I can always be found

I might be too young to say this, but I've begun to see patterns forming. People who slip in and out of your life with glances, mentions, images, and sounds. Part of what I try to do here with these backwards ramblings is attempt to connect the past with the present, but memories aren't just about the past. Sometimes the past connects with the present all on its own.

My freshman year of college, I lived in the same dorm as a tall Australian named Angus. The first week of school both of us befriended a kid named Chris down the hall. Chris had a camera on his computer (unheard of in those days), and Angus had me in stitches for an hour with a video of himself turning on the camera, saying "WhoooOOOOOOoooo" and moving away into the darkness as a lamp fell over behind him. Or something equally ridiculous.

Angus was also in my modern dance class, both of us bumbling but respectful. As he was 6'6" and I was 5'2", with a great sense of the bizarre we always picked each other as dance partners, laughing as we flew across the room in our sweatpants in giant (or little) flailing leaps. Angus and I, covering both ceiling and floor, pliéing and making odd shapes.

That spring I went through a brief and misguided phase in which I thought I should own a skateboard. Angus was the first one to test it out after I'd assembled it, looking proper old skool eighties, straight out of an old super 8 film, tall and fluid like a birch tree in the wind, weaving an S-shape through the dorm parking lot.

Angus didn't come back our second year, and none of us knew why. "I think he went to art school," I heard from Chris. And left it at that.

Several years out of college, I'd heard Angus formed a band. And that they were pretty big in the indie scene. "Can you believe that's the Angus we went to school with?" a friend said to me one day over post-work drinks. We sometimes have these conversations; people we once knew making it big, and all we can do is react with jealousy-soaked pride. I bought their first album and listened to the songs, trying to glimpse an old acquaintance in the cacophony.

But that was hardly the past entering the present. That was just echoes.

A year ago, The Husband and I found ourselves standing in the rain outside a large warehouse on a docking complex-turned-art commune just outside the center of Riga. We weren't quite sure what was going on there, other than the fact that there was art and music, and many young hip Latvians scurrying about. We even heard a few people speaking English.

As we huddled together against a large warehouse door, shielding ourselves from the light but constant rain, we commented that it felt like we could just as easily be standing outside a club in Williamsburg. All the kids looked like hipsters. I pointed to a tall kid in mechanics' overalls loping across the muddy walkway.

"Yeah, and look, there's Angus." We laughed and waited for the rain to stop.

It was only later that night, once we'd been coerced inside the warehouse for the end of a London DJ's set and back outside again to brave the monkish silent service of beers from a makeshift bar, when we returned to the hotel and stumbled across the truth of who we'd actually seen. The ticket stub from the event had a web address on it, and when I went to the site, hoping to find out more information on one of the artists at the event, I saw a familiar name.

"Babe," I said to The Husband, as he removed his rain-soaked shoes, "guess who was playing at that show we just left?"

Back at home I got in touch with Angus through his management and told him of the strange coincidence, spotting him on such foreign soil. He was pleased to hear from me, said he hadn't heard from anyone since he left our school. "makes me smile that you figured out who i am.was."

Past, meet present.

Until I make it to their next show, to find out if he can still make me laugh with a whoop! and a fallen lamp, I'll listen to this song, his song, and picture Angus weaving, leaping, tall and lean, straight out of a super 8.

(Incidentally, in the hundreds of times we went leaping around the room in our modern dance class, his pants never once fell down.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.