Moments and jelly beans

It seems to me that life is like a bag of jellybeans - a collection of brightly-colored moments, each of which fills you with something. Some are more pleasant than others, some are bigger than others, some are just filler, and some clearly impact the remainder of your life.

When I met my first Arizona friend is one of those moments.

I moved from Ohio to Arizona when I was 5. I only went through one year of schooling in Ohio; it was called kindergarten but techincally it was closer to first-and-a-half-grade. I was bounced between first-and second-grade classrooms during the day for reading and math, then took recess with the kindergartners. I didn't understand that this was unusual at the time, but I knew I wasn't exactly well liked. When I got to Arizona I had no family and no friends, and largely entertained myself with little trinkets and toys I opened on the drive out here (yes, we drove from Ohio to AZ and got here on a day it was 118 degrees).

The first day of school came up here and I was put in first grade. I knew nobody. We played soccer at recess...well, they played. I tried, but I didn't understand for the life of me why you couldn't pick up the ball inside the lines. I ended up committing several "hands" penalties not understanding what I was doing and instantly villifying myself. Then lunch came, and Shannon Ashenfelter, a blonde-haired, pig-tailed, blue-eyed cutie asked me to sit with her at lunch. We had pizza...the kind that was cut into rectangles and used powdered cheese. We talked - strangely I don't remember what the conversation was about - and she became my first Arizona friend.

I was a rather timid individual and, had she not befriended me, I strongly believe my young life would have taken a drastically different shape, one far less pleasant than how it's turned out so far.

My family only stayed in that house for one year. Shannon's family and mine kept in touch for a few years, then grew apart. As fate would have it, though, she was dropped back into my life for a brief moment at work a few years ago. My company ended up hiring her as a representative and when I saw her name on the new-hire list I almost fainted. Instead I smiled as all the memories came back. When she first saw me in the department she dropped her pen and her jaw, stared for a second or two, and said, "Oh my god, it's like I'm looking at a ghost." We briefly hugged, smiled, laughed, then went about our days. Eventually, though, I sent her a letter at work thanking her for what she did so many years ago, and I count myself extremely fortunate to have received the opportunity to do so.

We all should be so fortunate.