It is funny how things work out.

I was folding my freshly cleaned clothes at Alexandria’s only coin laundry when I met Gord. He and his sister Cathy were quietly minding their business doing their own laundry.

My life, at that point, was set. I was done school. I had wandered around Europe for a time. Been across this country several times picking berries in the Fraser Valley, labouring underground in Flin Flon and loading trucks in Mississauga. Now I was an entrepreneur. Not yet 20. I had cobbled together some savings, and persuaded a bank and a government funding agency to extend some credit. Just months earlier I had opened, to disappointingly little fanfare, a Sam the Record Man store in the town of 3,300. My path to riches, perhaps fame, seemed blindingly clear and unobstructed.

Meanwhile, Gord and his three sisters and brother had just had their world turned upside down. Gord’s mother had died just a year or two before, leaving his dad to forever mourn her loss and finish raising five school-aged children, alone. Hughie and Connie McDonald had built a model life in Roxborough, a West Island suburb of Montreal. They lived on a tidy little street lined with bungalows. It was a place where kids played ball hockey on the street, fashioned makeshift zip lines from clothesline and wash buckets, and where the adults kept secrets and hung stylish plates on the wall. Sundays meant church and, if they were good, Chenoy’s for smoked meat and cheesecake (denser than lead).

But that dream was now extinguished. In perhaps an instinctive retreat to order, and the memory of a time of happiness, Hughie moved his young family to his childhood home in Glengarry County. Their house not yet completed, the McDonalds, less a wife and mother, made do in a long, narrow apartment in Alexandria for several months. It fell upon Gord and Cathy to do laundry.

I don’t remember why we spoke; neither of us was so terribly enamoured with our species to randomly strike up conversations with strangers. Nevertheless we started a conversation that night. We’ve been talking ever since.

More than 30 years have passed now. But nearly everything meaningful and noteworthy that has followed in this scribbler’s life has been shaped by that accidental intersection three decades ago.

Since then Gord and I have travelled together, run out of gas together, worked together, not worked together, played hockey, shared near-death experiences, the odd cocktail or two, apartments, vehicles, clothes, books, 45s, long playing albums, CDs and MP3s.

Gord introduced me to Kathleen. Elsa and Kathleen were friends. Gord was dating Elsa at school in Toronto but wanted to date Anne in Glengarry. Would I pick up Elsa and Kathleen at the train station and squire them around Montreal to allow Gord to make time with Anne? But of course.

A while later Gord and Anne were married. Kathleen and I, too, were married. I am afraid to say I don’t know what became of Elsa.

Each of us has four wonderful, devious and helpful children. Each of us has opinions coming out our ying yangs and a willingness—nay eagerness—to reach firm, unshakeable conclusions well before the facts are all in.

There is very little that I recognize in my grown-up life that I don’t trace back to the coin laundry in Alexandria. Even the notion of living and raising a family in Prince Edward County was Gord’s dream—it was never mine.

For many summers Gord’s parents, Hughie and Connie would pack five kids in the station wagon and journey five hours from the West Island to Sandbanks. Despite the fact that his stories of these trips recall mostly torment and suffering, Gord managed to develop a deep and abiding affection for the place.

I must also admit here that we inflicted several, too many to count, misspent weekends in the County, taking in the cultural highlights—the Cherry Valley Diner, the canteen at the beach and the Royal Hotel. It was at the Royal that the quietly inebriated fellow at the next table shuffled his noncompliant frame to turn to address us.

“Youse is toooruss?” inquired the regular with seemingly genuine interest.

So we live and work here now, inspired by Gord’s fondness for the place. We’z is still juss toooruss, but we are content here—happy and proud to call the County our home.

I never knew Gord’s mother. But I think about her often. I think about the tragedy of being taken away from her young family—of smart young children aware of the intense and seemingly ceaseless pain of loss, but without the context or experience to put order to it. Yet they endured. Her life and death are part of who they are—and by extension, part of those who know and love her children.

She would be pleased with how they’ve turned out.

Late at night also I wonder how my life would have been scripted had she not left too soon—had Cathy and Gord not been folding their clothes at the Alexandria coin laundry. We all take distinct paths formed by thousands of choices— some conscious, some otherwise.

But the significance of some key intersections only becomes evident in the fullness of time.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca