For you, Cam :)

I have two friends from high school that I never really hung out with while we went to school together.  One is David, and the other is Cameron (they both follow my blog, how awesome!)  Cameron is the person who won a little contest so I let him have his prize, which was to pick a topic of his choice for me to write about in this blog.  He wanted me to discuss the deaths of Rick Rypien and another young NHL player, but since I already talked about Rick Rypien and Jack Layton, I asked him if he had anything else in mind.  He couldn’t think of anything, so he said “ME!”  I laughed a bit to myself, and to his surprise, I agreed.

As I said, Cameron is one of my friends whom I met in high school.  After leaving high school, I was dating a certain person, and this certain person happened to be a distant relative of Cam. We found this out because I went with my boyfriend to join his family for Christmas, which was being held at his cousin’s place.  Cameron also went with his own family for Christmas to HIS cousin’s place.  Now, my then boyfriend and Cameron were not at all related, they just had a common cousin.  I don’t know exactly how it went in this particular situation, but pretty much what it would look like is this:

One of my then boyfriend’s parents’ siblings would have to have been married to one of Cameron’s parent’s siblings.  That couple had a child, making it the cousin of both Cameron and of my then boyfriend.  At any rate, I had not seen Cameron in about two years, and I had never really interacted much with him when I had seen him before.  Seeing him here, now was a bit weird. 

A few years later, I ended up running into Cameron yet again.  This time, we both ended up going to the same Bible college.  To add to this, we both were commuter students, driving from the same city, for classes that started at the same time in the morning.  When we first “ran into” each other, it was on the high way on our way to school.  I saw him pass me, and then I passed him.  He kept following me all the way off the highway and down the main road, and then into the parking lot for the school.  I was a bit weirded out by this until he also followed me to the main building, books in hand – which was when I realized that he was a student as well.  (Of course he was… duh!)

At this point, Cameron and I had run into each other a few times over the years, leading us both to believe somewhere deep down that we were destined to be friends.  One day, a Canucks game day, Cameron and I both showed up for class wearing Canucks jerseys.  After this, we had an endless supply of things to talk about.  It has been a few years since then, but Cameron has been one of my most faithful hockey friends.  I have a few friends whom I consider to be my “hockey friends” and this is because our friendship is based around one thing: our love for hockey, more specifically the Vancouver Canucks.  Our friendships tend to be rather seasonal.  Cameron, however, is different.  I know this because it is summer, and I have actually had contact with him.  We went for lunch a couple weeks ago and we had things to talk about other than hockey, although we did talk about how the off season seems to be taking its jolly time this year (even though it is one of the shortest off seasons in Canuck history.) 

I guess what I am trying to say out of this is that you never know where your friends might come from.  In high school, we didn’t interact at all other than the occasional casual hello in the hallways.  Now, I would consider Cameron to be a good friend of mine.  We may not see each other very often, and we may come together for the very obvious reason of hockey, but there is more to it.  We trust each other, and there is a loyalty there that goes beyond the hockey season and into deeper matters of the soul.  Sorry if this sounds all gushy.  I just love my friends, and this is an opportunity for me to brag about how awesome one of them is.  Cameron, you rock.  Thank you for being my friend even when there are no hockey games on for us to talk about :P  In the words of Paul Rudd, “I love you, man!” 

Thanks for "listening."