A couple of nights ago, in the midst of the usual barrage of charitable and political solicitations, I received a call which Caller ID did not label as "Toll Free Call" (or any of the other Usual Suspects). I couldn't make out what it
did say, so I hovered over the phone, waiting for the answering machine to pick up. When it did, I heard a familiar voice.
I first met AJ in - was it 1979? - at a Dungeons & Dragons game DM'ed by a mutual acquaintance. A week or so later, we ran into each other again, at an outdoor play. (I think, but wouldn't swear, that it was an interleaved performance of "Hamlet" and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead".) We hit it off pretty well, and soon become good friends. We played a lot of D&D and other RPGs; he was usually the gamemaster. (I tried my hand at GMing occasionally, but I wasn't very good at it.) Chivalry & Sorcery, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, we played them all.
I still vividly remember our first game of Traveller. At the end of the first session, our party was aboard a submarine, being pursued by the Imperial Space Navy. The charges included poaching, several counts of assault, hijacking, kidnapping, trespassing on government property, destruction of government property, theft of government property, espionage, sabotage, and extortion. We were not, in fact, guilty of poaching. For the rest, let's just say that we meant well.
Eventually, we both earned our doctorates - I in mathematics, he in theology - and embarked on our careers. I still managed to visit him once or twice a year, but most of our contact was by phone and, later, e-mail. We would indulge in hour-long phone calls, most often devoted to discussion of books we'd been reading. As time passed, as such things go, the contacts became rarer and finally evaporated.
As soon as I recognized his voice, I pounced on the phone and announced my presence. After a few minutes of badinage ("How do we know you're actually the :name: we were trying to reach?"), we settled into the old routine. I told him about
The Perilous Frontier; he responded with
1491, and we exchanged favorite bits from that book. I continued with
1493, which he has not read (though I'm sure he will, soon), and we meandered into discussion of my Bering Land-bridge time line (with its quasi-Confucian Kwakiutl).
To be able to say, "Do you remember, in
The Rise of the West, how McNeill talks about :blah blah blah:?", with the expectation that yes, he did; to have the same issues come to his mind. but with a different slant, that I had glanced at before; to meet once again with a kindred spirit.... Old friends are the best.
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mmegaera is on a cross-country trip, from the Pacific NW to the East Coast, up to Canada and back west, and we just got back from a (rather long) lunch. I hadn't seen her since - well, we were briefly in contact at the Spokane WorldCon last year, but we hadn't had a good long conversation since Reno in 2011. A delightful talk - life, aging, Bujold, space flight, General Grant, various museums, pets, the value of e-book readers (and their disadvantages), and a host of other topics....
