to raise. Then one day she gets pregnant w/ twins! At the time she is working as a cleaning lady for a rich couple, who cannot have kids, & the wife convinces the mother to give her one of the twins! The mother does give her one, but regrets it after & the two boys actually meet very young & become the best of friends & even “Blood Brothers!” No matter how they try, the wife (Mrs. Lyons) & the mother (Mrs. Johnston) cannot keep the two boys (Mickey & Eddie) apart…
They story is full of superstition, including that “if twins separated at birth ever find out of their connection they will both surely die upon hearing the news!” It is full of wonderful song, writing, & acting! Ron & I both really liked it & talked about it for a long while afterwards, on the way back to Pembridge. I found out it was Ron’s 1st musical & he said it was memorable at that!
When back at Pembridge, we made one of my “pizza kits” (as Mel would call it ☺︎) for dinner! It was especially yummy & filling since I hadn’t eaten much of my lunch earlier in the day. We chatted with some of my housemates at dinner & then ended up in the TV lounge afterwards, watching a “Real World IV: London” marathon on MTV! It was so cool to see the shows, now that I am living here & it turned out that the group on the show lived near Pembridge, cuz they shopped at Europa & used the Notting Hill Gate tube stop! ☺︎ Kelly & I decided that some day this week we will go on a walk in search of the house they lived in…
After watching the marathon for about 2 hrs., Ron & I came upstairs & had a nice long talk about life… We talked about camp, relationships, world relations, & everything else the conversation led to… Ron said he wasn’t used to having such conversations, which I found interesting! He also said he, being British, just doesn’t often find himself talking about such things… I am tempted to say “typical male,” but I won’t, cuz Ron sure isn’t typical. I don’t know quite what he is…
It’s funny cuz we have flirted a lot this weekend, but nothing more has happened & I think I am glad about that… It would be a shame to jeopardize our friendship. Oh, how terribly mature this sounds!
We finally went to sleep about 1 AM again last night, me in my bed & Ron in Lori’s.
Today we may go to China Town for the “Chinese New Year” Celebration, but we’ll see… The weather seems kinda yucky & I am feeling lazy at the moment!
CHEERS! ☺︎
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Note from Present Day Kathy: It’s bittersweet to have finally gotten to this entry, the first of many in my London Semester Journals, that chronicle the time I spent with my old friend, (not his real name) Ron while in England. Learning of Ron’s death earlier this year (though it happened 4 years ago) led me to revisit what I wrote about my experience across the pond all those years ago and decide to share here.
The narratives we create in our heads/memories about our past, especially our relationships with others, fascinate me. Why do we choose (intentionally or not) certain experiences to focus on, when and if we reflect on our lives?
When I first learned that Ron had died (4 years ago) this summer, I remembered him being a significant part of my semester abroad in 1996. Over the years, I have thought about the time I spent visiting Ron and his family, in their hometown of Southampton, England over Easter and again the weekend before I flew back to the States that year. However, it was usually in the context of how cool it was that Southampton was where the Titanic sailed from, as well as how kind Ron and his family were, especially including me in their Easter celebration, when I was away from home/missing my family.
It’s not that I forgot Ron and my friendship grew into more during the months I lived abroad, however I’ve always told myself that if things had somehow worked out with us, I wouldn’t have ended up with Bob and have the wonderful life we do today. That narrative was a safe and rational place for me to keep my memories of/with Ron.
That said, navigating grief and loss is not usually a very rational process. As I’ve shared in previous entries since learning of Ron’s death, returning to my journal entries, reading letters that he wrote me, and looking at the photos of our time together, has painted a picture of Ron, as well as our connection, that I couldn’t fully see back then. The experience has brought me both joy and pain.
Hindsight has a tendency to give us that kind of perspective.
When I get stuck wondering and entertaining (what I’ve learned are called) counterfactuals, I remind myself of some key things, including the reality that Ron is dead and that the main reason our relationship didn’t progress much, once I left England, was Ron not writing to me very often.
It was confusing, hurt my feelings, and ultimately led me to give up on us as a couple, when I wrote Ron more frequently than he wrote back. In those days e-mail was in its infancy, social media didn’t exist, and long distance/overseas phone calls were expensive, so our main option to keep in touch was snail mail. I realize now, especially from looking back at the letters and cards I received from Ron over the years, including after we met at camp/before I studied in London, while I was living in London, and after I returned home, as well as connecting with his sister more recently, that he didn’t find it easy to express himself.
Whether or not we might’ve had our own wonderful life together, if things had played out differently, is okay to imagine. But at the end of the day, we both made decisions after I returned to the States, along with factors that were somewhat out of our control, that led to our moving on and living separate lives.
Why share all of these feelings so openly here? Because one of the many things I’ve learned, in my adult life, is that we have a huge capacity to love and care about people. I can be confident in and grateful for the life I have built with, and the love I have for, Bob over the past 22 + years and still honor the feelings I had for Ron (which my journals, pictures, and his letters have helped me to recall), as I make peace with his death.
When my sister and her husband were going through the process of adopting their children, we learned a lot about having open minds and hearts, especially when it comes to welcoming non-biological children into our extended family. With help from those who had been in their shoes, we came to understand the value in open adoption relationships, including birth families and those who end up parenting children who are adopted. The idea being that a child cannot have too many people who love them. Likewise, I don’t think any person can have too many others who love them or love too many people.
