Before I went any further, I wanted to find some pictures so I can show how hot he was (at least I think so). We weren't really picture taking people. I wish now that we had taken bundles of them. But I managed to find the pictures we did take.


This first one shows how long his hair was when I first met him. Not the best picture of him, but it does show the 'long haired hippie freak' look he had going.

Now this one is a weird kind of a pose, but I think he looks gorgeous in it :) This is my Ron.

Anyway - on with the story.

Now if real life were a romance novel, I would have ended where I did. Of course I would have made it much longer and included lots of sex. Not that there wasn’t. Lots of sex that is. We were both hot. For each other. But since this is me and not some romance heroine, I’m not going to go into detail.

But real life isn’t a romance novel and it is real lives and not the HEA.

Ron and I got married on August 29, 1975. It was a Friday night. He just wanted something very small and since I was so in love and hadn’t lived in the city long enough to make a whole lot of friends, that was fine with me. I had just turned 21 a couple of weeks earlier. We got married in this tiny little chapel with just our best man, maid of honour and our immediate families.

This was the days of disco, David Bowie and Elton John. Ron rented his tux and bought a new pair of shoes. Platform shoes and that means high. Shoes that he hadn’t really gotten used to. It was a little tiny chapel with little tiny doors. I was standing at the front with my dad waiting for Ron to come in the little tiny door at the side in platform shoes he hadn’t adjusted to. Everyone went “ooooofffff” and winced when his forehead met the little tiny door very, very hard. I heard them. I was just concerned and glad that he hadn’t knocked himself unconscious. Some memories stay with you for life and that’s one of them.

Now this is a rotten picture of me, but I like it because of the way Ron is gazing adoringly at me.


Another real crummy one of me but I like how handsome Ron looked.

Now this one I do like of the both of us. We were so happy. I think there has been only 4 or 5 pictures taken of me that I've ever liked, so just ignore me in most of them, but this one is one of the few good ones.

It’s important to say that I had such a good upbringing with my parents and my sisters. My dad adored my mother and showed it in so many ways and she adored him. The thing that stands out most about my childhood is laughter. We were always laughing, all of us. I had these two really annoying younger sisters that I loved very much despite some of the nasty things they did to their (obnoxious - so they say) older sister. I didn’t realize until much later how fortunate I was being raised with so much love and laughter. Not many people have that. Ron didn’t. And it came into play later in our marriage.

So we settled into married life. Things were different back then than in many cases today. We both worked, I worked in an office and Ron worked for the railroad and we lived in the back section of a two story duplex. There were no halls in that apartment. One room just flowed into another room. And the bedroom was so small there was only room for a single bed. Of course that didn’t matter to us *ahem*. In one of those weird twists of life, we would have been neighbours anyway. The night I met him he was planning on moving into this apartment which was just a few houses down from where I was living. I would have passed his place every day on my way to work (it was close enough for me to walk – after I met him and established he was the guy – he had a few days off after he moved to his apartment, I would walk over at lunch for a *cough* nooner. He seemed to be always up for it ;)

He had friends, Serge and Marg who lived in the upstairs part of the house, that's why he moved there. They are a couple who have drifted in and out of our lives at various stages throughout our lives together. We hadn’t seen them for a while, but when Ron first got sick I called Serge to let him know. He called Ron and dropped in to see him but then Ron got so sick he didn't want to see anyone. I called Serge again yesterday to let him know Ron had passed away. He and Marg dropped in to see me today, and he was telling me he still remembered the day Ron told him about this most incredible woman he had just met. He had never seen Ron so excited before. That made me cry when he told me. In a good/sad way. Maybe Ron was planning all along on proposing to me! I just beat him to the punch.

to be continued

'til later