By the time I was in grade eight, I had gone to eight schools. That meant walking into the classroom eight times as the new kid. The new kid. You know what that means. It means almost guaranteed social awkwardness, unless you turn into a chameleon or perform some other kind of social acrobatics.
Eight schools by eighth grade also meant, however, that by the time I was 13, I had learned how to find the people I thought I could talk to in a room full of people I didn’t know. How do you describe it, what happens, when you walk into a room full of people that you don’t know? In my case, there is a “first time we met” story, as told by a dear friend, that comes to mind.
I was 18. She was 18. We were waiting in a university hallway for one of our first-year, undergrad classes to start (English lit, “Chaucer to T.S. Eliot”). Her version of the story is this: For some unknown reason, I just started talking to her, and what she thought was, “Why is this person in beetlejuice tights talking to me?” The word “weird” may have been in there somewhere (either about me or my tights, I can’t recall).
I think it was around the 20-year mark in our friendship that I heard her tell that story. And my version of the story? Well, it may not have been beetlejuice tights that I saw on her, but I saw something … something I learned how to see in someone in the first 30 seconds in each of those grade school classrooms.
This past year, so many of us have been bouncing back into rooms full of people that we don’t know after three years of being mostly in our pandemic bubbles. How to describe that bouncing back, the moments of awkwardness, the social acrobatics?
I’m not sure. For my part, though, I will say this …
If, for some unknown reason, I just start talking to you, it could be because I see your beetlejuice tights. Then if, by chance, a friendship forms, well, lucky us, because I have to agree with T.S. Eliot, “Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!”
To every person that I have been able to call a friend in my life, in case I haven’t told you, I love your beetlejuice tights.
a few words ... from Montréal 