Of course there is a lot more to that topic, but hopefully you see where I am going with this, as I’ve tried to make sense of some unresolved feelings about my relationship with Ron so many years ago. I’ve realized that I can still think of Ron fondly and that doesn’t have to take away from my current relationship with/marriage to Bob.
Bob has been incredibly patient with and supportive of me, as I have been navigating this experience, and it has led to us having some really good conversations about all that we’ve been through over the years and what we want to rest of our marriage/life together to be.
Also, as I’ve shared here in recent months, processing Ron’s death moved me into a bit of a midlife crisis or more so, as Brené Brown writes about, a “Midlife Unraveling.” Reflecting on who I was at 20-21, before I met the man I’ve shared my life with (since not long after I returned from England), has also been bittersweet. It’s caused me to think about if me at 43 is who I imagined I’d be, as well as how I feel about some of the key decisions I’ve made a long the way.
I am fairly sure that, had it not been for my learning of Ron’s death, some other event(s) or circumstance(s) would likely have sparked my “midlife unraveling” eventually. And as with so many challenging life experiences, I’ve found many silver linings through trying to make peace with the passing of my old friend.
I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Ron’s younger sister (not her real name) Ginny, as an adult in recent months. Ginny was 16 when I stayed with their family in Southampton and we hadn’t been in touch since, until this summer, when we reconnected on Facebook, after I saw her (almost 4 year old) post about her brother’s death in September 2014, which I’d somehow managed to miss previously.
I also believe that working through Ron’s death has inspired me to write and share here on my blog more, including transcribing my London Semester Journals, which has reminded me how much I love writing, especially reflecting on life and my experiences. I really enjoy the process of typing in each entry, uploading any relevant pictures, and then adding my “Note from Present Day Kathy,” which has become my favorite part. This has helped me to see: who I was back then, how far I have come since, what parts of me I am proud to have let go of, the parts I am glad I’ve hung on to, and how I see myself going forward.
After all that, I do have a some things to say in regards to this specific entry, about the first 24 hours, or so, of Ron’s visit to London. I love that the first thing Ron and I did, after he arrived, was meet up with (not her real name) Joanne, that we knew from our summer working at Camp Algonquin together in 1995. Getting to work with and know fellow camp counselors and staff, such as Ron and Joanne, who were from England and there via a program called Camp America, gave me the idea to try to study abroad during my junior year of college, something I’d never seriously considered or looked into before.
Similar to the time I’d spent the night before with (not her real name) Kerry, my friend from college/sorority sister, who was studying that semester in Galway, Ireland, being with those who I had history and a comfort level with was so nice, after almost two months of constantly meeting people and navigating all that entails, as we developed new relationships.
I get a kick out of the amount of detail I included in this entry, from what I ate to the things Ron and I did to pass the time in between lunch on Saturday and seeing “Blood Brothers.” I am still easily amused and appreciate that was something Ron and I shared, being able to entertain ourselves, regardless of where we were or what we were doing.
To this day one of my favorite things is going to see musicals with loved ones and I am glad that I went with Ron to his first that day. I know from his sister that he didn’t see many (if any) more later in his life, so its nice that we both enjoyed Blood Brothers and our post-show discussion, on our way back to Pembridge.
I think its cool that Ron and I hung out with my housemates that night and didn’t feel compelled to go to a pub or a dance club or do something more touristy, after having been gone much of the day/being out and about. It was so cool that the Real World IV: London season aired right before my semester abroad. I remember watching it before I left the States and forgot I also got to see many of the episodes again, that night, while living there, and how fun it was to realize the cast had lived in the same neighborhood, Notting Hill Gate, that we did.
I appreciate getting to revisit the long talk Ron and I had that night. Ron was not a stereotypical male, which is part of what made him so unique and special. I’ve always loved having long “tree branch” discussions with friends like that, where we talk about anything and everything, and did so often during my college years.
Ron was not the first guy to tell me he wasn’t used to having conversations like that. I believe that one of my gifts is being able to help people, who might not otherwise feel comfortable doing so, to talk and share about their lives, thoughts, and feelings. I like that I was able to bring that out of Ron too.
As I share in the “Reminder” at the bottom of each London Semester Journal post, I don’t transcribe every detail that wrote, as at times I feel they are too personal for me or those I interacted with. That will definitely be the case when sharing about my relationship with Ron, especially knowing he was a fairly private person, during my time abroad. However, I also want to honor his life/legacy and feel sharing some of my experiences with him are part of what will keep his memory alive.
Through my communication with Ron’s sister, in recent months, I’ve shared memories and pictures of Ron and my time together, both at camp (during the summer 1995) and when I lived in England. Doing so was therapeutic for me, as I grieved his death, and it reminded me of the idea in the closing song of Hamilton, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.”
I told Ginny that I am grateful to have been part of Ron’s story and want to help his memory live on. I hope that Ron’s sister, and anyone she might choose to share my pictures and memories with, such as other family members or friends of Ron’s, appreciate that too.
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Reminder: Unless I’ve been given permission to use people’s actual names, in most cases I’ve removed or replaced the names of the real people who were part of my journey/experience there, in effort to protect and respect their identities/privacy in my London Semester Journal entries. I will also not share details that I think and feel are too personal for anyone I interacted with, my loved ones, and me.
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Here’s the back story of My London Semester Journals from 1996, including what prompted me to revisit and decide to share them here in 2018. And here’s a list a list of the entries, which I will update as I share them.
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