I love you

WOW!

What an incredible blog! How wonderful that you fell in love with New York and how incredibly wonderful it is that you seem to have become more comfortable with who you are.  Your increasing self-confidence is so awesome to see!  You are a remarkable person, Ryan Deauville, and it is such a relief that you are finally beginning to feel it.

And what fun to have met a special lady in The Big Apple! She was obviously impressed with you as well or she wouldn’t have agreed to see you when you returned to New York.  LOL!  You were probably so starry-eyed that you don’t remember much about the city ;-).

OK. Tell me about the lady.  What is she like?  It’s fun that you have met somebody who has caught your eye and your attention.  If you spent a great deal of time just being together and talking and she seems special enough to mention her to me, I would like to know more about her.  Getting out of Indian River County can be an eye-opening experience, can’t it?

The truth is, the very fact that Indian River County is small is what appealed to your dad and me after we spent so many years traveling all over the United States.  Just be glad that we decided against retiring to Key West.  Imagine what a horrible childhood and education you would’ve had there!  I’m so glad that you’re doing some traveling and seeing more of the world than Florida and the cities to which you travel for GREENS+.

The truth is, New York City is a very special place.  When I lived there, I was still very young and still into the great outdoors.  The truth is, I missed the wide open spaces and the greenery very much.  When I got older, I think I would have liked and appreciated New York far more.

Haylen is missing, so I need to go and help your father find her.

It’s wonderful to have our blog going again.  Let’s keep it alive!

I love you INFINITY!

My New Found Love - New York

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” – Albert Einstein

I stumbled across this quote recently and it has stuck with me. While I had pieced together a nice little script on Chicago, I realized after my trip to New York that finishing it would’ve been a waste of time. I was even considering a combination, but it would only have been detrimental to the latter.

Originally, I had planned on taking a trip back out to San Fran to spend New Years with Courtney. The idea lingered for quite some time, but it only took five minutes of persuasion from Austin to send my mind elsewhere. New York again. Why not? I needed to give NY another shot anyways. So after a booked flight and a hop up the coast, I was there. From the second I arrived there was a different vibe. I cannot say I’ve ever been hit with it so intensely before. It was a good one though. Now more experienced travelers, Austin and I skipped the 45 minute in the taxi line and found a private car. Drivers just kind of hang out around the airport, but at least you can barter with them. The driver had dropped us off nine blocks away from the apartment, but why complain? We met up with the first friend, Jason. Mind you that I was heading up knowing there would be a lot of Austin’s ex-college buddies, most of whom I’ve met, but I had no idea where this was about to go. After grabbing some food we went to a little pub and met up with seven or so more friends. Fortunately I had plans elsewhere, so I took off for the rest of the afternoon.

This will sound Hollywoodish, but I’ll go for it anyways. The story really begins last time I was there. After dinner it took me as long to open the door as it did to lock eyes with a beautiful girl. She looked back and there might have been a good 15 second period where nothing but staring occurred. We spoke for only a few moments on the sidewalk as we were both heading separate ways with friends. Thinking on my feet I requested her number. To my shock she gave it to me. We never got to connect on that trip. Now fast-forward a few months. When I decided to go to NY I wrote her a message on Facebook just letting her know that I was going to be around and would love to meet up if she was available. Well after a few messages back and forth we set plans and that’s where I spent my Thursday. We just walked around the city for hours; Rockefeller Plaza, Radio City, Central Park. We even found a secret burger joint. This place was in a hotel, a really swank hotel. We walk in and there’s a little lounge, quiet and dark, with a real laid back feel to it. We assume this is where the burgers can be found. Wrong. We ask the bartender, “We heard there a burgers…” and he cuts us off simply to point around the corner. We turn and there is a line next to a large wall with an enormous red curtain. The line seems to be going absolutely nowhere. Well, we wait for about 45 minutes and finally end up in a place I could best compare to the No Name Pub in the Keys. I’m assuming you know this place, off the beaten path in Bent Pine Key with dollar bills covering the walls. Well minus the dollar bills, that was this burger joint hidden inside an upscale hotel. After getting our burgers we had to wait another 15 minutes to get a table just to eat them! Well, let me say it was worth the wait. It might not sound like anything great, but it was a lot of fun! After we ate we walked out to Central Park. I got my picture with a snowman which I’ll send to you when I get it from her. I was pretty excited about that lol. It was getting late, I had to meet back up with everyone and she needed to take the train back home, so we called it a night. Believe it or not we ended up meeting again New Year’s Day. We walked to a nice little spot by the water and just talked for a few hours. Now, none of this may sound like much, but I have become a much different person from a couple years ago. Even just from last year I’ve changed drastically. Hanging out with her and leaving everyone to do so was a bipolar version of me lol. Not that it is realistic or anything will come of it, but she’s definitely one to keep in contact with. This for me, again, is simply bipolar.

New Year’s Eve

There’s not really much to talk about on this one. His friends rented a bar in Greenwich Village. 185 people attended and it was insane. Probably 99% of them were from Denison, Austin’s college. I was quite the oddball out, but I handled it well. I met a ton of great people, but I wouldn’t even call New Years the highlight of the trip.

