So drink this bottle of whiskey, and don't give in to hate.

OK, today is the day I'm going to talk about a topic other than Heated Rivalry, because something amazing just happened.

Back in high school when I was 17 and in the 6th form (as we called it then, same as junior year in the US), my first boyfriend was a US exchange student from Illinois called Dave, a farm boy from the vicinity of Springfield, south of Chicago.

This morning I was woken up by someone knocking on my door at about 9am. I'm a night owl so I'm not always up then. I staggered about calling out for them to wait, and after pulling on some clothes, opened the door to find an older guy asking if I knew [my name]. And it was Dave. Neither of us recognised the other at first sight, obviously.

So for the past 3 hours we've been talking, catching up and exchanging reminiscences, filling each other in on our lives. He was only in NZ for 3 months back in our high school days and I think it was a pretty intense experience for him, urban New Zealand (Christchurch, where I grew up) being very different from rural Illinois, and my family were more liberal than his so I was a bit wilder than the girls he was used to. We thought we were in love, of course, and he says he was heartbroken to have to leave me, and that he regretted never corresponding with me afterwards - I thought my heart was broken, too, and wrote to him a few times, then stopped when there were no replies.

We dated for several weeks and were both virgins when we finally had entirely unprotected sex, not long before he had to return to the states. We had sex several times after that, ostensibly "going to the movies" but actually to a quiet park near where I lived, putting a blanket on the ground in a copse of trees. Apparently, (I have zero recall of this), I wrote to him after he got back home and told him that I hadn't gotten pregnant, thank goodness! (I do remember anxiously waiting for that period to come). His mother read that letter for some reason, and gave him hell! So I think he was kind of traumatised by that and never replied to me. He regrets that, now, and one reason for seeing me again was to apologise.

It's not like either of us has been carrying a torch all these years, but I think he really liked New Zealand and had fond memories, and he and his wife came back here as tourists in their fifties. He has a son back in the states and a daughter in Sydney, so when he decided to take a trip downunder he hired a private detective to try to locate me (as he's not great with computers and searches etc.) I'm not easy to google under my own name as although it's an unusual one, there's an Australian poet with exactly the same name, so all the hits are for her.

Anyway, eventually, through torturous routes via my old employment as a doctor, Dave got an address for me, but the street number was slightly wrong. (He wrote to me but it'll have been returned to sender). Luckily, today when he went to the wrong address across the road from me, a neighbour helped him to figure out the right number and he ended up on my doorstep.

So I was a bit muzzy, just woken up and no tea or breakfast yet, and my flat is a complete tip right now. Fionna who cleans for me Mondays is on a 3 week Christmas break, and every day I keep meaning to do a big tidy-up and put away dirty dishes and paper grocery delivery bags that are all in a big heap, but I hadn't gotten around to it due to a) painting seasonal cards each day, and, b) being obsessed with Heated Rivalry rewatches, fanfic, and art! Anyway, Dave didn't turn a hair at the mess, and frankly I'm past caring about that sort of shit these days.

We had a nice long talk, comparing notes about our lives.

• I'm happily single - he was married, not very happily, had an affair then got divorced, then his wife died from cancer. He has twins - a son and daughter, in their 40s.
• I'm staunchly leftist - he voted for Trump for specious conservative reasons and now regrets a lot of the Trump administration's bullshit. He didn't seem full-on MAGA but I told him I was anti-Trump so we wouldn't talk about that. He seems otherwise a nice guy, not bigoted, sings in his local choir, Christian in a social sort of way, cares about his kids, friends, and local community.
• I was a doctor (a psychiatrist, then ran the local psych registrar training programme) - he was a farmer, then elected to the state legislature, then worked for a passenger rail company. We're both retired.
• He's a prepper! He told me a little about how he's set up his farmhouse with a two year food supply and various other survivalist gear. I'm into apocafic, so weirdly we have something in common there, and have exchanged book recs for favourite post-apocalyptic series!
• He's intrepid enough to still be traveling the world. He flies small planes and is having a space-age plane built. It's called the Samson Switchblade - a 2-seater plane that on landing, folds itself up into a fucking 3-wheeler sports car/bike! He plans to travel more widely in the states, once it's finished and delivered. Obviously he's well-off, from selling the farm's land (most to the government as flood mitigation rewilding), and a good pension after the legislature work. I'm also comfortably off due to a sensible superannuation plan (same as what he calls a pension) plus as an only child I inherited my parents' house, and sold my own. But I stopped flying anywhere after Covid, and never plan to get into an aeroplane again.
• He's fairly trim, with just a knee replacement (used to be a runner), but he has Parkinson's disease, with a noticeable hand tremor. I'm generally healthy but also fat and profoundly unfit, with limited exercise tolerance.
• He's not at all tech-savvy in terms of phones or computers, whereas I'm comfortable with all that and a lot "younger" than him in my internet activities.

None of those differences mattered - it was just nice to catch up again. We've exchanged emails, and I plan to write to him and tell him what a blast it was, seeing him once more after so many, many years. He's off to other parts of NZ now, and Australia.

I'm still feeling a little stunned, but that may be low blood sugar as I still haven't had breakfast.

Dave, thanks so much for remembering me and tracking me down. I hope you have a blast with your amazing transformer plane before the Parkinson's gets too bad (and that you never need that two year food supply).

Man, what a way to start the day!