I remember that I was doing laundry the last time I saw her, and that was more than thirty years ago. It’s funny how the clouds of the past break now and then, and reveal a scene with such startling clarity. So, I was a freshman in college, more than thirty years ago, doing a load of laundry down the hall from my dorm room. I stepped out into the hall and there she was.
We had not been close in high school, but we had been friendly; and that was all condescension, in the best sense on her part. Lori was one of the elite, the beautiful, the chosen; and I was an outcast, an exile, an alien. Of course, I’m being over-dramamtic, but it was high school, when everything was over-dramatic.
So I saw her, and we had a nice friendly talk in the hall outside the laundry room; and after a rather long time she went away. And I never really knew why she was there. I had heard that she was dating another man from our school, an upperclassman, but he lived on a completely different part of the campus. So the only conclusion I could draw then, and can draw now, is that she deliberately sought me out. Because she knew I would be there, because she wanted to see me; because she liked me. And that seems so amazing to me, and so characteristic of Lori, full of guilelessness and simplicity.
And now that she’s dead, I suddenly know a lot about what the rest of her life was like. There was a wedding, and it must have been soon after I last saw her, because she celebrated a thirty-year anniversary; and it was not to the boy at my college. There was work and there wer children and, recently, grandchildren. There was cancer, for the last eleven years of her life. She lived the rest of that life not far from here, and I might have seen her on the street any time; but I didn’t. We went our separate ways, and that was the way it was always going to be, and it’s like that for so many of those whose paths cross ours. They move on and we move on and everybody forgets after a while. But still, not all of it fades; some abides. There are a few breaks in the clouds. Thanks, Lori, for mine.