There really aren’t too many other highlights worth mentioning, but it was a trip for the ages. I realized that I will end up living there at some point in life. Electric feel. That’s how I would describe it. Everything about it; the people, the vibe, the atmosphere, it’s all just electric. I make more friends in a single weekend, and for that matter now have more friends out of town than I have gathered here in my entire life. Go back two years ago and I would’ve laughed at you if you told me I would love New York. And yet here I am having fallen in love with the city. Everyone is young. Everyone is vibrant. Everyone is doing something with their life. Everyone is interesting and intelligent. The opportunities and adventures seem endless. You can feel the energy and drive in people there unlike anywhere I’ve been. I could go on forever. Coming from my high school, sheltered up and shy personality to where I am now is amazing. I never thought I’d enjoy people like I do now. Long story short, I now understand where I want to get eventually.

Well I’ve probably left out a lot, but I can imagine you get the point!

I love you and can’t wait to see what you think! PS – I’m not rereading or editing cause this flowed out and I want to leave it that way ;)

Ryan

My Sweet Boogs

My sweet Boogs, what a wonderful birthday present this is!  You’re absolutely right we have so little one-on-one time and I love the time that I spend with you so much.  You know that I never planned to get married – I kind of got conned into it.  There’s no question that I’ve always loved your dad, but I just never planned to marry or to have children – it just wasn’t in my mental script.  After living together for 4 ½ years, your dad announced to me one day that I wouldn’t marry him he was leaving.  I loved him and couldn’t imagine life without him so I married him when I was 34 (I originally met him when I was 29 and he was 19).  We had a crazy, hippie style life together.  I found myself cast more and more into the spotlight as I accepted more and more important jobs (only one of which I ever “applied for” – the rest were just offered to me—oftentimes more than once).  As you probably know, if I had not broken my neck I probably never would have gotten an education –which is probably why I have never overly hassled you about your education (notice that I said “overly”).  I kept getting offers for more and bigger jobs and usually ended up grudgingly accepting them.  I was content to just make a living – enough to support your dad and me.  But, as luck would have it, bigger and better jobs came my way and I eventually became more and more successful in my professional life.  In the early to mid 1980s, I began to feel as if my life was missing something.  Your dad and I became foster parents to a 12-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his parents.  He had two brothers and the three of them live at a facility kind of like an orphanage that was run by a church group.  I felt that the three brothers should be kept together.  A family tried to adopt them and ended up keeping just one of them.  It made me really sad to see that happen to those brothers.  The boy who was living with us as a foster child deeply believed that his parents would come back to get him one day.  We kept in touch with him until he got to the age of 18 when he moved out of the facility that he was returned to after the “adoption” with the other family didn’t work and they just kept one of his brothers.  It was then that I started realizing that all my feelings about not wanting to be a parent were probably something that I was hiding behind because of my absolutely horrible childhood.  I told your dad that I wanted to adopt a child.  He thought that I was absolutely out of my mind.  I was in my mid-40s by this time and we were living in Tallahassee.  Your dad was working at a halfway house for delinquent boys.  His best friend at work was named Mike.  Both Mike and his sister had been adopted.  One day, Mike came to work and announced to your dad that his niece was pregnant and wanted to know how to go about having her expected child adopted.  Your dad immediately called me and I had the best adoption attorney in Tallahassee get in touch with Mike’s niece and arrange for us to pay for her prenatal care and your birth.  She was only weeks pregnant when she found out and called Mike.  Consequently, we were able to keep up with her whole pregnancy through Mike and his wife – approximately 8 ½ months!  Mike’s wife kept calling me and giving me progress reports.  At one point, she called and said that your birth mother’s doctor suspected that she was going to have twins.  I told her that she absolutely couldn’t tell your dad – he would probably have a stroke!  She later called me and told me that you are going to be twins – that you were just a very large baby.  At the time, the cast director for Disney World was a friend of mine and had found out that we were expecting a baby.  He was just in the process of leaving Disney World to accept a job as tourism director for Vail, Colorado.  As luck would have it, he had three young sons so he sent me three large boxes of boys baby clothes. I still didn’t know whether you were  going to be a boy or a girl.  I called Sarah, Mike’s wife to find out the result of the ultrasound that your birth mother had gotten to find out that she was just going to have a large baby and not twins. She didn’t want to tell me, but after my telling her that I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea about how to raise a girl child and I had three boxes of boys baby clothes and if you were a girl you would have a major gender identity problem, she confessed that you were going to be a boy.  I was absolutely overjoyed!  (To be continued…)

Happy Birthday!!!

Mom,

Instead of writing you an elaborate card or searching for another gift, I thought this would be much more fun and special. I've created a blog for us. We will be the only ones who can see it and will both be able to post whatever we want. I realize that even though I see and talk to you all the time, we don't have enough one on one time. I know there are forms of communication much simpler (emails, for instance), but this just seemed like a much more fun way to share stories with each other that we may never talk about in person. I want this to be a completely open way of communication, no limits, and most of all, no judgement...anything that comes to mind, whether it be one simple thought or an entire novel.

I just thought that this would be something really neat we could share together. I personally always seem to get things out better through writing anyways. It never hurts to work on my writing either!

I hope and think that you will really enjoy this. I know I will!

I love you so much. Happy Birthday and let's have fun with this!

-Ryan