(I was going through some old e‑mails when I found this missed con­nec­tion post I wrote years ago. Aside from get­ting in touch with the per­son I was writ­ing to, one per­son replied, “I am not her… but I read this page hop­ing that one day some­one would post some­thing this nice about me after a ran­dom smile exchanged on a street cor­ner. Well Done.” Don’t we all.)

I was walk­ing north on O’Connor around 5pm yes­ter­day, lost in a thought, when I turned the cor­ner and saw you look­ing at me.

You gave me an unin­hib­it­ed smile, the likes of which seemed to con­vey a strange famil­iar­i­ty. Like we had seen each oth­er at an office par­ty but were nev­er for­mal­ly intro­duced, so we knew of each oth­er’s exis­tence but were too shy to be the first one to say any­thing, and rel­e­gat­ed our com­mu­ni­ca­tion to giv­ing each oth­er quick glances when pass­ing each oth­er in the hall.

It made me think of this line that Emilio Estevez says in St. Elmo’s Fire:

There are sev­er­al quin­tes­sen­tial moments in a man’s life: los­ing his vir­gin­i­ty, get­ting mar­ried, becom­ing a father, and hav­ing the right girl smile at you.

Okay, so maybe Joel Schumacher got the entire con­cept of St. Elmo’s fire wrong in the movie, and sure, Andie MacDowell’s role was as chal­leng­ing as putting but­ter on bread, but she was per­fect for it. She had a fresh face with the right amount of charm and mys­tery to be the love inter­est of the guy who played the pop­u­lar jock in The Breakfast Club, and for a moment yes­ter­day, YOU WERE THAT GIRL. If that makes me the crazy, obsessed wait­er-cum-law stu­dent then so be it. At least I was­n’t the wild frat boy with a bas­tard son who could­n’t hold his life togeth­er that Rob Lowe won the Razzie for, right?

You were the girl who defined one of those four quin­tes­sen­tial moments, and it came at the right time, as I had just spent so much time curs­ing Ottawa for hav­ing such incon­sid­er­ate dri­vers and inac­ces­si­ble down­town park­ing. I was the guy you smiled at who prob­a­bly lives a lit­tle too vic­ar­i­ous­ly through 80s com­ing-of-age movies cause I was nev­er cool enough to have any “real” prob­lems, and your smile stopped me in my tracks. By the time I gained the clar­i­ty to turn around, all I could see was you walk­ing away, in a long black coat, black hat, with red hair.

All I need now is to lose my vir­gin­i­ty, get mar­ried, and become a father. Maybe you could help me with those too.