The cat called back (3)

In which our Hero wonders if there was maybe a memo that went out and he just missed it

Third and not yet last in the odd sequence of my past reaching out with a female hand is a classmate from university whose contact made me smile. “It’s Vita, remember me?”

When I was 25, a few months before I was writing here, I went back to my parent’s homeland for the first time in 15 years. And over and over again, I’d meet a relation who had possibly seen me at 10, and more likely seen me as a toddler, and they would be so very happy and ask me that question, “Do you remember me?”

I tell this story again without any of the awe having faded, we were driving the five or six hours to visit a relation, and my uncle asked the driver to pull over at a roadside stand, and the man at the counter came to the car to talk to my uncle, turned and saw me in the back seat and he just smiled. He just smiled so wide, went back to his stand and poured candies into my hands as if I was the 10 year old he’d last seen. “Do you remember me?”

I’ve promised myself that I’m going to try not to ask kids that, to try to keep the perspective that the little moments when we connected back then were significant only to me, and that I was just part of the forest of knees to them. But that’s the question I think of. Do you remember me? Do you remember me?

Did I matter to you?

I think that’s as far as my capacity for nostalgia goes. I’m not really looking to rekindle old friendships, even though I wouldn’t mind if we turned out to still be friends. Mostly, I’m just interested in knowing how their lives have progressed. And if, maybe, do they remember me?

Vita wasn’t entirely silly to give her name, given that LinkedIn had a different last name and her true first name rather than the nickname she used. But yeah, I remember her.

Not that it’s all that great an accomplishment. My engineering school had around a thousand people in my year, but my particular program sequestered around a hundred of us away from the masses for a faster, harder ride. And of that hundred, there were maybe 20 women. And of those 20, about only half were free of the kind of stereotypical social dysfunction that makes a lot of technical women kind of invisible.

Plus she was a fellow denizen of “the Common Room,” our lounge, our office, our diner, laboratory, workshop and nightclub. So while we weren’t socially friends, when you’re crossing paths with someone 12-18 hours a day, it’s hard to call them anything else.

I remember her as a middling student, like me. Which was okay, because we took care of our own, and there was always someone to go to for help, or for that one answer on the problem set that you couldn’t figure out. But one of my vivid memories of her was her using her looks and charm, going from guy to guy, filling in her homework. Me too, she vamped at me too, and I let her check what she wanted. But what’s never stopped being funny is that I really doubt she needed to work so hard.

The last time I saw her was at our graduation, where she shared my glasses to watch the event. She went back to her native country right after the ceremony, and that was that till this email. And again, I can’t see much reason to reach out. I’m not much of a professional contact, given that we’re on different continents. We weren’t really friends.

But she asks the same question, the only question that I wonder when I think back. “Do you remember me?”