The Moment that Tells the World Makes No Sense

During Easter of 1979, my parents took my sister and me on a 10-day vacation to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, the only actual time I've been to the latter.  They wanted to get as early a head start on the trip as possible, so we left Thursday afternoon before Good Friday.  A quick search on google informs me that was the 12th of April.

I was in junior high, with my last class letting out at 2:20 in the afternoon.  I remember it was Mr. Hodgekins science class.  My parents had the car packed and waiting outside the school, and knowing they were there I had to hurry.  My sister was in grade 10 of high school, so we had to stop over there to pick her up ten minutes later, and then we were off and out of town.

We drove for about six and a half hours and stayed the night in Revelstoke.  This all seems kind of rushed and irrelevant, but this is all a set-up for the point of this story.  The next day, we drove over to Kamloops and then down the old Lytton highway (the Coquihalla turnpike wouldn't be built for another seven years), stopping at Hell's Canyon on the Fraser River for a couple of hours.  We had time to reach Vancouver in the late afternoon, just at the tail-end of rush hour.

My father got lost as we came into Port Coquitlam, so that we wound up wandering back and forth across the Fraser river I think four times.  He was trying to get to North Vancouver, but he hadn't been in Vancouver for some 20 years and nothing was where he remembered it.  I remember we finally got across the bridge into North Vancouver from Burnaby Heights; I can still visualise the way the Stanley Park peninsula and the bay looked.

We were all pretty tired.  The car needed gas and we found a gas station ... but strange as it may sound, this particular gas station didn't have any drinks or candy bars, so I told my mom that I was going to run across the street where I could see a hole-in-the-wall grocery.  I took off like a bolt, caught the lights and cut through the door.  Seems I was always full of energy like that.

It was a very, very old shop, with wooden boards on the floor, a very old dusty smell and very narrow aisles.  And as I came in, paying at the counter, was my science teacher Mr. Hodgekins.  I swear.

He was as gobsmacked as I was.  I said hello to him, he answered hello back ... and that was our whole conversation.  He grabbed his purchase off the counter and seemed to rush out.  Like he was frightened or something.

Coincidences are freaky.