Places Heather Has Been Sited

My friend Heather requested to be part of a chart on my blog, so here it is.

I live in what is in some ways a small town, even though well over one hundred thousand people live here. What I mean by that is that within certain circles, one tends to come across certain people with a degree of regularity. Hence, you'll meet someone who you might well have met many times in the past but never really registered as more than a face.

Back toward the end of March, I met a gal who I didn't recognize at first as someone I already sort of knew. The reason: She was wearing glasses, which I'd never known her to do before. She is someone who skates in similar circles. I'd seen her play in a band a friend of mine was in, and I'd seen her play one or two solo shows when she was playing among a list of other musicians I knew. Finally, I'd seen her a few times--and been introduced to her or vaguely hung out on the edge of shared conversations with her among shared acquaintances--at a bar I frequent. She struck me as an attractive woman I would likely not have much in common with. I don't know exactly how I came to that assessment, since we'd probably exchanged all of two sentences in the years I'd known (of) her. Perhaps, it's that I'm a personally very conservative person, while most of the people I have contact with in town trend pretty liberal (that said, most of my nonchurch friends are fairly liberal and many of them would say I'm liberal too--I guess much just depends on how one assesses these things; I tend to feel like an leftist oddball among religious people and a rightest oddball among the artistic crowd I often mix with).

So in March, I went to see a performance of Indonesian-like music at the college music hall, mostly because a band I like called Electrophoria was among the participants. Heather struck up a conversation with me as I walked into the hall. Should I sit with her? I wondered. Well, why not? Neither of us were with people, a friend of mine having turned me down for the event. I'm glad of that, since it meant I got to spend the evening getting to know her. It was only after she mentioned being a musician that I realized who I was talking with, that I already kind of knew her, and that we had a ton of friends in common. And it was only after talking with her--spending time with her, at a bar after the show--that I realized that we actually had more in common than I'd have imagined and that my assumptions about her had locked me out of what might have been an interesting friendship much earlier (though, fact is, I probably wouldn't have had the guts to talk with her anyway).

Anyway, since that evening in March, I've had several more occasions to run into Heather or hang out with her, and it's been a joy each time. Heather is this incredible combination of sweetness, cuteness, strong-headedness, quirkiness, and, well, funness (is that a word?). I'm glad I've gotten a chance to get to know her and to spend time with her. Below is a map of places at which Heather and I have been present at the same time: