Later in the Annex

Bumped into Ian and Louie saying hello to Alan. "Two Alan's," said Ian, including me in this three way meeting, years, decades under the bridge. Is it eighteen years ago we hung out in the Future Bakery? (Ian and Louie were young.) Alan says, yeah, he's still playing rock and roll and doing odd jobs, renos, in the neighbourhood.

Oh, but it's a beautiful warm autumn dusk. And I thought of Carolyn, all those years ago, how she admired that I knew so many people in the Annex, then. Oh, Carolyn, who'd passed through so many schools just after I'd left, before arriving in Prof. P.'s lab to sort out our basophils. What a nice short meeting we had. Her unhappy stomach turned out to be cancer, and canned her. And now these decades on (one and a large fraction) I wonder who's happier, I or her ghost, her reincarnation, on our trek to bliss or oblivion. Oblivion or bliss.