A Friend, In Former Days

Angela Van Essen
Wonju, South Korea
Friend

Dear Hennie and Peter Vellenga, Tim, and Heidi.

I am writing to you because I was friends with Ted while we were both students at The King’s University College. We worked together on the Vriend’s Organic Vegetable farm for a summer, and I have always admired and respected Ted. I am also writing to you because Ted’s story has strangely and sadly intersected with my own. Canadian poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje once wrote "we live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell." I heard about Ted’s death the day after the anniversary of my own sister’s death, which occurred 20 years ago on May 25th. I was eight years old when my older sister was killed in a collision while riding her bike home from the local Safeway. It is a part of my life story that will always affect me deeply. So when I read the news of Ted’s death on that day, the grief that sprung up within me was far deeper than the grief I felt for Ted, because it was mixed with the recurrence of another.

I know that after my sister’s death I tried to collect relics of hers; things she left behind. I stole her diary and kept it with my own notebooks and poetry. I wore her old clothes when I grew into them. Later I grew crushes on the boys who went to school with her. So even though these acts were childish, I identify with the desire to collect memories and stories of the people we miss so deeply. Because of this, I felt compelled to record my own fragmented memory of Ted, even though we lost touch in the last five or six years.

A friend, in former days

“there are some people whom you can never forget. Whose presence slips between nostalgia and forgetting”

but these are recycled words, and now I seek neither the gloss of nostalgia nor the fog of forgetting. Yet my act of writing reveals only the frailty of my memory. What I recover feels dusty and clumsy in the words I set down.

These are the fragments that I have found. Perhaps they too can be used within the structure of this stained-glass picture…

Once we swung on swings in a park. It was after eating Thai food in a restaurant. Perhaps we were both missing Josh, and eating the food made us feel like we too were trying something new, something marginally exciting. He got dizzy and I laughed. I felt like a child again.

Once we picked saskatoons in the river valley with recycled margarine containers as our pails.

Once we stood together within a row in front of a small crowd, shy and proud recipients of some kind of academic award. He congratulated me, and I him. I remember feeling that this was a new side to him, one I had not seen before. We were not in classes together, and he always seemed so quiet.

Once we all snorted with laughter, on our hands and knees in the dirt. All of us; Ted, Rob, Fama, Josh, Anja, Beth, me, and the Vandergiesen hippie were making farting noises and throwing dirt clumps in the field. I think we were weeding. I think someone shouted ‘fire in the hole!’

And several times we rode the tractor back to the yard after a long, dusty, and sweaty day. Sometimes he would be silently practicing his sign language. Sometimes he would just be taking in the prairie sky.

These are the pieces I remember best. These are the ones I will keep.