Destiny / Choice

I drew this portrait of my husband eight months before I met him. I just took out my drawing pad and chalk pastels one cold January night and sketched and colored and this face emerged. Eight months later, by the Penn Station information booth, there he was.

That was 30 years ago now. When I made the portrait I had just returned from visiting my parents for Christmas in Antigua, and in retrospect I think I had seen my future husband going up to the altar for communion with his mother and brother at midnight carol service on Christmas eve.

I had also dreamed him years before, when I was a teen still living in my parents home at 37 Paddington Terrace in Jamaica. I had dreamed myself in a bridal gown, veil blowing in the wind atop a hill, and I had looked up at the man beside me, his face at a great height from mine, and years later, I realized it was his face that I dreamed. 

At our actual wedding in August 1986, my friend Annie P. saw him for the first time and she said to me, "It's not so startling that you drew him eight months before you met him. You've been drawing that face all through high school."

I look at the chalk pastel portrait now and wonder why I made him so fierce looking. In reality, his eyes were soft when I met him, his lips teasing, his whole demeanor gentle and amused with a quick dancing wit.

I am thinking this morning how much we can know of the future even when we don't know it consciously. I love this man, this good and devoted father to my children, more today that I did when I married him. I believe I was always destined to love him. Almost twenty-eight years later, I choose it still.