Epilogues??

Probably not an accurate way to describe these next entries. While I was away for the summer, I ran into a few old friends who had been following this, and was chatting about a couple of things that had happened since I signed off in March. They suggested that the stories might make good reading, and of course I am pleased enough at the compliment that I figure I should open up shop again for a while.

Vanity, thy name is Patricia. Or at least it would be, if it weren't already 'Vanity.'

I've been pondering how best to tackle the telling. One story is rather entertaining, and I would generally choose to end on a light note; the other was far more profound, and was one of those moments when the cosmos seemed to wink at me. A wiser person would probably choose two separate entries. I will leave that decision to the editors.

Who do not, of course, exist.

Living so far away from home for so long has taught me many things: significant amongst them is just how very small the world is. Bert and I used to say when we were growing up that there was very little point in misbehaving anywhere in the Maritimes-  any random town we would go in, someone was bound to stop us and ask 'Is Art Long your father?', to which we would open our mouths and remove all doubt. The same works for many Atlantic Canadians. If we are all six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, a Maritimer is just three degrees from her mother finding out that she'd been caught making out with a boy at the beach on Friday night at a village two and a half hours from home.

And that's all fine. But when one spreads one's wings beyond one's home province, one expects to be able to maintain a certain anonymity. Generally that works fairly well. However, if the frailties of humanity aren't enough to convince us of our connectedness, random meetings with people from home will soon do so. There were a couple of times in Seoul in the early days, when my most recent ex-husband would call me from the cathedral and ask things like 'Do we know any Guptills?'

P: 'Nova Scotia or New Brunswick Guptills?' 

MREH- 'New Brunswick'

P: 'Yes, we went to college with one, and my niece's mother married one of his cousins, who I used to babysit for when he was with his first wife...'

MREH: 'One of them just walked into the Cathedral'.

P: 'Ask him how Timmy is.'

That sort of thing has no business happening in Korea, and yet happens with alarming regularity. You are never more than three conversations from home.

A truth that was proven again rather dramatically this last spring.

I work with scores of Canadians, something that was nicely unsettling for the first few months that I was here. I spent twenty years in the UK and could count on one hand the number of Canadians I'd encountered after finishing my post-grad, and here I have been completely surrounded by them. Most frequently they have been from Ontario, but lately a few Maritimers have been added to the mix. (including most recently, a girl from Lunenburg- as soon as I saw on the faculty list that we had a new teacher surnamed 'Wentzell', I knew it was someone from home) One of the most pleasant of these already-lovely colleagues was a girl from PEI, named Kelly MacDonald. Kelly is, and I hope she will forgive me for publicising this, RIDICULOUSLY fabulous. Not only is she funny, fit, smart as a whip and fantastic with children, but she is holy-mother-of-God beautiful. Seriously. She kinda makes your eyes ache.  That is in no way relevant to the story, but could be an important feature of one that appears another time, so stash the information away.

Point is, Kelly Mac is an Islander, from Montague, which gained her the nickname 'Monty' within moments of meeting her. At this same first conversation, as people do, we went through the list of 'Do you know so-and-so?'s that accompany every greeting with someone from home. As Kelly is about twenty years younger than I am, we both knew that our circles were unlikely to collide directly, but we tacitly accepted that we could both call our dads to establish the chain of connectedness that was sure to exist.

My 'do you know?' was about a friend from many years ago, when I had not been in the UK for very long: Kim Monroe. The first time I saw Kim, she was trudging up towards the residences at the UEA in Norwich, bent against the weight of the enormous rucksack on her back. It had a maple leaf stitched on an outside pocket, so I did what any self-respecting Canadian would do: nudged my first ex-husband hard, and told him to carry her bag for her.

FEH: Why do I have to carry her bag?

P: It's enormous, she's Canadian, and I want to talk to her!

FEH: Canadians are weird.

Of course, Kim could hear the entire exchange, and told me later that she'd already decided to tell us to f**k off with our offers of help, but somehow the universe decided that she wouldn't, and a great friendship was born.

We spent a lot of time together that year. She was hilarious: a story-teller with a self-effacing eye for detail that would have me crying with laughter, falling off the small single bed in her cramped dorm room where we were drinking coffee as she was regaling me with stories of her travels to Australia- where she'd upset her hosts by cleaning the residue off the teapot- and Africa, where she'd learned the hard way that the men there are generally married and sometimes repeatedly- her words, not mine. (Kim also had an affinity for extraordinarily attractive African men, and was involved with one rather stunning incarnation while we were there- moody, taciturn, and embroiled in South African politics all around the time when the first free elections were being held.) I have great memories of many hours spent in Kim's company, including several on a visit to see her in Montague one summer while we were home. As is so often the case, unfortunately, once Kim returned home and Annie came along, contact dropped off. I still kept a picture of the two of us in a boat that summer, though, grinning hugely at the FEH reflected in the cabin glass behind him.

