Across an Ocean, Romance Can Now Flourish

The Boston Herald

They come and go across an ocean, which for centuries separated people. They talk on wireless phones that weren't even a dream until a few decades ago. They write e-mails that traverse the world in seconds.

My son and his girlfriend live thousands of miles apart, but the miles don't keep them apart. She flies here for a weekend. He flies there. He can pick up the phone and hear her voice any time he wants. She can pick up the phone and hear his. They write, but they don't have to wait for the mailman. They're connected by jets that crisscross the sky with the regularity of buses, by  microwaves that bounce off satellites and by computer chips and technology.

Tania was born in Scotland. So was my son's grandmother. In 1926, when she was 15, Peggy Beckham and her family left Glasgow and moved to New York City. She left a boy behind, Ian Weipers, the son of the Presbyterian minister.

He wasn't her boyfriend, she always said. But he used to walk her to school every morning and wait for her after school every afternoon. He took her to the movies and on her first date. And one night, when he knew she was at choir practice, he met her at the church door, with an open umbrella because it had started to rain and he insisted upon walking her home.

They wrote after she came to the States. He missed her, he said. And she missed him and all her friends.

But the letters she wrote took weeks to reach Scotland and the letters Ian wrote back took even more weeks to reach her.

He visited once. He took an ocean liner across the Atlantic and showed up at her door one hot summer night. He was 29 and she was 28. Her mother said, "Be home by 1:00.” Then they went out and did the town. But the next day,  she had plans with the man she would eventually marry. Ian got back on the ship and returned to Scotland.

Then World War II began.

Sometime in the middle of the war, a letter arrived from my mother-in­ law's best friend, May Mason. May wrote that she was married and had a child,Tom, that she and Tom were living north of London because of the bombing, that her husband, Johnny, was in London "working for the war effort" and that warm clothes were scarce. "How is it there, Peggy?" May wrote. "How are you? How is America?”

My mother-in-law sent wool sweaters and thick socks and flannel

nightclothes for May and her baby. "I'm married, too," she wrote back.

During the war, she never heard from Ian. She wondered whether he was alive.

In 1945, a letter arrived on the thin blue air mail paper he always used. It was chatty, as if he had written it just a few weeks before.

Years later, when they were in their sixties and both long married and sitting in a shop across from a Marks and Spencer store having tea, he told her that he had written to her not just during the war, but right after he'd returned from America. That was the letter she’d received in 1945.  All his other letters never never arrived.

My mother-in-law was born in 1910. Tania, my son's girlfriend, was born 60 years later. Just 60 years. It's not a long time, not even a lifetime. Yet, then and now are two different worlds.

And if there had been commercial jets back then? And money to spend flying them? And direct dialing and bargain rates and cell phones and no mother saying, "Be home by one," and e-mails and prosperity and no bombs and no war to divide a world?

My mother-in-law loved the man she married. She was "fond of'' Ian. That's how she put it.

In later years, she'd always visit him when she was in Scotland. Seeing Ian was part of going “home." My son is lucky. He presses redial and says goodnight to his girlfriend an ocean away.