Memories Relived, Friendships Rekindled
Maybe it's a sign of old age. Maybe it's the result of too little to do. Maybe it's something in the water up here in Canada. In any case, my brain has been flooded with nostalgia recently. Nostalgia's not even the right word. It's more like an attack of waking, lucid dreams, in which whole sequences of memories will come back to me. And it's weird what you start to remember.
This is all the more strange to me because I don't consider my memory all that sharp. I can remember voacbulary words for language, but events and people tend to fade into the cobwebs. To my surprise, things that happened ten or fifteen years ago are still there, as vivid as ever.
This whole process has sparked me to rekindle some old friendships. Luckily, with the internet, the search for long lost friends is not nearly as difficult as it might have been thirty years ago. Within twenty-four hours, I had e-mails back from the two people whose memories had most recently haunted my dreams.
Aaron and I met during my junior year in college. We were in the same study-abroad program in Japan, although he was from a different small, liberal arts college. Over the course of the year, we developed a really good friendship. I'll confess that on my part, I at first had quite a crush on him--attracted by his good looks as well as his intense intellectual personality. For his part, he had no problem with my sexuality, and if he knew about my crush, he never let on. Once I got beyond the crush, I really came to value his friendship.
We galavanted all over Japan together. Our interests were similar, and we were both odd in our own ways. We would spend hours in a soba shop in the back streets of Kyoto talking about religion, life philosophy, and this culture that we had immersed ourselves in. Sometimes we would just go to a cafe and sit and read. There's something magical about being able to sit in silence with somebody and not worry about filling the emptiness with idle banter. It's a feeling that I have rarely had since.
Aaron was the friend with whom I took the literal slow boat to China in December 1997. Our little ship went from Maizuru to Shanghai. It was an incredible trip. After the excessive and sleepy politeness of Japanese culture, we were ready to drink up the vibrant abrasiveness of China. As the boat floated up the Huangpu River, it seemed as if the city was changing right before our eyes. You could feel the excitement and energy of an amazing boom town.
It was one of those trips that you take when you're young and you don't mind the discomfort or the chaos. We had no real plan, didn't speak Chinese, and didn't even have a hotel. But we managed it all nonetheless. There were the occasional misadventures, such as missing the "soft-seat" train from Suzhou to Nanjing. The flustered train station attendants shuffled us on to the next train--and what a shame we didn't speak Chinese, because we found out that that train was just hard-seats, and we spent the next many hours standing in an overcrowded wagon with Chinese peasants. They all just looked at us, wondering why foreigners were in the car with them. The moment we stepped off the train in Nanjing, I knew we were doomed; I could feel a cold coming on.
Another of our misadventures involved our choice of restaurants. For the most part, we were lucky in our choice of establishments. But one day we made the mistake of just choosing a restaurant where our taxi let us off in Nanjing. Maybe it was the water; maybe it was the duck. Whatever it was, we were doomed. Poor Aaron bore the brunt of poison, and I remember him spending the night running back and forth to the toilet until finally he just stayed there. It was the Nanjing Gastrointestinal Massacre.
What a flood of memories this has opened up! I could go on and on, but I won't. The saddest part of any story is when the characters drift apart, and that is what happened to Aaron and me since I left for Peace Corps. But drift is a natural part of life, and it should just remind us of the blessing of friendship, not to take it for granted when we have it, because how sorely we miss it when it's gone.
Tags: China, friendship, memory
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