July 1: I know you

Back in 1990, when I was 17-years-old, I took an acting for the camera course at the Calgary Jewish Centre. One of my fellow students was a lady named June. She had grey hair – which she described as "salt and pepper" – and a Mary Poppins kind of British accent. I remembered her mostly because her name was June. I had never met a real-life June before. All the Junes I knew were either fictional or months.

So June stuck in my mind.

I ran into her a couple years later at the library. She was sitting by the magazine rack and reading one of the latest editions (probably not American Rifleman) and I walked up to her and said hello. She didn't recognize me so I had to remind her and then she remembered me. We chatted for a bit. She said she had auditioned for a couple commercials but nothing came of them, so she stopped pursuing acting for the camera.

More than a quarter of a century later, I was at Reid's Stationers in Calgary, where I had just bought a new TSWBI pen and some bottled ink. Out in the parking lot, I accidentally dropped one of my bags and a lady who happened to be passing by called it to my attention. The lady was June.

I picked up the bag. "Thanks, June," I said.

June regarded me with her cold blue eyes. Her hair was now all salt, no pepper. "I don't recall telling you my name," she said.

And how I could have had fun with this situation. I briefly toyed with telling her I was a psychic but the Holy Spirit wasn't going to let me get away with that. So I told the truth. When I was done, I thought I'd be congratulated on my superior memory. But I was not. June seemed offended that I'd gone to the trouble of remembering her. She said she barely remembered that long ago acting for the camera course and she didn't remember me at all.

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There was a similar occurrence on an airplane in the year 2000. I was flying home to see my family in Calgary and I just happened to be assigned a seat next to an actress named Jane, who had co-starred with me in a student film about seven years earlier. Jane did not remember me. I remembered her. (For some reason, the universe likes sporadically introducing me to women who have four letters in their names with three of them being J, N, and E.)

Well Jane and I started chatting and she asked what I did for a living and I told her I was a psychic and would she like a demonstration and she said that she would. So I asked if I could hold her hand and then, with fingers clenched, I told her that she was an actress who had studied at the University of Calgary and then I told her about her ex-boyfriend, a marginally successful comedian, whom she had dated while she and I were making that student film together.

After frightening Jane a little, I finally told her who I was and how I remembered her. She laughed good naturedly and then she asked me about the roses I was carrying. I told her that they were for the flight attendants.* She told me that was very sweet of me and then a lady who was sitting behind us asked if I was single because she wanted to introduce me to her best friend. 

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The whole point I am trying to make is that I knew Jane and June and that Jane and June also knew me but they didn't remember that they knew me. This put me in a position of power.

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Some people tell me I have an amazing memory. I don't have an amazing memory. This was proven to me while perusing the SDG Counties Archives last month. I got to look through a whole bunch of past issues of our newspaper and I saw a whole bunch of articles I'd written that I don't remember writing and a whole bunch of pictures I took that I don't remember taking. We only tend to remember what's remarkable and I guess that I just didn't find much remarkable about a quilt auction in 2004 that helped pay for a new carpet in the United church. 

See, what's remarkable to me might be plain to you and what's plain to me could be something you find remarkable. This is why a whole bunch of people can experience the same thing and then come up with entirely different recollections. A number of things can influence this. Education is one. Socio-economic background is another. Taste is also an influence. I know people who think that the Lord of the Rings trilogy are the best movies ever made and they can quote all three screenplays chapter and verse. But I found all of them to be fairly ho-hum and, although it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, I can barely remember anything about the last one, Return of the King.

But it bothers me that I remember June and I don't remember much about anything that I learned in the acting for the camera course or even my theatre studied course at Mount Royal College. I think I was told that saying tongue twisters really slowly would help my vocal technique. And in movement class, I learned how to be a tree. What you do is you stand real still and you lift your arms in the air (those are branches) and sometimes you wave your arms a little bit (that is supposed to be the wind.) 

