Birthdays and such
The day I turned 22 Ivo was still in Alaska and I was stuck in Aldeburgh. Aunt Clarissa bought me a sugary white cake and a ghastly sweater and spent the day talking with my mum about how horrible the world was. The only thing she asked me was what I intended to do with an English degree.
Ivo sent me American chocolate, a poem composed the night before in drunken euphoria (noteworthy more for the hilarious scribal errors than the incoherent declarations of what I am certain he meant as love but came across as pornographic innuendoes), and a series of his own drawings he thought might entertain me. Like many in his profession, he had learned to sketch over the years, puzzling over what form a given fossilized bone or scale might take in artistic reconstruction. The prehistoric world, he once told me, was all very Dr. Seuss. One merely had to have a little imagination and there was no telling what might have been. From the fossilized remains of a single jaw bone he would recreate the animal. And so I was treated to Epidexipteryx and Epidendrosaurus and Deinocheirus and one I was certain he made up, Opabinia. ("I am not making it up!" he protested in his letter, knowing full well what my reaction would be.)
He wrote of his latest escapades - of nearly killing a dozen tourists when the raft capsized because he had been distracted watching an unusual variant of the common loon; of literally missing the boat and having to be taken on the outboard to catch up with it; of joining the polar bear club and determining that no amount of scotch could make swimming in sub-freezing temperatures worthwhile ("I shall return to you a lesser man. You can imagine what I mean...". His testicles, he lamented, were simply no more.)
He was off the following day to see his sister and brother-in-law in Vancouver and then would head south to Seattle to meet up with an old friend who now taught at the University of Washington before heading out again for two weeks in the Inside Passage, his favorite part of the summer. The midnight sun would be out on June 21st and while the tourists would be off playing midnight golf or watching midnight basketball or simply doing the midnight drinking thing, he intended to be alone on Chenga Island where he could best observe the sky. However, he noted - and I could hear the ache in his penmanship - no sun could brighten his life as I did and he would give anything to be with me on my birthday.
That was the closest anyone had ever come to saying they loved me. I lay down on my bed and cried myself to sleep.