* * Life has no dress rehearsal

Everybody loves a good romance story. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. They live happily ever after. While the basics have been the same since Adam fell for Eve, the way eligible people make connections has changed with the times. Love Story in 1970. You’ve Got Mail in 1998. And now it’s Kiley Facetimes Mark in 2016.

“I turned 40 and got my divorce papers the same week,” Kiley Thompson told me as we chatted in a Blacksburg bagel shop. “My papers were finalized on October 30, 2011, and I turned 40 on November 3. People talk about chapters closing in life; that was a slamming chapter closing.”

Kiley and I have known each other for over half her life. She was a customer of mine, managing her Virginia Tech student literary magazine that my company printed. We’ve somehow managed to stay connected. She keeps up with modern trends as well as anybody I know.

“There are all kinds of apps these days for people looking to find each other on-line. Tinder. Match.com. E-Harmony.com. I live in a small town where the main demographic is between 18 and 24. I’m 44. I was a single mom.

“I was never of the opinion that I’d get married again. I tried leaving Blacksburg twice, but it didn’t work. If Blacksburg wants you, it keeps you. Dating options were few and far between. Dating a student or graduate student seemed a little creepy.

“Then this whole thing happened.”

Kiley met a guy. Mark. He lives in Scotland.

“In April, 2015, a friend named Susan who works for the Nautilus project was on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. They lowered a camera into the water and a whale buzzed it repeatedly. It was amazingly cool. A bunch of friends loved it. The video got on Facebook and went viral through Buzzfeed.”

Long story short, a friend of Susan’s saw the video and “friended” Kiley. People get friended by strangers all the time. “If he was a friend of hers, he couldn’t be too bad.

“I learned from his settings that he worked for the University of Glasgow and for CERN (the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, in Switzerland). Being a bit of a geek, I found that sexy. He was a single guy with a couple of kids. He was cute.

“We started talking on Facebook and did that for six months. Then we decided to Facetime. That’s video calling. I was in L.A. for work and he was in Minneapolis for a conference. Our first call lasted three hours. ‘Well, this is interesting!’ I thought to myself.

“We Facetimed more. We were flying back to our respective homes, me from L.A. to Blacksburg and he from Minneapolis to Glasgow. I sat next to a woman and told her about Mark. She said, ‘This isn’t a coincidence. This is the universe talking to you. You need to listen.’ She was an older woman flying from Phoenix to Philadelphia to Manchester. Her sister had died and she was leaving her sister’s funeral. She said, ‘I just buried my sister. Life has no dress rehearsals. You’d be a fool not to see what can happen with this. You don’t get a second chance.’ This really resonated with me.”

Simultaneously, on his flight, he sat next to two women, recent widows, going to Scotland as a memorial trip. One had met her husband 20 years earlier in an Internet chat room. “She told Mark it was the happiest 20 years of her life. She told him, ‘You have to meet her.’ We got home, immediately Facetimed each other, and told each other about what had happened, our stories. It was a vacuum kind of moment. He bought a ticket for three months later to come over and meet me.

“We wrote letters, actual snail-mail. We read to each other. We talked about our children. A month and a half into that, I couldn’t wait. I bought the most expensive airline ticket I’ve ever bought and I flew to Glasgow. It was old-school courting. But I needed to see this man in person. It was movie-like. (From the airplane,) I saw myself descending into Scotland. We landed and I stopped at the bathroom to put myself together, knowing he was in the building. What was this going to be like? He’d made a sign saying, ‘Improbably Wonderful Person Kiley Thompson.’ He ran to me and kissed me. Luggage dropped. This type of stuff doesn’t happen in real life. I’m an optimist but a realist. The only way I can explain it is that it was like falling into a space that had been created for me.”

Sadly, my word count has elapsed and there’s much more of the story to tell. Kiley and Mark are engaged to be married next springtime. Stay tuned.