Pye in the Face

Appetizer: What is the nearest big city to your home?
Ottawa, Ontario. I’m headed there this evening to see my friend Seany Mac whom I lived in residence with at Guelph. I haven’t seen him for a decade and I can’t wait. We recently got back in touch and I was pleased to learn he lives reasonably close to me. Then Saturday night I am going to my friend Adam’s for a BBQ. He was my neighbor and little buddy way back when I lived in Manotick around 7-11 years of age. They are coming out of the woodwork, and I love it.

Soup: On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how well do you keep secrets?
I’ve been guilty of letting at least one juicy tidbit slip towards the wrong ears at least once in my life, but these days I pride myself on keeping my mouth shut. I’ll talk to close friends until the cows come home, but when in mixed company I tend to shift into “Hemingway mode”. Less is more. My senior superlative was “Talks Least, Says Most”, and I’m still kinda proud of that. Meanwhile, here I am maintaining a blog and blathering on for anyone who’ll listen.

Salad: Describe your hair (color, texture, length).
Short, fine and brown. I’ve had the same haircut for 20 years, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I have a blond spot that sets me apart a little. When the hair on top of my head gets a bit longish it becomes very pronnounced. Like a polkadot or something. You know what I just thought of then, that I haven’t in year? This, and I laughed.

Main Course: What kind of driver are you? Courteous? Aggressive? Slow?
It all depends on the car and the situation. On long country straightaways with little O.P.P. risk, I’m Steve McQueen. In downtown Toronto with my Mother’s minivan, I’m Hoke Colburn.

Dessert: When was the last time you had a really bad week?
I have no idea. I take it day by day and if things ever got to the point where I’d had 7 miserable 24-hour periods in a row there’d be something seriously wrong. Or I’d be in Newark.

When I first got back from England in 1999, I dated a girl I went to high school with for a little while. One night while visiting her apartment I left my Mills Hall sweatshirt in her room (hey now,) and we stopped hanging out in the biblical sense a few days later. Eventually realizing where my prized shirt had gone, I called her up and asked if I could come get it. No times ever worked for her, or she’d tell me how much she loved it and could she keep it, etc. etc. I saw her many times over the next 7 years and every time I’d ask about the shirt. “Are you still going on about that shirt? I love it!” But I never would let up - it meant a lot to me.

Here is the only picture I have of me wearing it. Mills Hall in the early 90s was the only all-male dorm at the University of Guelph and we were a very proud and misbehaved bunch. I met one of my very best friends while living there, and I still keep in touch with loads of the old crew. Last week I was asked to be in one of their wedding parties this summer. It’s an ongoing bond and the closest thing to a good fraternity (and there were several fraternities at the school) that Guelph had going for it. Long story short, we all had those sweatshirts, the dorm is now co-ed without any sort of culture like we brought to it and if you’ve since lost it - that’s it. It’s gone.

I ran into the young lady in question at a wedding over the summer and said hello to her quickly. A few days later she emailed me to ask why I’d given her such a dirty look. I told her I didn’t remember giving her one, and certainly didn’t mean to and that I was sorry. She wrote back: “You’re still mad about that stupid sweatshirt, aren’t you?” I told her I wasn’t mad, but that I wished I still had it and that I’d pursued it a lot harder before she got married and threw it away. “I wore it last week” she replied.

It took her several months, but when I got home from Florida Sunday night I had a missed parcel slip at the door and I immediately wondered if she’d actually, finally sent me the sweatshirt back. I just returned from the post office, looked at the return to sender address and began doing a little jig in my front hallway. It’s in perfect condition and I’m wearing it as I type. I am ecstatic, I’m going to forward this post to all my old Mills buddies and to she who knows who she is - THANK YOU!