Constant Craving

I promised you this story a while ago, Gentle Reader, the story of Beauty's license plate.

I ordered it from the DMV in San Mateo, because that was Beauty's home for years, and that's where her car doctor is. After I picked it up today, I dropped in for a visit, because I hadn't seen him since last summer's drama ended, the day I brought Beauty home.

I figured he missed me.

(He did.)

We went outside, where Beauty was waiting in the beautiful California sunshine, and smiled at her, and he said, "Wow, that's really a beautiful car. She doesn't look anything like the car I picked up for you at the auction house."

I blushed on behalf of Beauty, who can't. Then I told him how I'd visited Jack's father over the Christmas holidays, and how we'd agreed to blame the Awful Events on the incompetence of the administrators of Jack's estate, so that we could go on. I didn't tell him that, even though there was a great deal of incompetence on that front, I know in my heart that it was Jason, Jack's brother, who kept me from Beauty. But it's all in the past now, there was a happy ending, Beauty is with me, and I'm going to keep my promise to Jack, to look after her. Forever.

Besides, Jack's father let me play the storied Fender Stratocaster. And he let me put on Jack's old leather flight jacket.

When Jack bought Beauty, back in the homeland in 1996, her license plate was 105 YZT. That's how plates were doled out back then: three numbers, followed by three letters. It's different now. That was a long time ago.

When he moved to California in 1998 Jack flew, and Beauty took the train. Jack told me he planned to get the same license plate for her in California as she had at home. Just because he could.

Except he couldn't.

There was some sort of rule about choosing a vanity plate that was too similar to a regular, randomly assigned plate. It's a stupid rule, but such is the nature of bureaucracy. So he got 1O5YZTA instead.


The astute Gentle Reader who is also a Star Trek fan might take a moment to examine the plates in the two pictures above, and smile. For everyone else, I shall explain:

The registration number of the first starship Enterprise, the one we know from the original Star Trek series, was NCC-1701. That Enterprise is destroyed in the movie, The Search For Spock, and in subsequent movies the new Enterprise is NCC-1701A. Captain Picard's Enterprise is NCC-1701C.

When Beauty finally came to me, her plates had been removed. My first impulse, because I knew the meaning of the plates Jack assigned to her, was to get hers back. But then I got a better idea.

I got 1O5YZTB.


Do you remember the episode of Lost when Desmond gets stuck in a time warp, and Daniel Faraday tells him he needs to find a constant, something that was important to him in the past, and the present, and Desmond chooses Penelope?

Well, Beauty was Jack's constant. And now she's mine.

There must be some word today, from my boyfriend so far away

Even as I watch, in another application window, the messages from Jack continue to arrive. More than 200, so far, and Thunderbird alerts me to the fact that several thousand more emails are being downloaded. They arrive in the inbox with the sender's name bolded, just as they do when a new, real-time message arrives. I think that's what's freaking me out the most, to see his name pop up like that, over and over, as though he'd just pressed the send button.

When I moved to California two and a half years ago I didn't take my computer because it was old, and I knew Jack was setting up his Mac G4 laptop for me. He'd only had it for six months, but he was giving it to me. So I backed up everything on my old computer onto a pack of CDs, and left the CPU in the corner of a friend's apartment, you know, just in case.

Just in case someone I loved died, and I'd need to scour the machine for every last scrap of his existence.

The other day, after my visit to Jack's homeland, where Peter and I took a flask of Scotch and two glasses to the cemetery, I decided it was time. Time to crank up the old box and give it one last forensic exam. I didn't care about the hundreds of megs of TV commercials or the years of Powerpoint presentations from all the classes I'd ever taught. I cared about the email messages in my Thunderbird client.

First, I read all the messages to and from Jack. It was easy, because they'd all be gathered into their own folder years ago. Then I deleted all the messages that weren't from him, emptied the trash, and tried to figure out how to move the messages off the old box and onto my laptop.

It occurred to me a good place to start might be to install Thunderbird on the laptop. I hadn't used it for years, not since I discovered Gmail. I thought I'd install it but not activate it. Use it just as a viewer for the old Jack messages. But as I began the installation, it wouldn't let me proceed without entering a POP and SMTP server address. One of the options it gave me was "use Gmail," so I did that. What the heck, I figured, it didn't really matter what I entered, I wasn't planning to use the Thunderbird email client anyway.

So I typed my Gmail password into the required field, pressed the finish button, and the client opened.

And then it started downloading messages. They poured into my new inbox like water rushing over Niagara Falls, and I don't use the metaphor lightly; I grew up there.

I didn't understand what was happening at first. What, exactly, was it downloading? The date stamps on the messages were years old, so I scrolled up to the first one, and saw that it was the welcome message from Gmail, dated February 24, 2005.

