Twenty Eight Years Later

Click on above picture to enlarge. No need to do so on this pic, we're large enough already!

Grumpy and my American Dream started back in 1981 when we first travelled to the US on our honeymoon. We stayed with an old flame of my mother's, a Canadian GI who looked her up on a visit to London as we were preparing to get married. Grumpy thought he'd done a great thing by booking us a hotel on Sunset Strip, until Hy told us it was in the middle of the red light district and we should stay with him instead since he lived in LA.
A couple of days before the wedding, we had a call to say we wouldn't be able to stay with him after all. His son had been killed and obviously having house guests was the last thing on his mind.
Since the flights were booked, we flew out anyway, with the idea of going back to our original idea of staying in a hotel. Imagine our surprise when Hy was there at the airport to meet us. He insisted we stay with him and we ended up having a marvellous trip.
Hy had two other children, Mel and Nadine. Nadine was also recently married, and we had a great time as she showed us around. We still have a glass match pot she bought us as a wedding present from Disneyland, even though we had to pull all the matches out of the matchbooks before shipping it back to the US from England.
In those days before Internet, it wasn't as easy to stay in touch. Grumpy met up with her again on a business trip a couple of years later. We knew Nadine survived but lost her home in the Northridge earthquake, and we lost contact.
I had tried on and off to locate her over the years, but to no avail. Finally I found one of her daughter's on Facebook and discovered she was divorced and living with her new man just outside Seattle.
So finally, after nearly 29 years, we ended our vacation by meeting Nadine again at our hotel. The years have taken their toll on both of us. I suspect we were both a little relieved to see how we'd each 'blossomed' over the years. Several times she told Grumpy how he hadn't changed a bit. We obviously had. But in a year of reacquainting with old friends and family, none could be sweeter than finding the girl who started our American dream.