He was my best friend at work when I was teaching in Calgary. Trish and some of the others persisted in calling him my "work husband" which I think he found embarrassing, but aside from sex and the fact that we are both married (and faithfully so), my relationship with him was otherwise rather similar to my relationship with Shawn. Dodo was the person I confided in when things happened at work, and he was the person I told all my frustrations to. He was able to understand things that Shawn couldn't really understand because he knew all the same people I knew and understood the career in the way that others who don't do it, can't. Shawn loved it that I had Dodo to talk to about these things, I think, because it spared him having to listen to them along with all the necessary backstory to make them make sense.
The coolest thing about Dodo is that I truly believe he is the only close male friend I have ever had with whom I have never felt that there was some "crossing the line" going on. I never said one thing to Dodo that I wouldn't have said with Shawn right there beside me, and I know the same is true for Dodo and his wife. Somehow we were able to be real friends with total respect for each other's spouse and family. Just before Shawn and I moved away, the four of us (and their two children) had dinner together at Dodo's house. It made me wonder if we shouldn't have been doing that all along.
I miss Dodo hugely now. He's left the teaching profession and started a hockey school, a dream he'd always had since I first met him, and I'm delighted for him that he's finally doing the thing he wanted to be doing all along, the two things he loves doing the most: teaching and playing hockey. I believe Dodo would have made the NHL himself if he hadn't been so small. But if that had happened, all the kids he has mentored would have missed out enormously.
Dodo isn't much of a writer, though he's an excellent communicator face to face. I knew this already before leaving, because even when I emailed him at work to make lunch plans it was impossible to get him to type more than two words in his replies. More often than not he would just come to my classroom to respond. He hates writing. So I knew that when we moved we would be unlikely to keep in touch.
I've been gone two years now and I've received a total of four emails from him, each one comprised of four to six sentences. I consider myself lucky for having gotten this much out of him as I truly believe it might be a record. But the last two emails have occurred within a month of each other and in them he has actually not only answered the questions I asked, but also provided new information about his life. This is huge progress for a man like Dodo. I feel like dancing when I see his emails in my inbox.
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I think summer has ended, just like that. After complaining about the heat for about three straight weeks, it's abruptly over. It's cold, it's dark, it's cloudy. Autumn is on its way already. Autumn is so short on the prairies; we snap without warning from summer to winter. I'm hoping it will have a little more time to unfold in BC. It will be like going backward through time and having the chance to gather up a little more of it.
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