How we met twice in a lifetime...

Thirty years ago, I laid eyes on him for the first time. I was too busy working, he kept going, and so we met only in my mind. A few years later in the spring of 1990, I remembered his face as he took the seat next to mine in Asian American Lit. He whispered that he forgot his copy of our class novel and asked to share mine. Days later when he forgot his book again, he was more interested in the scribbles on my notepad than the conversations happening in class. So when he started to write in the space beside my random sketch, I looked beyond his audacious reach and saw the words of a beautiful stranger who somehow knew my best-kept, best-friend secret of leaving marks on paper.

'private messaging' c. 1990

Those were the days when 'private messaging' came with the face-to-face thrill of meeting a new friend. As technology delivers bite-sized texts and character-limited tweets, I'm holding tight to one word that's slowly fading on my yellow paper: artist. Making art allows my hands to leave deliberate and purposeful marks on different surfaces to connect with another human. And when that one human becomes the person of my life, I hope the marks I leave will also keep our children connected. ​To this day, wherever he makes a point of sitting next to me -- in a restaurant, at the movies, on the soccer field bleachers -- I feel the luck of our twice-upon-a-lifetime first meeting in a classroom. So with him by my side, I'm working on a new series to feature hand-written messages that I'd like to keep from fading.
#breadcrumbs, FAMILY series