Sue Tennander
When I was a little girl and at the age of 7 I got my first valentine´s card from a boy called Paul who sat behind me in class. When I got to school that day he was standing by my desk and urging me to look inside ( we had desks you could keep papers etc, in) to see if I had any valentine cards Of course he had just planted one and didn´t want to take the risk that I thought it might be from someone else ( he´d signed the card with a big question mark as was the custom) However, he wasn´t a very good speller. The fact that he had written ”Hapy Valunteens ” would have been enough to identify him as the author but when I opened the card he blushed bright red and kissed me on the cheek. So much for anonymous admirers!
Jeanette Clayton
At the age of five – what was it, that intensely inquisitive thrill, the longing to be close to that boy down the hill, Christopher. Why the fascination with one another’s little 5-year-old body parts? Why the will to abandon other friends, to soak up the excitement of seeing him, standing close to him? First love indeed. Thirty years later I heard that he had “turned bad”, that his parents had completely disowned him – their only child. What on earth could he have done? My mind reeled graphically around the horrendous possibilities.
In the meantime my first marriage too had “turned bad”, my husband (today, in 2012, no longer amongst the living) having slipped down the kind of slope that makes old school friends whisper of “turning bad”. Was there something within me that drew me inexorably towards the “wrong men”, the “baddies” of this society?
We hold in our hands the power to change our lives by changing our perceptions, refusing to succumb to closed images of what we are, who we are. Since the day of our serendipitous encounter in 2001, my life has been blessed by total twosomeness with my present husband – another Christopher. That earlier version of me had no idea that there were people on this earth so full of goodness, love, and the will to share as my Christopher, my LAST LOVE.
Theresia Eriksson