Melissa's Place

Good Things

They say bad things happen to good people, and that may be the case, but people don’t talk enough about the good things that happen to good people too.

My friend Amy Proulx is a good person. She and I were drawn together for many reasons in University. One was our adoration of Paul Simon (she once gave him up for Lent). Also, our pursuit of fluency in french brought us to the same residence: La Maison Française. And our tree-hugging tendencies probably led us both to Guelph in the first place. Whatever the reasons, we drank tea, played the guitar on the roof of our rental house and visited the Farmer’s Market together for years. Once, she found an old rocking chair at the Thrift Store, so she walked home with it balanced on her head and when she got home, she painted it red. Once she walked home from the University Community Garden with a wheelbarrow full of tomatoes and she gave a workshop on making salsa. She wrote a vegan cookbook and took all the pictures to illustrate it herself. Once she made her own pitas in our oven. Many times, she microwaved a squash and forgot it was in there.

I knew Amy through some rocky patches in her life. For a while, they thought she might have M.S. She would get tipsy and had some other neurological phenomena. But she always had a bright attitude. Instead of getting her automobile license, she bought a moped. She sometimes said she thought she was reincarnated because she knew things and she didn’t remember how she’d learned them. For instance, she would listen to Greek radio stations (or maybe it was Araibic) and she could understand but she didn’t know why. She was brilliant, but her body seemed often to not cooperate with her free-spirit. She was diagnosed with polycystic ovaries, which essentially meant that she couldn’t have babies. She took everything with a grain of salt. She had the wisdom of a three hundred year old woman. Then she ran away and married a wonderful Iranian man.

She went to Iowa to do her PhD in some food-related-save-the-world plan. And now she writes me that is she going to return to Toronto (her husband is a firefighter who is at the top of the waiting list in this area now). She has heard of my wedding and has reminded me that many years ago, she promised to give me, as a wedding gift, an enormous batch of homemade pierogies. How could she know I would marry a Ukrainian man! And just when I think I’ve already heard the good news, she tells me they are expecting a baby! She went into the hospital for an ultrasound because of a kidney infection and voila! There you have it, Ladies and Gentlemen. Wonderful surprises happen to well-deserving and unexpecting people very single day. What a great life!