Talk Without Speaking

In the astronomical-odds department, I recently bumped into a long lost friend of mine at Blue Chip Cookies, the UBC morning coffee shop. Chris and I played basketball against one another when we were in different high schools. He was in a french catholic school and I was in an english protestant school; it made for crazy rivalries. Once in CEGEP we ended up trying out for the same team together, ended up actually speaking to each other and became great friends. We lost touch when I started bouncing back and forth to Australia I suspect although I can’t, of course, remember the exact moment.

Here we are, 13 years later we figure, and it’s like no time has passed at all in many ways. He came out and played volleyball with the usual gang and I was amazed how the wordless communication flowed between us even after all this time.

So, finding Chris again got me thinking, yet again, about my one other long lost friend, Jane. Jane and I worked together on Sparks Street in different restaurants. It was one of those things where I suspect I had a bit of a crush on her at first but we were just destined to be friends. She was a huge cyclist as well so once I started couriering I pestered her to leave serving and come hang out on the busy streets with me. We biked together for ages; it probably seems a lot longer than it really was.

Jane eventually moved to the U.K. and my house burned down; it was a combination of those two events that caused us to lose complete touch with each other - I didn’t have any contact info for her and my contact info was a smoldering heap. We had one of those Bell invisible answering machines and we called in a day or so after and there was a message from Jane calling from the U.K. but, as I remember it, there was no contact info for her.

So, last week I made a concerted effort, with the help of Google, to try to track her down. It was massively complicated by the fact that she has the same name as a fictional character in some popular british comedy hence a million useless hits. All this was massively rewarded with an email from Jane this morning!

Amazing! I’m all done.