"Dear Monstre
I hear that you are in Paris doing things that would make me cool. This makes you useful to me.
signed,
your childhood friend"
My goodness. Not quite my childhood "friend" but the son of the only friends that my insane forbears managed to keep.
Summers together after we'd all finally moved to Canada in time to learn french and english and hebrew and catch up on the rest of elementary school. (which meant desperately trying to show interest in classes that we'd covered in kindergarden in Poland, but hey)
Ahhh, childhood Andrew, thirteen precious months older than me and infinitely cooler.
Softball games on the lawn in the Laurentiens always resulted in my face connecting with the plastic wiffleball or plastic way-too-fat baseball club.
He used to tell me the most horrible things, not gory-horrible, but un-truth horrible.
Little butterflies are baby butterflies. When my six year old fuddled brain tried to explain that this was bullshit, I knew they came from caterpillars, he patiently explained over everything I'd so painstakingly learned from national geographic magazines and the Worldbook encyclopedia and from the little caterpillar-infected sour cherry-tree in our back yard in Llodava.
I had multiple confirmed sources. I had personal experience backing up my knowledge base.
I was six. He was seven. He was in grade TWO and it was my first summer in Canada.
He was thirteen months older. He HAD to know better and so I listened and believed and repeated the same bullshit lines back to him the next summer about tadpoles not growing up into frogs like everyone said, he'd turn on me with all the cruelty of an eight-year-old and tell me I was too dumb and too little and how come I didn't know better when everyone else did.
Even as a seven year old I took myself far too seriously, and swore to hate him then.
(don't even get me started on how much I despised Calvin's dad in the comic strip as late as ten years later)
Ten, twelve, fifteen years later whilst I was struggling through university and working full time in the grocery store, mousy cropped hair and no-time-to-primp utter lack of conscience as to how to wear anything but army pants too many sizes too large, we met again on some errand for his father (still the most darling man) and he told me of the acid games he'd play in his car (felt strange that I'd already stopped playing them by then), of the number of times he'd dropped out of college, how his parents were paying his rent and paying for his car cuz they were sooooo nice.
I gritted my teeth and bid him adieu and went to do my homework.
Two years ago, we met at the wedding of another girl that had spent those summers in St-Agathe with us, and he told me of the Microsoft certification program he'd enrolled in and asked me questions.
With my finally emerging confidence (based entirely on a spurious epiphany that summer from a comment by Marc that I was an amazing person simply because of these incontrovertible facts and other irrevocable things and I'd just better accept it so I did once I got over the shock of the first person to ever say anything aloud like that) I managed to make jokes and sarcastic answers that didn't shrink in his thirteen-no-longer-signigificant months additional wisdom. Not much, at least.
He told me how he wanted to go into computers because that's where the money was. I cringed. Tech is something to love and immerse yourself in with a passion and thirst for knowledge...
...a personal trait that is entirely possible he helped endow me with, those many confused-looking-for-answers summers ago.
I spent that evening dancing with a different childhood friend, Peter, and went home trying not to think of Andrew and how handsome his face had become.
So last night when I received his e-mail about how he's a microshite programmer now looking to come to Paris...
...I replied wittily and slightly impersonally but supportively and with promise to fill in more details later.
When I got to the bottom of his message where he included his "p.s." with his last name in case "Childhood Andrew" just wasn't enough, I wondered if it was as ludicrous to him to forget me, as it was for me to have lost mark of him.
In this slowly stabilizing confidence I tell myself that his memories of me must be just as vivid, and maybe, just maybe, he looked up to me in a couple of small ways, the way I so helplessly did him. Fucked if I can figure out how, though.
Now, nearly twenty years later though, the pangs are so small that they are merely entertaining traipses through memory lane.
The wounds have healed. The indignation finally become a silly thing.
Not to be taken seriously.
I will write to him first chance I have � midi, and I will give him urls and helpful things and try to help him as much as I can.
I am healing.
The hurts are gone, and the myriad of things he taught me remain in my memory so that I can pass them on to the next six-year-old.
How to catch frogs.
How to eat ketchup on a hot dog.
How to build a castle out of lawn-chairs.
How to play hide-and-seek.
How to say "fuck" (not that I knew what it meant at the time) to the big kids in camp so they'd think I was tough.
How to sweep the floor of the clubhouse. (alright, so I was a bit of an errand-slave for a few summers)
How to discreetly eat all the sweetest blueberries from my basket without being noticed, whilst picking them from the now-razed-and-housing-developped blueberry hill where our parents sent us to collect berries for jam.
How to run and leap from the dock into the lake.
How to get tangled in lilly-pads.
How to play fetch with Casey, the world's most amphibious dog.
How to skip rocks.
How to thirst for knowledge.
And in other news, after three gruelling hours in another roundhouse meeting where our walking in circles was as far from my own climbing-spiralling-stairs circular thought processes as could be, the new guy finally realized that it really is that bad.
I've been answering the same questions since the beginning, running into the same walls.
I keep asking "so how to we proceed" and he is no longer wondering why I end every meeting with that question.
I never get any answer.
Today I explained my brilliant idea to solve the database seal problem that at once confirms the integrity of each transaction stored in the DB, is swift and efficient, and doesn't require re-calculation of signing certificates since a very large symmetric key is used, kept the same, and it is only the public key protecting the seal-key that gets changed. Daily. And the private key gets handed to the singing program and that's it.
Beautiful. Graceful. Inspired.
I came up with it in October.
I presented it in October, November, and didn't bother in December.
They asked the same question again, i answered with the same swiftly-becoming automated sentences.
Fran�ois said it was brilliant. He always does. Eric hemmed and hawed and made it clear he hadn't heard my explanation. Nicolas looked surprised that I had gone that far in solving the problem.
Then when I asked "so what is the next step so that we can test it?" I got the same blank look.
Nicolas saw it this time.
This doesn't solve anything, but my inner ego is pettily reassured.