A Day from the Past

How this day unfolded was not intentional, but it ended up being an opportunity to revisit three different periods of my life. I suppose one of the benefits to not sticking around the same place forever is that the people and places that are familiar and remind you of that place have this way of always being significant in that context, regardless of how much they change.

In the morning, I set out to find three geocaches near the Cameron Branch of the Burnaby Public Library (one of them was inside the library!). When I was really young and my parents wanted a vacation, they’d let me stay with my grandmother for anywhere from a weekend to a week or so. One of my favorite things to do with my grandma when I was a kid was to feed the ducks at the small pond off of Cameron St, about a 15 minute walk from her apartment building. I think when I was about 8 or 9 they ended up filling in the pond, but when I’m lucky enough to come across one of the old pictures of the pond, it always makes me smile. While we had driven past the area numerous times on the trip, it was nice to get out and walk between the caches near the Rec Center and just think about these old times and take in some of the new developments in the area, such as some really neat dragons.

One of the dragons near the Cameron Rec CenterI strongly recommend the How dewey find it? 2 – Cameron Branch and 10-10-10 Here Be Dragons! geocaches, they really highlight some of the best features of the Cameron Recreation Complex and if you’ve ever spent time there, it’s bound to bring back some memories.

Later on, I met up with Jason. Jason and I attended grades 1 through 7 together, there was only one year that we were not in the exact same class. So we have strong memories of each other from when we were really young. It is so remarkable how little has changed about who we are as individuals, even though so much has obviously changed. We’re adults, forging paths for ourselves in the world now. In elementary school neither of us had very many friends, so we are effectively each other’s time capsules. Though he has done far better keeping up with the news of our classmates than I have, so it really does take a delicious spaghetti dinner, at the New Westminster location of the Old Spaghetti Factory, to scratch the surface of what has become a nearly-annual tradition. More than anything, it is just nice to remember that while we struggled in elementary school, we made it, and we’re proof of that.

A short SkyTrain ride back toward where I was staying, I met up with Mairi. She was my first and best friend during my freshman year of college, which was absolutely the most challenging. What was funniest is that while we met at Lougheed Mall, which was a common place for us to go in college, she had not been there in years, either. We had decided to meet at the Starbucks.

Prior to meeting up, my dad asked me if I knew where the Starbucks was. I said that it was near the McDonald’s and I was adamant about this. My dad was less confident and was trying to explain where it was. It turns out that the McDonald’s is long gone. What was once a McDonald’s is now an urban clothing store, but when I explained the story to Mairi she said, “If you had said it was by the McDonald’s, I would’ve known exactly where you meant!” So the mall had changed since 2004-2005, but our knowledge of the mall had not, even though my dad’s knowledge had because he can see the mall from his apartment and probably visits it on a monthly basis.

I had not seen Mairi in about five years but as soon as we started talking it was like no time had passed at all. In fact, it felt like we could just have easily been back in 2004 and heading back to our dorm at Simon Fraser University later that night. It was so exciting to learn that she’s getting married, is successful at a wonderful job, and is generally rocking at life. While I could have probably ascertained some of this via Facebook or through some other online media, it was much better to hear it over coffee at one of our old haunts.

But with the ending of the day, so does the portal to the past. 2014 returns tomorrow.