Ticklings With Whiskers

For the one brief year of its existence, my husband and I watched a television series called Finder of Lost Loves. In this show, people who loved each other and lost each other were reunited. We never dreamed we’d be part of such a story, but today we were found. And after 45 years.

They were kids when we last hugged them goodbye, tears in their eyes and ours. They walked out of our temporary care into the rest of their childhoods. And for us, a curtain was drawn across their lives, a thick curtain.

We met at a restaurant, this brother and sister, and they came bearing gifts—a bouquet of flowers, a granddaughter of one of them, who looked exactly like the other when she was a kid, and stories, stories that are only theirs to tell.

For years, they wondered where we were. And recently, if we were still alive. Occasionally, they tried to find us. And failed.

But a few weeks ago, one of them saw a variation of our last name on a banana pepper jar at a pizza shop and tried again. This time he found my husband’s professional counseling website. When he saw a photo of Steve behind a desk, he sent a text.

I heard Steve’s shout of exclamation from two rooms away. And the rest of the day, we couldn’t stop smiling.

At the restaurant, these two lost loves told us what they remembered—a wagon, a finger caught in a door, a rocking chair, hide-and-seek, pizza parties, bedtime stories and prayers, and ticklings with whiskers.

“Now I whisker my grandkids,” the brother told Steve. “I got it from you. I remember how good it made me feel.”

“What were we like as kids?” they asked. And it was our turn to tell stories, to fill in the gaps made by childhood amnesia.

At our restaurant table, food took last place. Some of us forgot to eat. Some of us couldn’t eat. We’re were too strung out, the moment too big.

But we’ll try again. Next time at our house. We’ll stretch out our table. And they’ll bring their families.

Once again, we hugged them goodbye, tears in our eyes and theirs. But this time not for forty-five years.