Day 30: Hero

Yesterday, while I was skiing, I saw The Civetta (The Owl), one of the impressive mountains in the Dolomites, and one that I call home. I looked at if full of admiration and the next thing I knew (it must have been the tiredness), I found myself crying like a child just by the sight of it. On the left of it, the Pelmo, slightly higher than the Civetta, even though it doesn't look like that from the picture. If you cross the Pelmo, you literally arrive straight in our living room. 

In the last few days, I have been thinking a lot about someone who I don't often talk about, but who is always in my heart. My first boyfriend Maurice, one of the most determined and stubborn persons I have ever known. At school, Maurice was very clever and received advice to go to the highest possible A-levels (VWO). 

There was a problem though; Maurice had a dream, and this dream was to become a truck driver and to transport flowers (his parents are in the flower business). So Maurice had done his homework and discovered that attending VWO, would have taken him 6 years before he could see a truck from the inside. Instead, the lowest education would have taken him only 4 years... so why waste two years?  His no-nonsense motto was, if you want to do something, just go and do it. I thought it was an idiotic idea, and tried to convince him otherwise, but he was not having any of it. Maurice (with the brain of the size of the planet) chose the easy way, and attended the lowest eduction he could get and became a truck driver and drove flowers from Aalsmeer to France and Germany. 

In hindsight, he made the right decision, because not too long after he started working as a truck driver, Maurice became ill and fought against cancer for 3 years, a fight that in the end, he lost. In the years when he was ill (we were not together anymore at that time, but we always remained friends), not once have I heard him complaining. Instead, he was always joking, always cheerful and fun to be around. I visited Maurice the day before he died, and even then, at the most dire moment of his life, he was calming down everybody around him, and still making jokes. 

Maurice left us when he was 23 years old, and I have always wondered, why him? and why am I still here? I promised Maurice to do something useful with my life, which if course I didn't.... But I hope I made it up a bit and that today he would have been proud of me.   

This trip is challenging, not just physically, but also on other fronts.. and sometimes we all need a hero in our lives. Maurice is mine 💗