Casually, with nothing in her voice other than curiousity, she asked what my Christmas Day plans were.

I almost lied; I usually did about such things. Saving face was very important to me but instead I said, "Well, Johnny goes to his father's house to open present with him and the grandparents.  My folks come out on Christmas Eve but leave Christmans morning so they can get ready for the opening of Santa Anita."

"The opening of what?" she asked.

"It's a racetrack in Arcadia but they're really horse racing buffs and this is their favoirte day.  Then I heard myself say, " I don't really have any place to go."

"Come to our house for dinner, I insist.  It'll just be me and Tom and Tim and maybe a friend of his; we never know."

Just like that the hole in my middle was filled. I would be somewhere on Christmas Day.

This was the second Christmas since the separation from Johnny's dad but I still felt like Stella standing outside the beautiful country home, staring through the bay window on to a Norman Rockwell scene of contented family members, all wearing red velvet somethings, smiling, laughing and being of good cheer, completely content and satisfied that I was no longer part of their life.  That this scene only played in my head was of little consequence.

Christmas Day dinner at Corrine and Tom's was lovely.  Good food, soothing conversation, delicious apple pie and warm hugs all around; and our friendship grew.

During softball season, Tom and Corrine attended Johnny's games and during the summer I drove Tom to scout out potential real estate deals as his health issues compounded.  Four year flew by and I had accepted a position at another school.  I was working on a master's degree program in administration but Corrine and I spoke on the phone often.

And then one morning everything changed.  I received word from Corrine that Tom had had a massive heart attack.  He had been rushed to John Kennedy Hosptal.  I went to see him and he talked about his blessed life;  how the doctors had advised him to lose weight and stop smoking. But with one heart attack and a quadruple bypass behind him, he wanted to do what he wanted to do.  He died that week.

There is a natural and predictable flurry of activity and people that follow such life events.  But as the weeks and months passed and people returned to the rhythm of their own lives, Corrine's grief and lonliness grew palpable.  We'd meet on the weekends for any early lunch and a movie but she missed her old life.

Then the Universe worked its magic.  She received a card from Rosaleen and Kevin Healy, Dubliners she met when they all taught at the same private school on their arrival in California six years earlier.  They too, grieved for Tom and invited Corrine to Ireland for an adventure; Corrine invited me.  That week we were booked on a flight leaving in June to London with a connecting flight on Air Iingus for six days of sightseeing and cavorting through Ireland with the Healys and then eight days on a tour to the capital cities of Europe.  Hello! Paris, London, Brussels, Bonn and Amsterdam!  Every day was an adventure with more stories and laughter than one person has a right to.

We celebrated our homecoming with a slide show for our friends and colleagues.  We had neglected to take slides while in Europe so we staged my backyard to look like scenes from the capital cities.  We even hung a plastic replica of the Eiffel Tower from my pool slide as a special effect and we all laughed until we cried as the ruse was revealed.

Corrine and I have walked in the Coliseum in Rome, toured Pompeii, stood five feet from the statue of
David and the Mona Lisa, boated to the Blue Grotto on the Amalfi Coast and heard the screeching of the peacocks on Isola Bella.  We "Thelma & Louised" it on a trip to Taos, New Mexico and Sedona, Az.  And shared a last great travel adventure snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

But Corrine surmised something was in the air. Each day of our trip to Australia,I was awakended by a phone call from David, a man I had been seeing for a few months.  He picked us up from the airport on our return home and when I asked Corrine what she thought of him, she said, "Marry David."

Corrine was my Matron of Honor.  I asked her over coffee.

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