Aloha Friday Edition No. 4

My pal Kailani at An Island Life hosts this great meme, Aloha Friday, based upon a very popular term used in Hawaii when island residents take it easy and look forward to the upcoming weekend — kind of like T.G.I.F. The meme involves no long posts, no deep soul searching revelations … just a little fun.

Each Friday, Kailani posts a simple question or topic of conversation. Visitors leave a comment on Kailani’s site and then post a question or short discussion topic on their own site. Participants visit each other’s sites and respond with a comment! Even if you do not post a question or topic on your site, you can still play by simply leaving a comment!

Here’s my question for this edition:

We’ve all had friends over the years with whom we somehow lost touch … perhaps there was a disagreement or misunderstanding, perhaps not.  Sometimes the events of our lives just pull us in new directions, away from folks with whom we have had wonderful, nurturing relationships.

This Christmas season, if you could and were to reach out to one such person, who would it be and why? 

My answer: When I was attending college in Southern California, I developed friendships with some of the other folks who lived in my apartment building.  We were like a little family for the period of time that we all lived there which, in retrospect, was, in the overall scope of things, extremely brief. 

In particular, I spent time with and felt close to a young woman named Janice who was originally from Rhode Island.  She was a hairdresser.  One day she just disappeared.  Her apartment was empty, her phone disconnected.  She never said good-bye to anyone and we never heard from her again.  The apartment manager was as shocked as the rest of us, and we tried to find her via family in Rhode Island, but given that she had a very common last name, had no luck.  Over the years, I have thought about her from time to time and wondered what happened, why she would leave so suddenly, and was she really who she said she was?  Having spent most of my life living in the same town and even the same house, and having many of the same friends that I became acquainted with in elementary school, the idea of such an abrupt and permanent departure, and severance of relationships, is not just foreign, but unthinkable to me.  I’ve always speculated that perhaps she had been in an abusive relationship and her former spouse or boyfriend found her, as in Anna Quindlen’s book, “Black and Blue.”  I’ll never know …