The World Is Rather Small

So yesterday evening I'm out for a brief walk around the Elvis Loop (they are still dressed to fête New Year's, btw) in a desperate attempt to jump start my knotted-up appetite working again. And while I am walking a friend I had been meaning to call and get together with over a post-finals coffee calls. The backdrop is this: Aaron and I have been friends since 7th grade, but after a weird and thoroughly alienating senior year that still no one can explain to me why I was so ostrasized by most of my former friends, I was ready to turn my back on Shasta, and Redding, after graduation and I pretty much did. I packed up and headed off to UCLA where I bloomed and grew and felt ridiculously happy and excited with my new life and didn't think much about the life I'd left behind. About 4 years later, I ran into this guy on Bruin Walk who looked familiar, and I realized it was Aaron, and that he had transferred. We hung out a few times with another high school friend who was in town for the summer on an architecture internship, but after graduation we lost touch again. Fast forward another 10 years, when I get an email from my myspace account from Aaron, who has found me because he started studying TCM at Emperor's (our cross-town rival, aka the party acupuncture school) at the exact time I started at Yo San!

Last night he called to relate that while he was in the rehab facility recovering from his surgery for a nasty little episode of cauda equina syndrome, he noticed a doc with a very familiar face, but couldn't name it until..."Dr. Lehfeldt?!" spontaneously poppped out of his mouth. And lo, it was--Dr. Max Lehfeldt, MD--little Max with the golden voice that got him into Madrigals as a sophomore all grown up to be a hunky plastic surgeon! Or maybe not. We're supposed to have coffee in a couple of weeks, I'll let you know. It will be fun to catch up though, as I've always liked Max and he was one of the few people who was cool to me that wretched final year. I never cease to be amazed at how paths cross, diverge, run skew or parallel, then cross again after so many years when least expected. You really do never quite know what will happen or who will find you when you get up in the morning.