a Letter from Michael…

The mail brought one final holiday card today. It is from my friend Michael in Toronto. How very Michael to send a card in January, I’m so pleased he was thinking of me.

We met four  years ago when I took Hanni and her buddy Hannah (yes, they were just called  The Hannahs – or Webbs and Schaef if you needed to be specific) to Negril for vacation. We rented a couple of rondellas at Light House Park. This resort sits high on the cliffs outside of town. Michael was also a guest and the self-appointed maître d’ and entertainment director. Like myself, he had come there for years, though strangely we had never been there at the same time before. He cooked fabulous meals in the community kitchen and had an inflatable boat that he managed to get up and down the ladders to the sea.

For New Year’s Eve, Michael sent out the word;  loyal friends and locals flocked to the impromptu stage to see “The Fabulous Fancy” sing and perform.

An artist, an author, and an all around fascinating person, Michael captured my heart. There were times when I stood back and questioned my sanity. How to tell the “other” Hannah’s parents that we spent an evening listening to karaoke performed by a Canadian drag queen, who also taught them to navigate the cliffs in search of caves and ride the waves off into the sunset?

The girls worked with Michael on a project for the Park. The three would sit by the hour in the afternoon, escaping the blistering sun and working on a hand-painted sign.

Two years later, I made a plan to meet Michael and share a house at Light House Park. We met in the customs line at the airport and it was so wonderful to see him again.

He piloted our rental car out of the city and soon we were whizzing along the coast. It felt like home when we arrived at the gates of the Park. For ten glorious days we swam in the sea, wrote in the shade and cooked amazing fresh food.

We took a few side trips, adventures to spots one or both of us had been on past trips. It was like being with your favorite girlfriend in the package of a handsome guy. It may be simply a holiday card every year, but I know he is out there and thinking of me as I do him.

Thank you, Michael!