I discovered a really good writer — an author I like a great deal — in the strangest way.
I joined Facebook in 2008, mostly to keep track of family, friends and people from my past. The two largest groups are people from my high school graduating class and fraternity brothers from college, with former colleagues not too far behind.
Maybe the strangest group — thankfully a fairly small one — is people who have died. A close friend’s wife, a fraternity brother, a former colleague and roommate from long ago and a woman I met through Facebook. The first three died after illnesses and the fourth was murdered by her daughter-in-law.
Weird, huh?
I have made several friends in and around the UK, and maybe the most bizarre is that one of them came to me through the fraternity brother who died. Brandt Heatherington and I were both presidents of our chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon at George Mason University, him about five years after me.
Brandt and I had known of each other, but we became fast friends through Facebook. He had a friend named Steve Carter, and he and I got to know each other through commenting on Facebook. I was please to see that he was a writer, with three books available on Amazon.
I bought all three and have read two of them. I enjoyed them a great deal and I sent him copies of the two books I have available on Amazon. And as I work to finish two more books — one a romantic fantasy and the other an anthology of 40-plus years as a columnist — I was thrilled to see that my friend Steve had another book coming out.
Let me be clear about one thing. Steve is much more successful than I am he has had books approaching six digits in sales, and I think the best I could claim is the low three digits.
The very low three digits.
At any rate, I read his newest book, this one a collaboration with his wife Julie. It touched me deeply, and after I show you the review I wrote for Amazon, I’ll tell you why.
Here’s what I wrote on Amazon, rating his book 5 stars out of 5:
“Being somewhat of a goof in my waning years, I ordered this book through Amazon.UK and as a result took a lot longer to get it. I had read Steve Carter’s two earlier novels and enjoyed them very much, and I was fascinated to see that he had added his wife Julie as a collaborator on this one.
“Definitely a smart move. This book has more heart than the earlier two, and with at least five female characters in it, they are deeper and more individual than I would expect of a male author. In fact, the lesser characters of both genders all seem well fleshed out.
“I was particularly impressed by a 21st century British novel making effective use of a 19th century American author and at least in one respect, giving the 19th century novel a happy ending of sorts.
“Carter’s first two novels were good. Thanks perhaps to a maturing writer and definitely to an excellent collaborator, this third one is better.
“Read it. You will not regret it.”
Why did the book touch me so deeply? It’s the story of a boy who meets a wonderful girl at age 9, essentially falls in love with her then and has fate intervene and stand in the way time and again over half a lifetime.
Well, as someone said, these things take time.
So why did the book touch me? Call it a very different version of a similar theme. In the summer of 1977. I was living with my first wife in Vienna, Austria. We were in the third year of our marriage and starting to show some of the strains that would split us up two years later.
A college girl from the west coast came to Vienna for a summer internship and moved into a townhouse two doors down from us. She and I became friends and sat outdoors evenings talking politics in the first year of the Jimmy Carter administration. I was very attracted to her but never made anything remotely resembling a pass.
She went home in late summer and I never saw her again. It was sort of heartbreaking, especially once my marriage ended. I think I can honestly say not a month went by over the next 25 years or so that I didn’t think about her.
In those pre-Internet days I had no idea how to see what had happened to her. Besides, I had never lived anywhere near her part of the country. But around 2003, I learned how to search for people on the Net. By then I was living in Southern California and had been for 13 years. but I was shocked to learn that she was living less than a hundred miles from where I lived when I lived in Colorado in the late 1980s.
I agonized over whether to stay in Colorado when I left. Had I known …
At any rate, she eventually moved back to where she had grown up. I was in her neck of the woods in August 2009, but I was with my family and as I said three paragraphs ago, I have never seen her again.
We have been friends through Facebook for some years, but there will never been anything more than that between us. Life is too far down the road, and even if I were to find myself a widower, I would be damnedly close to the end of my life anyway.
And besides, I don’t know if she thought of me one-tenth as much as I thought of her.
It’s like that song by the Dobbie Brothers.