Tim trying to organize his money discreetly in Dresden Hauptbahnhof
After reuniting with Tim in Vancouver in 2016 after a decade of not seeing each other, I thought I’d had to wait another decade to see him again. Apparently not, after ‘floating’, as Tim would put it, the idea of him coming to Berlin to visit me, he agreed to visit me in 2017. The in 2018, I visited him in Vancouver again. He’s a well-known debating coach that brought his students to victory in the Canadian national high school debating competitions and he’s done this multiple times.
He’s also one of the few privileged characters to appear in more than one of my books within a very short time period. Though we were never really near each other, always a continent away, we felt close at heart. Or at least I did, I’ll have to ask how he feels when I see him again. We were born at about the same time in roughly the same area and our parents knew each other, so you could say that us meeting since babies wasn’t really a coincidence.
“Hoofbanhauf” ~ Tim attempting to pronounce “Hauptbahnhof” (“main station” in German)
Much like myself, he’s a truly loyal friend. Maybe that’s why we click so well, knowing that being friends with each other since we were babies and being so far apart meant that we weren’t in the friendship to gain benefit from one another. I’d like to imagine that he’s the kind of friend that would allow me to just roam into his office for a coffee even if he’d become the Governor. I know I would, though I’m not sure how likely it is for me to hold a political position.
Playing games and fun aside, I remember two distinct lessons that a quick thinking him taught a stubborn me. On his eighth birthday, I threw a fit because I couldn’t have the chocolate plaque on his Dairy Queen cake. As a generous friend Tim broke the plaque in half and put the larger half on my slice of cake. He taught me that friendship wasn’t worth material things; one can give even if it’s their birthday; and those who have more should share with those who don’t have.
Then I remember we met about two years later in a restaurant and I started drawing on the back of the menu paper. When Tim turned around to reach for something, he accidentally nudged my arm and resulted in an ill-drawn line on the paper. Again, I got angry and threw the pen down onto the table. Then he picked up the pen, knowing what I was trying to draw, completed my picture using the ill-drawn line. He taught me that people should be adaptable; that beautiful things can come out of mistakes in life; and that empathy and encouragement to a friend can turn things around.
Although I can count the number of days that we’ve spent with each other to be less than one month in the past two decades, he’s taught me more than any other friend before I turned ten. Now that we are seeing each other more frequently, I hope this trend continues and that more of my friends can be like Tim. The higher the quality of my friends, the more I can learn from their lives. Friends that preach only by example and not by words, friends that spend time together regardless of distance and situation, and friends who aren’t afraid to tell me the truth. Because best friends tell me what I need to know especially when I don’t want to hear it.
Be my neighbor Tim, not ten time zones away.