It was downloading every Gmail message I'd ever sent or received. SENT or RECEIVED. Four years' worth of email!

They're still arriving. It seems to have limits and works in batches; it downloads a thousand or so, and then I have to delete, open, or otherwise address them before it will continue. Most of the biggest messages are between me and my publisher, with large file attachments. They are easy to group together and delete.

And the messages from Jack continue to pour into my email inbox. They are, for the most part, short and to the point. Dates and times and flight information for every trip we took together. The occasional sharing of a link to something the other would find amusing. A few pictures. A poem, or a song. And a great many apologies, from each to the other, but most from him to me, and most, I think, unwarranted. It breaks my heart to read them again.

This one made me laugh out loud, though the irony wasn't lost on me, either. Describing his day of checkups at the hospital, Jack reported, "The endocrinologist didn't like my approach to medication. As far as I'm concerned she can take her approach, fold it five ways, and shove it where the moon don't shine."

They're still arriving, the messages from Jack. Hundreds of tiny text missives. Oh, how I wish that this same sort of magic could be conjured with Bell or AT&T.

In the meantime, Gentle Readers who are tech savvy, since my personal geek is gone can one of you tell me where the mail files are in Thunderbird, and whether it's possible to copy and move them to my laptop?

Make 'em Laugh

I had only two boyfriends in my five years of high school, Josh, whom I haven't seen since his wedding in the 1980s, and Rex, whom I haven't seen since Monday when we met at the Kingsway Theatre. Our friend Gilbert bought it, reopened it, and is renovating it. In that order.

The three of us admired the theatre, and I inquired as to when the old popcorn machine might be operational. Then we walked down the street to a bar where we remained for the next ten hours.

When we were in high school the three of us spent most of our free time (and some of our scheduled class time) at a certain corner table in the library, out of sight of the librarian, where we talked about things that, in retrospect, pegged us as the nerdy pretentious clique that always thought they were smarter than everyone else. Thing is, we were. Gilbert became an engineer, then a computer scientist, and now runs his own high-tech company. And though they were good friends back then, Gilbert and Rex hadn't seen each other for over twenty years, until I hooked them up last spring. Now, Rex is Gilbert's right-hand man.

"What is it with guys?" I asked. "I mean, you two were best friends in grade thirteen, and then you both went to U of T. How could you have never spoken in all this time?"

"We did!" countered Gilbert. "We went out for pizza once."

"It was good," said Rex.

Gilbert's always been one of my closest friends; we've been through a lot together in the two decades between high school and the Kingsway, but I hadn't seen Rex since the New Year's Eve we broke up. We had a fight in his car, just before midnight. I don't remember what it was about, and have asked him not to remind me if he does, because I don't want to regret the stupid things I did when I was young any more than is absolutely necessary.

Rex is the deep, introspective type. He doesn't say much, but he's always thinking, and he notices and remembers everything. It's intimidating, but then, I'm not easily intimidated. When we were dating I told him my favourite movie was Singin' In The Rain, and for Christmas that year he bought me the soundtrack. It wasn't easy to find; it was a French import. I still have it. I think I still have everything he gave me. Even the letters.

It was those letters — in a box in my closet in San Jose, that I'd been looking through one day last spring, on a weekend when I needed to procrastinate; before my world fell apart — that led me to look up Rex on Facebook. "Is that you?" I pinged, though I never doubted it was.

"What's great about seeing someone you knew years ago, but haven't seen for a long time, is that you always see them the way they were then," mused Gilbert. He's not usually the deep one; more the let's poke this thing then pull it apart from the inside and examine it type. But he was right. I looked at Rex, sitting across the table from me looking all the world like Jack Donaghy, right down to the smirk, but what I saw was the boy with the long, dark brown hair and big brown eyes. The smirk hadn't changed a bit, though.

We went through two waitresses, lots of food and drink, and a hockey game, and then it was time to go. My car is at the garage (that's the next story), and Gilbert had picked me up on the way to the theatre, but Rex wanted to drive me home, even though he lived about a hundred miles in the opposite direction.

I was glad he wanted to, but I was a little scared, and so I talked all the way home, nearly forgetting to give him directions in time for him to follow them. We took a detour through the Exhibition, just for fun, and for a moment I was 18 again.

He pulled up in front of my condo building and I had to get out of the car, I mean, what else was there to do? I felt like I should say something deep, but then I realized it wasn't necessary. This wasn't a deathbed confessional, and it wasn't a chance meeting of two people who would never see each other again. It was a beginning. So I said, "I feel like you're back in my life, now. I hope that isn't presumptuous of me."

He replied, "No."