Like a mirror on a wall

And on Sunday we took my father to see the Underground Railway Theater's From Orchids to Octopi for his birthday, thus completing culture weekend bingo; all I missed was the symphony. I should describe it before it closes. I should also talk about Coppélia, which I would love to see become Boston's regular spring ballet in the same way as The Nutcracker in winter. This post is going to do neither; it is, instead, an odd and somewhat demoralizing experience I had on Friday while waiting for fleurdelis28 at the BU Theatre.

Because public transportation is like that, I'd budgeted a full hour for the bus and the T and instead arrived forty-five minutes in advance of the pre-show talk. Fortunately, I had brought Andrea di Robilant's A Venetian Affair—and even more fortunately, the box office let me pick up the tickets that were being held in Fleur-de-Lis' name, so I could wait in the foyer instead of the rain—and I was reading the eighteenth-century Venetian equivalent of phone sex and glancing up periodically to check for Fleur-de-Lis when a young woman came in. I knew her immediately. We had gone to high school together; she was a freshman when I was a senior, but we were both in Chorus and Concert Choir and stood next to one another in the soprano section; I wouldn't have said we were very close, because we never saw one another outside of school-related contexts that I can remember, but on the Europe trip in April we were part of the same knot of friends who talked on buses during the day, hung out in one another's hotel rooms almost every night: she is one of the people intimately tied up with my memories of cathedrals and madrigals and Amadeus at the Old Vic. I read Clysta Kinstler's The Moon Under Her Feet because I ran out of books in the second week of the trip (when were in France, meaning I couldn't hit up the bookshops as readily as in England: a useful experience, to be in a country where I was functionally illiterate and might as well have been mute) and borrowed the novel from her. I don't remember what about, but I remember good conversations in Canterbury. When we climbed up onto the roof of the hotel in Paris to watch the sun set over a skyline that reminded me of Tai-tastigon, I took photographs with her camera. To make up for the day she hurt her ankle and couldn't walk around the Champs-Élysées with the rest of us, I proposed to her on bended knee with a fifty-franc bouquet of flowers. She laughed and hugged me. "Is that a yes?"

She had no idea who I was. She recognized me enough to stop in front of me and say doubtfully, "Lexington High School?" but when I introduced myself by name, it clearly did not compute. Maybe I should have recited the anecdotes I've summarized above. Instead we traded the standard pleasantries, I lied to her about my situation, she mentioned she was married—to someone whose name rang a faint corroded bell from high school; I can't tell if I knew him or if he overlapped my brother—and then she drifted off with her family and I read A Venetian Affair and Fleur-de-Lis showed up and we watched an awesome opera. And I am aware that all experience is subjective; that I remember clearly many people who wouldn't know me from a boot to the head. But that kind of polite, blank strangeness from someone I'd ten years ago considered a solid friend unsettled me. I don't think I've changed that much in looks. I didn't own a leather jacket then, but I haven't cut my hair. And while I don't suppose it will keep me up all night, this line of thought turns much too easily into the narcissistic, neurotic kind of Ich-und-Du speculation: when I thought we were friends, how did she see me? did she see me at all? High school was not one of the high points of my life. I'm sure it is for some people, God help them, and it could have been worse for me, but my positive associations with those four years are confined almost solely to Latin, music, archery (which I did outside of school), and two or three people. If her memories of me were anything like my self-image from that period, I wouldn't have blamed her for smiling brightly and retreating. But she genuinely seemed to be drawing a blank. I am not sure why I feel so strongly that it's foolish of me to be hurt.

There is no moral to this story. I have run out of philosophy and I have a doctor's appointment in six hours. I wonder who I don't remember from high school, and who else doesn't remember me. I wonder if I should be remembered.

O lucem candidiore nota

Someone just quoted Catullus 16 on The Daily Show. My life is complete.