A love letter to Ronnie

His hand-prints are all over my heart. He held it for years in an uneasy, complicated grasp that I could never escape. Though I tried. Lord knows I tried mightily.

“You’re going to marry Ronnie Calhoun one day,” predicted friends and family, both mine and his, for years.

“No, I’m not,” I said firmly, sometimes angrily, for no two more stubborn people ever tried to form a union. It was constant debate, disagreement and sometimes argument. He’d drive me crazy during dinner conversation then shake his gorgeous head, those beautiful teeth as white as fresh bleached cotton flashing brilliantly, and laugh at my aggravation. He always laughed. And that made me madder.

“You drive me up the wall,” I’d storm out at him.

A smirk would slide across his face. “Now, is that the Christian way to be?”

But no man has ever been a more intricate part of my life and now I see that he wormed his way through my heart down to the soul of my being.

We were childhood combatants, he the torment of visits to my grandmother’s since he lived nearby and came to play with my cousins and me. Mischief sprang constantly from his dark brown eyes and streaked across his freckles. I was his chief victim. When I was 8, he blacked my eye with a baseball bat, supposedly accidentally, during a yard game.

Beginning at 9 and continuing until I was 12, he diligently sought to drown me in the swimming hole every summer. One Sunday afternoon, to his absolute delight, he almost succeeded, throwing back his head and laughing uproariously. No remorse. Ever.

I was sure I would hate him for the rest of my life.

Then in the summer of my 15th year when he was 18, everything changed. He took me home from church one night, then there on the front porch under the beam of full August moon while the pounding of my heart drowned out the crickets’ serenade, Ronnie Calhoun became the first boy to kiss me. Long, sweet, gentle and dizzying. So much so that I have spent years chasing the magic of that kiss and trying to duplicate that moment. No girl could ask for a sweeter first kiss.

I was sure I would love him for the rest of my life.

That began three decades where on and off, we chased romance together. We’d give in to the difficulty of it each time but we could never give up completely. We always came back to try again, even though sometimes it was years between attempts.

When the call came to my New Orleans hotel room, my world crumbled. Pancreatic cancer, Mama said. Not much time. For three days, I, like Katrina, flooded the streets of that city with my tears as I paced wildly, crying without restraint and praying fervently, woefully beseeching God for a reprieve.

Often I have marveled at how a person never remembers the last kiss of a romance. The first one is never forgotten but the last one is rarely recollected.

I remember, though, how our lifelong romance ended. It was the day before the Lord called him home. His once perfectly sculpted, muscular body was emaciated, skin simply hung on his bones.

I knelt at his feet, held his hand and prayed, then leaned over to kiss him, my cheekbone pressing against his but my lips barely able to reach the deeply sunken skin of his cheek. We whispered, “I love you,” one last time.

The first kiss I liked much better.

To his funeral, I sent a single red rose with a note that promised, “I’ll meet you there. Love, Ronda.”

For I know he’s there, no doubt about that. Plopped down in the bosom of heaven, aggravating some angel like he loved to aggravate me, and bringing joy to the others around him.

I am quite sure I will love him for the rest of my life.