You Don’t Remember Me?

I always thought I was mildly memorable, not in the same way you might remember meeting someone famous, but in the way you might recall someone with a pleasant, easygoing personality. Someone might say to you, “Hey, you know that guy Robert?” “Sure,” you’d say, “I know him. What a guy he is.” Or “Yeah, of course. How could I forget him?” Or even “My life changed for the better the day I met Robert Glover.”

Okay, so maybe not the last one. Maybe I’m delusional, but I still think that someone I’ve met, not just once but a half-dozen times or more, someone who lived in the same building as I did, someone whose name I can remember, would at least summon up a memory or two of me – if not my name, at least my face!

This came to mind when I was wheeling my daughter down the street in her stroller one afternoon, and I ran into someone I recognized. “Hey,” I said. “how’s it going?” I followed up his blank stare with “Ryan, right?”

Instead of stopping, he back-pedaled away from us. What was this? I recognized the move immediately, but I can’t believe someone else was using it: “the back-pedal brush-off”. That was my move! When you don’t want to talk to the person, but you also don’t want to be completely rude, you walk backwards away from them. You face them, but you’re simultaneously getting as far away as you can. The follow-up move is the “see ya’ later spin” that ends the encounter.

“Ryan, right?”

“Yeah.” Still a blank.

“Gables Park Plaza?”

“Yeah.”

“Robert,” I said. Had I just asked him for the cube root of Pi? “I used to live there.” Latin verb declensions? He looked as befuddled as a caveman in a library.

“Sorry, dude.” I was “dude” now, but not in a familiar way, more of an “I’m irritated with this conversation and I want to get away from you” kind of way.

“We talked by the barbecue a few times.”

“Sorry, I don’t remember.”

“Passed each other in the hall.”

“Nope.”

“Rode up and down in the elevator every day.”

“Uh uh.”

What was this guy’s problem? “Okay,” I said. “Never mind.”

“All right. Take it easy.” I watched him go. There it was: the see ya’ later spin! The nerve of this guy. Couldn’t he have faked it? Even if he didn’t remember me, which I found hard to believe, couldn’t he have pretended he did? Would it have been that much of a stretch?

That night, I replayed the conversation with my wife. “I don’t know what his game is,” I said.

“Maybe he doesn’t have a game,” she said, while she stirred the spaghetti sauce. “Maybe he just doesn’t remember you. It happens.”

Not? Remember? Me? Impossible. “No, that can’t be,” I said. “He’s working some kind of angle.”

“Maybe you just weren’t that important in his life.”

What? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Meeting me is typically the high point in anyone’s life,” I said. She rolled her eyes. “It has to be a game he’s playing.”

“Maybe he remembered, but he didn’t want to talk to you.” She lifted a tiny spoonful of sauce to her lips.

“Again,” I had to remind her. “Meeting me-“

“-is typically the high point in anyone’s life. I know.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Then I can’t figure it out.” She stood beside the stove, stirring the sauce. “He should have faked it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “He’s playing some kind of game.”

I’ll figure it out one day. You don’t remember me, pal? Are you kidding? What’s your game?