Operation Enduring Tofu – First Contact

Operation: Enduring Tofu is my ongoing saga discussing my emergence into vegetarianism — but mostly my journey to find the person responsible for my vegetarian lifestyle nearly two decades ago.   If you’d like to catch up, you can do so by reading:

Chapter I: The Legend of Shiny – An Introduction
Chapter II: Acquired Memories
Chapter III: The Celery Stalk
Intermission: a short video (not by me)
Chapter IV: The Name Game

Chapter V – First Contact

A few weeks had passed since I left that voicemail message on the voicemail which, as far as I could guess, belonged to the Sparkles household. And by that, I mean the parents of Robin, the 30-something woman with whom I was trying to connect after almost twenty years.  I was contemplating calling back exactly one month later and trying to get a live person. You know — so I could realize rejection in person rather than not knowing due to unanswered messages.

I didn’t have to wait. however. Because I received this email* before the month was up:

Hi Shiny.

I got your message from my mother last week. 

Very funny timing.  I was hanging out with *another participant from the trip* 
and we were reminiscing about *the summer trip* and your name came up.  Hope 
you are well.

And thenshe told me a little about her life, her professional career (which is rather impressive!), her family (married for almost a decade, two kids), and life in general. Contact had been made!

My phone call had worked. 🙂

I wrote her back.  I talked about my life a bit. I talked about the folks with whom I had kept in touch for a few years, eventually letting the relationships fade over the years.  And then I moved the discussion to the topic at hand.

Well, no. Not really. This was something I specifically wanted to do over the phone. So I wrote the following:

I have a favor to ask of you, actually -- one which was the main reason I 
set out to find you in the first place:  I've been been doing a bit of writing 
as a hobby recently.  And I'm writing an article about shared experiences 
and selective memory. (It's not an academic paper; it's more of an informal, 
freelance human interest piece.)  Do you think you and I could schedule a 
time to talk on the phone so I can get some of your recollections of the 
summer we were on *the summer program we were on*? Please let me know 
if this is something we might be able to arrange.

I mean, I didn’t say specifically it was a blog. And who could blame me? Bloggers are weird and creepy and stuff. Trust me — I’ve met some of them. And I didn’t delve into the whole topic of vegetarianism.  But that can wait for the phone call — if she were to agree to it.

We exchanged some more emails — and she gave me her number! Her schedule with work and travel, however, is extremely busy; she was out of the country this past weekend.  But she said I could call her…

… which I did this evening.

Unfortunately, she had a last-minute work thing, so we couldn’t speak for much more than a minute.  But we agreed to talk again next week.  She sounds exactly the same, and she mentioned the same about me. It was exciting for a good 85 seconds of telephone conversation!

We’ll see what the next conversation brings. Until next time…