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Nov. 30th, 2017 12:30 pm
Throwback Thursday
I post so much about losing friends here, it's high time I posted about (re)gaining one.
Brahmin Bear was someone I knew at UofC back in the day. We were briefly colleagues at the library, but I think I must have met him before then through mutual friends. (I knew a couple other people doing graduate work in the South Asia department at the time.) While working on his dissertation, he was hired to do some Urdu-language cataloging work and we started hanging out more often.
This was right around the time my crush on Monshu finally began to bear some fruit. I remember in particular how once BB went to speak to him about some of the materials he was working on and we were both a little giddy about it. But his first words to me when he came back were, "He's an ass." Apparently, nobody had told Monshu a thing about the whole project and he responded in the usual way he did to nonsense at work. (I can't confirm any details now since BB claims not to remember this at all.)
It was also right about this time that BB got a teaching job and moved out to North Carolina. We saw each other once more, at a party on the North Side, when he flew back to celebrate completion of his dissertation. After that, we lost touch until eight years ago when I thought to search his name on Facebook. That led to two brief but rich conversations via Messenger and then several more years of silence.
It was a recent FB post referencing Monshu's demise that prompted him to contact me again. Up till then, he didn't even have an inkling anything was wrong. We exchanged some e-mails and then he proposed a phone conversation. That's how I came to be dialing him from the middle of my bed at about 9:30 last night.
We covered a fair bit of ground in an hour or so, from the story of My Three Breakups to the romantic possibilities of bitter melons. More than once, one of us sidebarred something with a "but that's for another time". Because not long into the call, it was clear there would be another time; the chat was just too pleasurable and easy for there not to be.
I do think I will make it out to visit him. I may have considered it before, but knowing where he's living now (40 km south of where Monshu grew up), the associations make it unmissable. Hanging up, I felt a spot of melancholy thinking of the lost memories the Old Man would have shared had he been able to come, too. But it's high time I made some more memories of my own.
Brahmin Bear was someone I knew at UofC back in the day. We were briefly colleagues at the library, but I think I must have met him before then through mutual friends. (I knew a couple other people doing graduate work in the South Asia department at the time.) While working on his dissertation, he was hired to do some Urdu-language cataloging work and we started hanging out more often.
This was right around the time my crush on Monshu finally began to bear some fruit. I remember in particular how once BB went to speak to him about some of the materials he was working on and we were both a little giddy about it. But his first words to me when he came back were, "He's an ass." Apparently, nobody had told Monshu a thing about the whole project and he responded in the usual way he did to nonsense at work. (I can't confirm any details now since BB claims not to remember this at all.)
It was also right about this time that BB got a teaching job and moved out to North Carolina. We saw each other once more, at a party on the North Side, when he flew back to celebrate completion of his dissertation. After that, we lost touch until eight years ago when I thought to search his name on Facebook. That led to two brief but rich conversations via Messenger and then several more years of silence.
It was a recent FB post referencing Monshu's demise that prompted him to contact me again. Up till then, he didn't even have an inkling anything was wrong. We exchanged some e-mails and then he proposed a phone conversation. That's how I came to be dialing him from the middle of my bed at about 9:30 last night.
We covered a fair bit of ground in an hour or so, from the story of My Three Breakups to the romantic possibilities of bitter melons. More than once, one of us sidebarred something with a "but that's for another time". Because not long into the call, it was clear there would be another time; the chat was just too pleasurable and easy for there not to be.
I do think I will make it out to visit him. I may have considered it before, but knowing where he's living now (40 km south of where Monshu grew up), the associations make it unmissable. Hanging up, I felt a spot of melancholy thinking of the lost memories the Old Man would have shared had he been able to come, too. But it's high time I made some more memories of my own.