A Taichung Story

I'm 30 years old.

When I was 5, I had a friend named Karl. We did everything together. We walked to kindergarten together. We flooded his sandbox together. We threw stuffed animals on his roof together. And then he moved away, and I never saw or heard from him again.

Flash forward 23 years. After 2 years of living in Taiwan, I enrolled in Chinese class. And guess whose name was on the class list? His name was fairly unique, and his middle name was what I remembered his dad calling him. It had to be him.

But he never showed up for class. After 3 months in the class, I realized one of the girls in class was his girlfriend. I told her to mention to him that someone knew him from his days back in Indiana. When she did mention it to him, he knew it could only have been me. Like me, he carried around the name of that long lost friend in the back of his head. He'd actually been living in Taiwan longer than me, and we never would have met if I hadn't seen his name. Or we could have even met and not realized it.

So we met for drinks. And it was totally bizarre and cool. We got along, and turned out to be about as alike now as we were then. And when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. I mean, what are the chances of running into your kindergarten friend living 10 minutes' walk away from you in the same town almost a half century later?

Better than average, as it turns out.

Have a good day.