So this was the girl at the centre of my three-degrees-of-separation game with Kelly. She kinda thought that she maybe knew Kim's dad, Leonard, but would need to check with her own dad, and then wasn't sure of the name, etc, and as it was a long time ago and we were all too busy to follow up on the conversation, we let it drop.

Until Kelly's mum came to visit. As soon as I heard she was coming, I invited her over for dinner along with a lovely little gaggle of people. We had finished desert when Kelly told me to ask her mother about my Montague friend to see if she knew her, saying that she hadn't been able to figure out who she was. So I asked.

'Kim Monroe?' Kelly's mum said. 'The one who died?'

There was a full five-second silence. I gulped. 'Kim died?' I said.

Kelly's mum was stricken. 'Oh, well, I don't know. Who are her parents again? It might not be her.'

P: Leonard Monroe was her dad. I can't remember her mother's name. She was one of five daughters, all their names started with 'K'- Kim, Kendra, Kayla...

KM- I'm not sure- I think I had heard that... - I'm sorry, I don't...

I remembered that I had seen that old photo of me with Kim a few days previously, and grabbed the album to find it. Obviously, I was a bit shaken. Of course I realised that since nearly twenty years had passed, it was entirely possible that Kim would no longer be alive, but still. I went through the album, hands shaking a little, while Kelly's mum tried to recall details of the family to see if we were talking about the same person. For long minutes I searched, back and forth, cover to cover. The photo was not there. My frustration was mounting- I needed to confirm whether this was my Kim. The photo was not there. It was not stuck behind other pictures, it was not loose in the binding. The photo that I was so sure I had seen not even a week before was nowhere to be found. In exasperation, I slammed the album shut.

And a photo fluttered to the floor.

I picked it up. It was the picture of me with Kim.

Another silence fell, and Kelly's mum gave a shiver as she took the photo from me. 'Yes,' she said quietly. 'That's Kim.'

Now that there was no doubt, we spent a few moments filling in some gaps. Kelly's mum knew that family- in fact, had spoken to Leonard Monroe just a few days before coming to Korea. Kim had died of cancer- another shiver- several years before.

I told a few stories about my short time with Kim, and asked Kelly's mum if she would pass a message on to the family. I asked her to tell them, please, that while she was in Korea, she had met a woman who remembered Kim from her time in the UK, and who had spoken very highly of her. Kelly's mum promised.

It was about a week later when Monty came bounding up to me in the school cafeteria:

'Patti!' she gasped, 'I've been looking for you all day! I was talking to Mum on the phone and she wanted me to tell you something!'

Kelly then proceeded to tell me how her mother had nipped next door to see her neighbour upon her return from Korea, and was describing to her that evening at dinner- the connection, the missing photo and its sudden reappearance, my message to the Monroe family- when the neighbour stopped her. It turns out that this neighbour was actually Kim's mother's best friend. She immediately picked up the phone and called Kim's mother, asking her to come over. Kelly's mum was then able to deliver my message in person. Kim's mother remembered my visit clearly, even recalling how I had complimented her on the softness of her guest bed. When Kelly's mum passed on my message to her, letting her know that thousands of miles away there was someone who loved Kim, having met her decades earlier in ANOTHER place, more thousands of miles away and wholly unconnected to this one, AND heard of the coincidence of the missing photo being exactly the one to drop when confirmation was needed of Kim's identity, she grew quiet for a moment.

'Today is Kim's birthday' she said. 

Now, the vagaries of the universe are unfathomable. You who have been here through this whole mad journey know how I have ranted at the skies and railed at whatever angry sky-gods may be standing stony-faced behind me- and far moreso behind a world afire- and you know that I really haven't got a clue about it all. But whatever set of coincidences that has been set a-spin here: whatever twists of the globe there are that let a grieving mother receive a message from her daughter's long-absent friend under circumstances like these, miles away and years later- whatever they are, they were well-played on that day.

And that is not the end.

A few weeks after Kelly and I spoke in the cafeteria, I was rooting through a drawer in the desk in the spare room. I was looking for a frequent-flier card, and knew that I has seen it most recently in there, along with a pile of business cards that I'd stashed alongside it just after Christmas. As I flipped my way through the stack of cards, I came upon the photo that I had ACTUALLY remembered finding all those weeks before. I had not seen it in the album, I had seen it in the desk. The fact of the matter- I did not know that I'd had two pictures with Kim. I was looking for her photo in the wrong place.

The other story can wait.