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I arrived in the Republic of Panama in June, 1970, expecting to stay only two or three months. I was working with a Hawaiian company on Johnston Atoll, a collection of desert islands used by our military. After two years, they tried to send me to Kwajalein, another military outpost in the Pacific. I refused to go, so they sent me to Panama instead.
I attended a Halloween party that year that was hosted by IBM, who brought in a fortune teller to entertain the guests. The fortune teller wanted to read my palm -- my left palm -- and gave me several predictions about my life and health, some of which have come true. She also predicted that within a short time, a few months perhaps, I would meet the love of my life.
I made friends there. I got involved with a bunch of car nuts and managed to win my first ever slow rally with the help of one of them, Andre. Andre was in Panama with the Army, a civilian worker. He met a girl, Nila, and they decided to marry. I was invited to their wedding the following Valentine's Day. At the wedding reception I met Delia, a woman dressed in a pink pants suit. Our eyes locked. I really wanted to get to know her.
I spoke only English. Andre spoke English but knew a bit of Spanish. Nila spoke English and Spanish very well. Delia spoke Spanish.
I had a reason to learn Spanish.
One of the group I worked with, Gus, was a native of Germany who was raised in the Bronx, where he taught himself English. Gus had a very heavy accent and we had difficulty understanding him most of the time, but he quickly taught himself Spanish. I asked his secret and he told me that he bought the local newspapers every day (there were several) and read at least the front page of each. That quickly built up his vocabulary for the words he had to know, the words everybody used daily. I decided to put his method to use.
Andre wanted to learn Spanish. I wanted to learn Spanish. Nila wanted to improve her English, though it didn't need much improvement. Delia wanted to be able to use English. The four of us started going out as a group and studied languages together.
I had spent two years on a desert island. I got to a tropical paradise where a fortune teller told me I would meet the love of my life. We met. I fell in love. Delia, however, felt committed to Junior, a millionaire who was in Spain studying medicine. She decided we had to break it off for at least a month. By the end of the month, she had decided to drop Junior and marry me.
Panama has a strange arrangement: instead of issuing marriage licenses they perform a civil marriage, after which the couple is free to have a church wedding, which was the important one to Delia. We married in the courthouse in Balboa, under United States jurisdiction, in December of 1971, planning to have the documents quickly translated so we could have the church ceremony in January of 1972.
Delia came down with pneumonia and was in the hospital when we were supposed to get married.
We had to reschedule. The church had an opening for April 15; otherwise we would have to wait until August. Oh, well, at least it's a date easy for me to remember.
The bilingual priest that was to perform the marriage tried to convince us not to marry because we had too many differences: language, religion and culture at the minimum. We contacted him twenty years after the marriage. He was amazed and happy to have been proven wrong.
Things have not always gone smoothly as we approach the Halloween 39 years after the prediction was made that we would meet. Were we fated to meet and fall in love?
Does it matter?
