The death of Ron Ouellette caused an all-consuming case of vertigo. The classroom spun, as I read between the lines of a Facebook post and then had my horror confirmed in a private message. He'd died in his sleep in the Colorado mountain house he'd recently bought with his ladylove, Marlene.
I met Ron at a house party on New Year's Eve in Maine; I was 17, and halfway through my Senior year of High School, while Ron was 29 and halfway through building a ferro-cement sailboat. I was thunderstruck. On 17 January 1980, Ron turned 30. That May I graduated and in June moved to Maine. We met for a second time on the Fourth of July at a friend's house and went dancing. Afterward, we drove to the marina and rowed out to the boat under a star-filled sky. We began dating in earnest that night.
For the next year, I spent more time on the boat than in the room I rented in the island house. The fal1 of '81, we sailed from Maine to St. Croix, through a hurricane that lasted six days, and set a mooring in Christanstead Harbor. He taught me how to scuba dive, free dive, spearfish, mend a sail, and art of cooking underway. He taught me that war follows you home, as he was a Vietnam Vet, and had "black moods" that made him go silent for days at a time. He suggested the maxim to do your best in any given moment, because those moments are what define you. He was humble, handsome and full of salty Yankee humor. We'd planned to sail and work our way around the world. However, I slowly realized that St. Croix had become the place he'd been working towards living while building that boat through all those cold winters and long days of dual jobs. Having reached his goal, he wasn't eager to set a new one.
I left Ron and the boat, taking the same duffel bag of clothes I'd arrived with and a cat I found in the rainforest, in the late spring of '82. I turned 20 in July in Portland and enrolled in college. My goal hadn't been to leave Ron, but rather to go to college. My stomach and heart ached for months. My mind compared every man to him throughout my twenties. Ron would remain a touchstone in my life. He came to Maine most summers and we'd share a meal, even when I lived in NYC or San Francisco. We didn't coordinate our trips to Maine; we just happened to overlap.
After college, 1987, I moved to NYC. Ron came to NYC via a boat delivery with a backgammon champion girlfriend from the Upper East Side. He found me at work, shortly after I'd moved there, to see if I'd sail around the world with him. It was a romantic declaration, an offering right out of French novel, which he knew I'd appreciate, and yet it deadened a piece of my heart to say, "no." My job at the oldest and largest literary agency in the world had just begun and I wanted to see where it would take me; a journey of the life of the mind. He understood and encouraged me to continue, but I saw the sadness in his eyes. His gait walking me back to Astor Place was not his usual dancer-like amble.
That lunch date in Manhattan haunted me for years. Through mutual friends, I heard that he hadn't left St. Croix to circumnavigate the world, but rather married a woman named Robin. By this point, I had moved to San Francisco and had started my own agency. He didn't come to Maine in the summer as much during the marriage. More in winter to a mutual friend's apartment in my Dad's apartment building in Portland. I saw him once or twice for dinner in Brunswick. He complained about his wife and, at earlier points, a girlfriend. I was losing patience with him and took the women's side. This shook him a bit, but he heard me. The marriage and the girlfriends didn't last.
I met my Dutch husband, Peter, in San Francisco. We married quickly and soon after learned we were pregnant, while on my father's sailboat in the Caribbean. Appropriately we discovered this when we were anchored at Jost Van Dyke, a former Dutch Island now a part of the BVI. We were sailing as crew for the first week of a two-week cruise.
Unbeknownst to me, the couple sharing the boat, who weren't my parents, and my brother and his wife on a sister boat, were all trying to conceive and failing. There were an inordinate number of warnings to "not get your hopes up before 12 weeks," as I was 35. Yet my brother went diving with me and that was the highlight of the trip.
Ironically, the person who would be taking over our cabin when we docked in Tortola, would be Robin, Ron's ex-wife. We never met face to face, but it was odd to know that I'd just learned I was pregnant in that forward double bunk where she would now be sleeping. Robin divorced Ron because he wouldn't have a child with her. He'd had a vasectomy immediately after returning from Vietnam. I never wanted to have kids, until I met my husband. Why Robin thought Ron would change his philosophy regarding becoming a father was beyond my comprehension. Ron was no longer in St. Croix, having moved to Florida to be near his mother who was sick. His job as an ICU nurse gave him great mobility and flexibility that he treasured.
Peter and I quickly had a second child. Ron met the whole group at a mutual friend's house for dinner one summer night in Maine in the early 2000's. It short-circuited my brain to have Ron and Peter in the same room; I kept calling them by the other's name. That was the second time my equilibrium was off in Ron's presence. Everyone noticed even my kids who thought it was funny. They had heard tales from the time when Mum lived on a cement sailboat, including their favorite about my octopus friend.
They all, Peter included, knew that Ron had helped shape me into a fearless adventurer; teaching me to shoot a pistol in case of pirates and how to set a sea-anchor during a hurricane. They knew I loved him and had entrusted my life to him. They all accepted it. The following night my mother had a dinner for all of us and included Ron. It was the very same house where we had first attended the New Years Eve party nearly 30 years earlier. Ron gave a gushy toast stating how wonderful it was to be back at that house, sharing the food and company of longtime friends and family. He hadn't expected it. I told him that night, as I had many times, that if my family loves you, we never let you go.
Even before we moved back to Massachusetts from California, our marriage was in trouble. Peter insisted on controlling the adventurer in me, including saying no to taking our family sailing with my parents. I decided to divorce him a month before I turned 50 in the summer of 2012. My friends and family threw a party for me at my mother's house in Maine. Ron just happened to have sailed a bright yellow catamaran he'd built up from Florida to Maine for a visit. I'd been sent out of the house so that everyone could decorate. I took a trail hike with my dog. Driving home, I saw a familiar silhouette riding a bicycle up a hilly peninsula.
As I approached I slowed the car, rolled down the window and asked, "Do you want a ride?"
Ron replied, "No, I need the exercise! I'll see you at the party."
That party was amazing. Friends from childhood and college in Maine showed up. So did family from around state. Ron came with Chuck and Julie by car, having parked his bike at their house. Chuck was the man who first introduced us all those decades ago and who had rented me a room after high school. His daughter, Jennie, has been my best friend since we were 11 years old. She was in attendance, too.
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