Installment Forty

I started out today incredibly focused. It didn't end as well, or at least not yet. The day isn't over.

I have put aside my job search for now. It feels like it's permanently on hold now anyway as I'm obsessed with my search for Gabriel Kelly. I am determined to find out why a father abandoned his children and ran away, apparently, to Ethiopia.

Foolishly, I thought our foreign aid agency might help me kick start my investigation by providing me with some kind of list of who's who in foreign aid in Ethiopia. I might as well have howled at the moon. Probably, I would have got more answers. Maybe I was supposed to howl in French.

Nadda. Zip. On hold. En francais. Blah blah blah, no use!!

In a brilliant flash of insight (or desperation), I turned to not-for-profit Canadian agencies working in Ethiopia. Google spit out some useful information of Canadian donor involvement. An NGO called CHF (formerly, the Canadian Hunger Foundation) is working there. Funnily enough, I did a high school project about that organization long before I studied international development for my degree.

What goes around definitely comes around.

I then actually managed to get some information on the phone from a nice young man (at my age, everyone sounds young to me) who was incredibly helpful. Ironically, though, because life is perverse, it sounded like he had an Irish accent!

My brain seems to have latched on to all-things-Irish. It may have just been a bad phone connection. Regardless, we have arranged to meet soon. Their office, luckily for me, is within walking distance.

That first piece accomplished, I decided to add this to my gratitude list:

I have a beautiful daughter engaged to be married to a lovely young man!

Gratitude expressed, I then turned to brooding some more about Gabe. Not for long, however. I found something else to get myself in a twist about. Or at least, something--or to be precise, someone--found me.

After promising myself to ignore Facebook, I caved. There is something so addictive and mind-numbing about it that in the middle of my Ethiopia Internet searches, I clicked on my profile page. There was a friend request from an old high school friend--a girlfriend this time, thankfully.

Or at least she was a girl...but never a friend, more my nemesis. Everyone has someone like that in their past. But well over thirty years is a long time to hold stupid high school grudges, so I accepted.

And then I saw her picture. Carolyn Taylor, now Morrison, looked--in a word--fabulous.

Shit.

Carolyn had always been a 'looker' as we would have said back in those dinosaur days, but goddamnit, she still was! How the hell does that work? Worse, her status listed her as single.

Looking at her picture, and creeping through her photo albums, my spirits kept dropping like a stone.

I threw away the packages of cheap ramen noodles I had bought (what next? Kraft Dinner?) but not before actually stomping on them. Even simple foodstuffs (okay, even unhealthy sodium-laden ones) seem to bring me back to the unpleasantness of aging.

Would someone out there please help me move past my own tattered self-image?