Abjectedly Yours

It began innocently enough with an online book purchase in December of 2010 that went awry; it eventually evolved into a loving friendship. Anthony Chandor, an antiquarian bookseller from Bath, England, and I, a teacher from Buffalo, New York, spent one cold December day working through the details of a failed business transaction. Anthony’s first email to me explained the mix-up and was signed, ‘Abjectedly Yours’. Every day for four years after that, we exchanged emails which created layers upon layers of stories about our careers, our families, our quirky personalities, our passions, our heartaches and our joys. Abjectedly Yours is a memoir that follows two polar opposite individuals as we met email-to-email, and eventually face-to-face, building a friendship that felt anything but awkward and new.

Apparently my casual friendliness caught Anthony off guard on that December day, and he found our exchanges intriguing. His reserved English nature yielded to daily conversations and bizarre bantering, which continued until his death in November of 2014. The gap in generations, cultures and geography made the friendship even more unlikely, and the bond even more unusual. Throw into the mix an unfortunate stroke, a wife, Alzheimer’s disease, blended families, a husband, an ex-husband, health issues, life in the nursing home, fascinating anecdotes, an eventual visit (highly anticipated by one and dreaded by another), and you have the makings of our truly incredible journey.

Our friendship never really had obstacles to overcome or awkward moments to work through. And to make matters even more incredible, I found upon visiting Bath for the first time, that the city, its people, the Abbey, and Anthony all felt oddly familiar. In the last minutes of that first visit to Bath, I was confronted by a woman on a footpath in the park who smiled charmingly, and remarked on my apparent happiness. Before she walked away, the oddly dressed stranger added that she had known me for 200 years. She bid farewell and when I turned back, she was nowhere to be found. Yes, I swear … it really happened.

I reluctantly shared this rather strange encounter with Anthony; he was not fazed by it in the least, and revealed that others in Bath had had “sightings” over the years. It continued to be on my mind and when I returned to Buffalo I decided to make an appointment with a well-respected medium; I wanted to know about past lives. The session with the medium revealed two connections with England and a startling revelation about a close friendship I had with a Vicar in the 1700’s - of course - in a small city in England. For me, the session added to my suspicion that something was indeed very unusual about the relationship I had with Anthony. Had we met before?

This new information, believable or not, added fuel to our email exchanges, and our correspondence continued. Our friendship strengthened, our trust grew, and our devotion to each other remained difficult to explain or define. Anthony flat-out refused to give credence to any medium’s words, and he reflected his distrust in facetious poems about his life in the Abbey. In spite of the teasing and kidding, the what if’s and the how do you explain’s, there was no debating the sincerity of our friendship nor the depth of our fondness for one another.

Abjectedly Yours is a collection of emails and personal diary entries that map the eerily familiar feeling that accompanied the “getting to know you” period and the “now that we’re friends” period between Anthony and myself. Our relationship was unique. It encompassed companionship, mentoring, friendship, and a very unique brand of love. The story is hopeful, tender, nerve-wracking, inspiring and best of all, true; every word of it.