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It is entirely possible - likely, even, that June and I crossed paths much more than what I've recounted here. This is because life is a dance and most of us waltz in and out of each other's lives, often without knowing it. Hanson said that "You have so many relationships in this life Only one or two will last." And so many of our relationships last only a few seconds. 

Say, for example, you're running late for an appointment. You see some guy sitting on a park bench so you ask him if he knows what time it is. He tells you and you thank him and you hurry on your way.

If later I were to ask you if you'd ever seen the man on the bench before, you would probably tell me that no, you had never seen him before in your life. But you'd have no way of knowing that unless you had a photographic memory and could vividly recall every conversation you've had throughout your life. If you and the man on the bench lived in the same large city, it would be entirely possible that your paths had crossed exactly 17 time before. You both stood in line in the same 7-Eleven one hot day in July (you were buying Dr. Pepper and he was buying figs.) Five months before that, he sat in the row behind you at a hockey game. Three weeks earlier, you passed each other in a grocery store. Four months before that, you were in the same bookstore together because you'd both heard that Bea Arthur was there signing autographs. 

So you know him but you don't really know him because there was nothing remarkable about any of your shared encounters.

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I know Al Pacino. 

I met him seven years ago when he was doing a meet and greet at the National Arts Centre. I was one of the few people to pony up $300 for the right to shake his hand and get my picture taken with him. For about 15 seconds on the evening of June 26, 2014, I was the focal point of Al Pacino's attention. He asked me how I was doing. A flashbulb went off. A bodyguard got ready to usher me away. When I did the math later, I realized that I was paying Al Pacino $20 per second just to pay attention to me.

Here is what I said to Al Pacino: "I'm a big fan of David Mamet."

In the two second it took me to say those seven words, I saw Al Pacino's countenance change. When I said "I'm a big fan..." he naturally thought I was going to conclude that sentence with "...of yours" and so he prepared to give the stock reply, probably something like "Well I appreciate that very much and I'm happy my films brought so much joy to you."

So when I said "...of David Mamet" instead, he relaxed a little and, I think, was even relieved. He knew absolutely that I wasn't a psycho rabid fan who was going to try to rip the hairs off his Italian arms. Al Pacino told me about some of the Mamet plays that he had acted in and then the bodyguard made it clear that the rest of the conversation would take place in my imagination.

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I am 99.99 per cent sure that Al Pacino would not remember me if we saw each other again. I am not offended by this. I was not remarkable to him. He was remarkable to me because he was, and still is, an A-list actor who is in several of my favourite movies. I think the only way he would remember me would be if I mentioned our brief David Mamet conversation.** 

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From the Gospel according to St. Matthew:  “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  Many will say to me on that day,‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

So that kind of puts the whole Pacino encounter into perspective.

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I'll end this by telling another story. It is so fantastic and improbable that it must be true. 

While on my first day of a Calgary vacation in the fall of 2007, I found myself on a bus in the city's downtown core. I was supposed to meet a friend for sushi but the city had changed since I'd moved away eight years earlier. I asked the young lady who was sitting next to me if she knew where the restaurant was and she said that she didn't but she appreciated the rose I gave her.

"I was one of the flight attendants on your flight last night," she said.

And if I wasn't late for sushi, we probably would have taken some time to laugh over the unlikelihood of our crossing paths so soon after we met.

She knew me. 

(Full disclosure: The picture at the top: She's the one on the far right.) 

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* For about 12 years, I made a habit of buying roses for my flight attendants every time I got on an airplane. I started doing this because I once had a job where I had to drive flight attendants from the airport to their hotels (and vice-versa) and they would always talk about rude passengers who treated them like slaves. I understood that the flight attendant's primary purpose is to ensure that you are safe in case of emergency. Their secondary purpose is to get you ginger ale and peanuts. My buying them roses was my way of showing them that I knew this. I stopped buying them roses after my mom told me it was a waste of money. Also, one time all the flight attendants wound up being dudes. I did not give roses to them. That makes me a sexist. I'm fine with that.

** It should surprised absolutely no one that I have already mentioned David Mamet in my first note-a-day.