My two children and I were attending the Tampa auto show inspecting cars I couldn't afford. I was looking at Porsches when I looked up and my gaze met his. I held it, the kind that comes with instant recognition. A guy around my age stood less than 15 feet away with a child in a stroller.
I knew the face. It was an image that belonged in a scene from 20 years ago and 1,000 miles away.
A mental bio popped up with everything but his name. He was a fellow expatriate. He belonged to that largely dispersed Caribbean tribe called Montserratian. On our boyhood home, he lived in the east of the island. Just seeing him brought back images of the group of guys with whom he once hung out.
Then he told me his name. And his nickname, which should have been unforgettable.
"My name is Irvin, but people at home used to call me Googy," he said.
He'd been in Tampa for more than half a dozen years. He had come directly from Montserrat, after a volcanic eruption. He introduced his baby son in his stroller. Mom was at home. He said I'd know her. I'd taught his wife in Sunday school at the neighborhood holiness church.
I had missed almost a lifetime of her growing up. Graduation, work, marriage, motherhood. Now I was staring at the man who shared her life.
When you grow up on an island of 10,000 inhabitants, you know almost everyone, if not by name, then by face. I could recognize a woman walking down the road at night half a mile away. I could put a face and a name to the gait. A few years ago, as I rode a double decker bus in east London, I recognized folks from my hometown as they walked on the side of the road.
Whenever I leave my house, I am usually an army of one in a parade of nameless faces, countenances with no past, present or future. I routinely embrace my anonymity, although a part of me always scans the crowd searching for a familiar face. Often what I see are blank stares. Until one pair of eyes, one face is imbued with familiarity. And in a moment, that face becomes a memory, a person with a shared history, the commonality of lives lived in a distant place, a smaller, greener, warmer place.
In Googy's face, the expanse of the history we shared was laid out in front of me like a documentary, flavored with green tropical hues, against a background of mountains and ocean, land and sea.
Exile makes friends of former strangers. A chance encounter is about so much more than geography. It's part history, some economics and lots of math. Slim odds, the unlikely chance that two people from so far away would converge on the same square quarter mile at the same time. A moment of recognition, a chance for recollection. A validation of identity. A temporary antidote to the nagging, unshakable feeling of being alone in a crowded city.
And then it happened again. While walking on a busy street in the south Bronx, I saw the round face of my uncle's former girlfriend. That time, recognition was more one-sided. I remembered her name and face immediately, but I had to jog her memory to remind her of who I am. Within seconds, though, we were catching up on common acquaintances.
As I heard her voice and saw her face, the shared history between us spread out on the pavement. We were oblivious to the crowd around us. My son and daughter, like they did the last time, looked on in silence. Dad is always talking to strangers on the street. I wish it were that simple. One day, they'll understand what it's like to walk around, your brain a gallery of childhood faces and names to remember on each chance encounter on the thoroughfare of life.
