Caroline
Caroline and Marilyn would come by my place . . . listen to records, joke around, and just hang out for no good reason. Eventually Caroline started coming by on her own. I remember next to nothing about Marilyn although I’m sure she was wonderfull, and a hottie in her own right, but Caroline I remember well. I was crazy about her. She was eighteen years old. Can you believe anyone was ever eighteen? She lived with her mother on Decelles, snuck out nights and made her way downtown, to the blues bars, folk clubs, and my infamous Guilbault Street flat. Girls just want to have fun, don’t they?
We did have some fun for a while. For how long? Who knows? Doing what? I can’t remember. How did it end? Sorry . . . I can’t help you there. We just went on our merry ways and the next thing you know forty-two very long years have gone by and a lot of sex, drugs, and ragas with it.
It’s a whole new century. I’m having my first coffee of the morning, jazz is streaming in over something called the “internet” and I’m staring at this machine on my coffee table as the fog clears. Up pops an email from Caroline. “Hey there, remember me?”
Damn right, I remember you! She lives only about 100 miles from here. Imagine! That’s less than 2 1/2 miles per year. I’m almost certain there were times when we passed within perhaps an arm’s length of each other when she either was staying in or just passing through Vancouver, which, it turns out she’s done. Often.
We exchanged a couple of hundred emails, figuring out the coiled twists of time and fate. And then she dropped by to have her picture taken.
First photo by Ilse Siegelbaum, second by the author.