The Bump-in.

I’m not a big fan of “The Bump-in”. Quite often if I see someone I know in the mall I’ll hide. Or avert my eyes until I get to a safe place where I can panic in private. This kind of social awkwardness goes back a long way for me, so I consider it a personal triumph when I do encounter someone unexpectedly and don’t run for the hills.

Then there are the people you hope to bump into. You might think you see them every once in awhile, in a crowd or on the road in another vehicle. You get your hopes up, and then they’re dashed when that person turns around and WHOA, that’s not who you thought it was. Of course these are never the people you do bump into. Instead it’s some ex-boyfriend who treated you like dirt, or it’s your gynecologist or shrink.

There are four people I’d really like to bump into sometime, either in person, or online.

Sheri from Casey’s. She was among the first people who befriended me when I got hired as a server there. I was eighteen, the youngest age you are allowed to be to serve alcohol in a restaurant here in Ontario. The training system at the time went like this:

Shift #1: You shadow another server. Just watch.
Shift #2: You’re shadowing another server again, but you get to do some stuff, like clear dishes, see if the customers need ketchup, deliver the bill, etc.
Shift #3: You’re still shadowing, but throughout the shift, transitioning to running your own tables completely.

It was during this training shift #3 that I met Sheri. I liked her immediately, and not just because she let me keep a $2 tip from one of our tables. When I made a joke about framing my first tip, that two dollar bill, she said, “Don’t be a gay lord honey, or we won’t let you drink with the big girls.” What’s not to like? I got to drink with the big girls.

Carolyn from Art Camp. I did actually bump into Carolyn via Facebook recently, but I’d love to see her in person. She was my camp counselor the first year I went to Art Camp, in grade seven. She was so kind and took me under her wing, so to speak, and we wrote letters, real letters, back and forth for several years. I still have all of them upstairs in a drawer. I get them out every once in awhile. I used to read them over and over and stare and stare at the envelopes, because Carolyn was a fine art major eventually and would never send me a plain, white envelope. It was always adorned with some beautiful collage or drawing or painted with watercolour. She is married now to Bill, another counselor from camp, and they have two beautiful boys. The only problem is that they live in the middle of British Columbia. That’s pretty far from where I live in Ontario.

Nicky from university. Nicky and I were pretty close friends for about two years. We met when we both got hired to work as servers at a restaurant on campus, called “The Wave”. Almost as quickly as we became friends, she disappeared from my life altogether. I was going through a really shitty time in my third year. I got very depressed, and although I was medicated, I still went through some difficult times when I just didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was living in a basement apartment by myself, and sometimes I just didn’t answer the phone. Or the door. For anyone who has experienced this kind of all-consuming dark depression, you’ll certainly understand that need to isolate yourself from the world. Nicky didn’t understand this and one night when I wasn’t answering the phone or the door she went through the upstairs neighbours’ apartment and came to my apartment door. She was really worried about me. She may have thought I was suicidal, although I was not. She told me that night she wasn’t sure it was “worth it” to be friends with me. That hurt me a lot, because I felt like she didn’t even try to understand what was happening to me, or give me any sort of real support. I’d like to tell her that I was hurt by how easily she took her friendship elsewhere.

My Uncle Albert. My mom’s brother, Albert, was my favourite uncle when I was a kid. I went to visit him in Ottawa by myself once. My dad drove me up there for the weekend…only now as an adult do I realize what a huge chore that must have been. Maybe he even stayed there in Ottawa to avoid all that driving. I’ll have to ask him. Albert let me stay up late and watch David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. He played John Lennon records for me (to this day I think of him whenever I hear the Double Fantasy album) and taught me how to play checkers and chess. We went skating on the Rideau Canal. He took me to museums and talked to me about science and computers and Canada. Then one day he moved away to Seattle. Then to D.C. He wrote me letters for awhile. Then he was just…gone. He didn’t return for his father’s funeral, and probably won’t return for his mother’s, either. I would just like to hear from him again. I think he’s staying away because his family is so dysfunctional and he’s decided to leave all of that behind, in the past. I guess I can’t blame him. I just wish I could hear from him. I like to think he’s searched for me online, and he has somehow found me at Flickr and has been following my life. I’d like for him to see how I turned out.

Who would you like to run into?

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