Have been feeling grey since the last two days. Mucky kind of grey. ‘The Gift of the Magi’-sixth paragraph-kind of grey. Not good at all. And all this for a couple of people I will very likely never meet in my life again. No matter how much I keep my fingers crossed, hope still slips away through the paper-thin gaps between my crooked fingers. I will never meet them again. One is Mrs. Perth. She is leaving Sarnia for good. Home beckons, and so there has been a flurry of dinners and farewells and coffee-sessions. She was the one to welcome me with a tub of gardenias, moving on with time to give me books and magazines and contacts but what I will remember most about her is that she tried. She tried so tirelessly, so unfailingly for me, trying for me even when I had stopped.
The other Sarnia institution I will so dearly miss is Gregory Peck. Handsome, grumpy, never one to learn the spelling of my name, never reluctant to incite the feminist in me, too set in his ways, too gentlemanly Gregory Peck. My ultimate Hollywood hero. Seeing him leave has left a void which can hardly be filled because whoever’s, destiny it shall be to fill it, he/she has a tall task ahead. Gregory came up to my flat on Monday evening to say goodbye. He has given me two books to read and throw away. I know I will keep them forever, in memory of a time that will never come back, in defiance of a time that will never permit that we meet Gregory again. I don’t know whether I will ever go to Ireland, to Galway or Dublin but I know in the deepest recesses of my mind and in the core of my heart, that every time I will ever read Yeats’ love poems celebrating Maud Gonne, every time I will ever walk in my mind, in the by-lanes of Joyce’s Dublin and every time I will ever go fishing in Synge’s Aran Islands, it will be with a very special friend, Gregory. I wish we could let him know adequately, how much we have grown fond of him, how much we will miss him, how his old-world Irish-ness has rubbed off on us, how much he will always remind us of vintage wine and rainy-afternoon classics, how special and rare he is because he is old wine in an old bottle. We love you, Gregory. And no matter, how hopeless hopelessness can be, we hope that someday, we shall meet again, good, old neighbours and even better, good, old friends.
Until then, Sarnia will not be the same.
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