I should come up with better post titles

I'm bored. I was supposed to have dinner with Michael but I'm a neurotic freak and so I ate sushi by myself and "Margot at the Wedding" leaned more to the dark and psychologically bent than it did to whatever semblance of comedy was imbued on the DVD cover.

I don't want to watch another movie.

I'm not quite ready to play more sudoku.

I'm out of rolling papers.

But here is a story that, the more I think about it? The more I think about it.

I might have told this story before and I tried to look through the titles of previous posts but, because they're all so arbitrarily named, I wasn't able to deduce if I had in fact covered this subject before.

Fundamentally? To quote the White Stripes: It bears repeating, now.

When I was nineteen years old I started hanging out in this bar in South Surrey. I hung out there a lot. Sometimes three times a week. The bartender would pull out my choice of beer (I drank beer back then) and have the cap off before I even made it to the bar.

I never did much or socialized. I played pool a little. I sometimes danced if I was drunk. Mostly I just hung around with my friends and shot the shit and sat with my arms crossed and gave the evil eye to anyone that made the most remote attempt to get to know me.

Anyways, there was this guy that just kept coming over to talk to me. He was persistent. He told me that I reminded him of someone, though all these years later I can't remember who it was. He saw through my facade and realized I wasn't the tough chick that I pretended to be. We spent a lot of time playing pool and he was very patient and encouraging with me. I am someone that gets easily frustrated if I don't pick something up right away (as my golf instructor can attest to after I came away with bruises on the palm of my hands because I was gripping my club as though I was choking it to death out of sheer, aggravating frustration).

Harry would watch me as I would line up a shot and say "I'm not going to make this" and he told me that was the wrong attitude to have. He intoned that a negative attitude sucked and it was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Harry became a fixture in my life for the entire time that I went to this bar. I would always hope to see him come in and we would have these conversations that would go on for hours. Hours. Sometimes the bar would close and the bartenders and servers would be cleaning up but we were allowed to stay and drink coffee until the last vestiges of the night fell away. And then, after that, we would sometimes walk across the street to the Tim Horton's which was open 24 hours and we would talk more.

Harry was the first guy that I was ever able to have a deep, intimate and engaging conversation with.

I realize that a lot of this is hindsight and it wasn't evident to me at the time because I was just some shit-head kid starting out in the world, but I think Harry saw more in me. I think he thought I was capable of greater things and that I had the potential to be a good and interesting person.

I believe when I was about twenty Harry was forty, or maybe a bit older.

He watched me go through boyfriends and he was always positive and supportive and easy going and happy to see me. He was one of those solid, dependable, open minded people that are equally great conversationalists and fantastic listeners.

There was a time when we almost made the move to the next level. Almost. But I couldn't quite get my head around the age difference. He never pushed me or resented me and - again, in retrospect - it was maybe more difficult for him than I fully understood at the time. We reverted to being friends again and there was never any weirdness.

Eventually he started seeing a woman that he had been involved with in the past. And then they were engaged. I wasn't invited to the wedding, mostly because I had met her a couple of times and I'm not sure she was comfortable with him hanging out with someone twenty years his junior.

I moved away. Harry got married and had children. At first we would email occasionally and talk about getting together for dinner but it never happened.

He would always email me on my birthday, though.

I can't remember the last time I saw him. Perhaps when I was 24 or 25?

I'm 33 now.

He emailed me a bit late last year and acknowledged that he was behind schedule and I responded to his email like I always do, but nothing came back. I think I emailed him halfway through the year and again, nothing.

On my birthday again there was his email. He said he was afraid to ask how old I was given that it's been 14 years since we first met. I, again, responded to his email and added a picture from my recent trip to Vegas.

No response.

As each year passes I wonder about the emails. I wonder about his life and his family and his happiness and his choices and my choices. I wonder if the reason that he doesn't respond to my emails is because I hurt him more that I thought I did, or if he doesn't want to encourage any sort of friendship with me at this point in his life (early fifties) and then I just wonder why does he remember my birthday every year?

It's both blessed and agonizing.

He was one of the kindest and most caring people I have ever met in my life. I think about the odds of meeting someone like him at age 19 (in a bar, no less) and I remember the time he came back from a fishing trip with this full beard and dropped off a fish (or was it a home made loaf of bread? I'm getting my Jesus parables all mixed up a decade later) at my parent's house cause I was still living at home.

Anyways. Maybe I will never see him again. Maybe I will keep on getting birthday emails from him until he decides to stop sending them. Perhaps he prefers to remember me as some twenty-something girl with a chip on her shoulder that he continually coaxed and encouraged to come out of her shell.

Whatever it is? I find I miss him more and more as the years pass.