Our Story

This was written in February 2014 as a submission for a Valentine's Day contest that the Vail Daily ran to find the best love story. We didn't win but you might like to read it.

Dimitri and I (Audre) met when I was 42 and he was 47—we were introduced by friends. Dimitri had just come back to Los Angeles after traveling all over South America for nine months. He was “out of a girlfriend.” I was a partner in the Los Angeles office of a New York law firm and a workaholic, who would never have considered taking a nine month sabbatical and for that matter never had a boyfriend (for more than two weeks).

Our friends actually gave Dimitri the names of two women to call—me and another woman. He called us both and proposed the same thing. He said “I’ll bring some sweets to your house after dinner [on the designated evening] and, if you make some coffee, we can talk.” I said “Great” thinking: “I can get home from the office by 7:30 that evening and make coffee, no problem.” The other woman said “No, I will meet you at [a café she designated].” Dimitri thought “Audre is a more trusting individual,” and I passed his test.

On June 22^nd,1989 Dimitri came over to my Santa Monica condo at the designated time and brought some Middle Eastern sweets. We talked for hours. He was exotic and very different from the workaholic men I typically encountered. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt of Greek parents and Greek is his first language. He speaks five other languages as well. Traveling is his passion and, as often as he could during his IT career, he would take sabbaticals (or quit jobs) in order to travel for months on end. Being in IT (from before IT was a career), he was a hot commodity and could get jobs whenever and wherever he wanted.

We talked about all manner of things, including his opinion that there was no need for a woman to wait for a man to call, before calling him. When I hadn’t heard from Dimitri in ten days (in that respect he was a typical male), I called him and asked him to go sailing with me out of Marina del Rey. He accepted and from that day our lives became a traveling love affair.

In Seoul, South Korea, we saw a sign that said "Life-Dream Enabler" and we looked at each other and each of us said to the other "that's what you are for me".