Mac
The story of my life in France would not be complete without mentioning Mac Prescott. I fell ‘in love’ with him the day I saw the back of his head on the big green kaki bus going to the base. He was my life line. I followed him to his base ball games. I watched him in the boys play ground every day at school. I sat beside him on the bus. I thought of him all the time.
I was only 7 so I didn’t know what to do with all this luuvvv nor did I know how to talk to him. When I left France I was eleven, but my ardor for him lasted for years. The last letter I received from him, he too had returned to Canada and the family bought a bull dog. He named it after me.
I never thought I could marry any one else at least until I saw him again. But how would that be possible? We lost touch and life brought us further apart as time went on.
Years later when I was packing up my locker at Carleton University to bid my final goodbyes, something extraordinary happened. As I walked down the empty hallways I passed a student coming in the other direction. I remember yet the sound of my heels clicking on the cement floor and echoing off the walls. This student was carrying an armful of maps so I couldn’t really see his face and I passed him by. Then I froze in my tracks, turned around and said, “Mac Prescott?”
It was he! I was incredulous. How could that be? How could I possibly have known it were Mac? I hadn’t seen him since he was eleven. We exchanged niceties, how are you? What did you study? Where are you going? Then we parted. I wanted so much to tell him what a crush I’d had on him in France, but I didn't know if he felt the same way or not. I saw him two more times that week serendipitously, once at a discotheque and at another time at a restaurant. We didn’t speak; we just waved and acknowledged each other.
Years later, around 2004, there was a 2Wing reunion in Ottawa for the air force ‘brats’. He wasn’t there, so when I got home, I put an alert out for him on the 2 Wing Brat site. A year later, I got the email I’d been waiting for.
We wrote profusely of our experience and about our feelings for each other when we were kids in France. We kept in touch every year just to catch up and say hi. This is the first year I didn’t hear from him and he doesn’t answer my emails. (2014)
