Alette and Wilhelm were one set of my great grandparents in Norway. This story is true, taken from my family's history, and the farm they lived on is still there where my cousin Phil visited about a decade ago. Sophie, one of their ten daughters, is my mother's mother, who died before I was born. Thorvald, my Grandpa, married her and then came to America at the turn of the century to have six children with her in Brooklyn. What if Grandpa Nelsen had not visited her village the day they met? What if she had been somewhere else the day he visited? What if Wilhelm, so long ago, had not wanted to give up his life as a seaman to marry Alette? What if Alette had set her eyes on another young man? These are just a couple of the thousands and thousands of things that had to come into place before my mother, Solveig, even met my father. My father was in a naval hospital at Coney Island after WWII when Solveig went to the shore one day. How likely is it they should have met, a sailor from Pennsylvania and a young secretary from Long Island? And that chapter of my life is after this poem ends. Had one little meeting of two people centuries ago gone differently, I would not be here. The romances of so many people so distant from me, people whose names I don't even know, all went into my creation. Their stories are my story. This little poem is my love song to them.

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