Dona E. Bowens

My two most recent worlds bumped against each other this weekend and it was crazy familiar and trippy at the same time. Spain and ‘Merica are the two worlds I’m talking about. You ever been in one of those situations where you run into someone out of context? You just can’t place them, right? You know that you know them, and while you hold up your end of the conversation with half your brain, you’re using the other half of your brain to try and place them in your world. Pickleball? No. Grade school? No, that’s not it either. Where do I know this person from? It’s only after you walk away that you realize, with a palm smack to the head, “Oh shit! That was Lester the maintenance guy from work. What’s he doing at the rodeo?”

It was something not quite like that for me this weekend, but pretty close. I can definitely place Lisa squarely in my life beginning in 2006. I found my BFF in Boogie Down Barcelona, renting a room on Craigslist (remember Craigslist?). She was my first friend in Barcelona and she took me in, hooked me up, showed a Sista how Spain worked back when I thought I could learn Spanish in 3 months. (For the record, it’s almost 17 years later and I’m still learning Spanish and always will be.)

And because life is circular, it only makes sense that I lived with Lisa at the very beginning of my Barcelona adventure and her home was where I lived in my final days in Spain before returning to the lunacy that is America. In the 16 years between those bookends Oh! the fun we had, the secrets, the drinks, the dancing, the comfortable silences, the knowing looks, the blunt loving words that only come from deepest understanding.

But now, here I was pulling up to a house in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh and there was Lisa standing in the doorway waiting on me. See, Lisa grew up in Pittsburgh, where her parents still reside, but I’ve only ever seen her in Spain. How trippy it was to road-trip 2 hours east from Akron and suddenly, once again the conversation is sprinkled with “Hostia!,” and “Que dices!” But instead of olives with a little quinto beer, it’s fried brussel sprouts with an enormous beer the waitress claimed to be the smallest available. (And ‘Merica, what’s with the brussel sprout fetish? I mean, I’ve always loved brussel sprouts but DAMN!)

I was reminded of a Rufus & Chaka Khan song called Please Pardon Me in which the lyrics go:

Hope you don’t mind

You look like a friend of mine

And it’s seldom you find

A face that’s so kind

Rufus & Chaka Khan

The song goes on to ask forgiveness for staring at the familiar, friendly face. I might have stared a tad because Lisa was out of context for me, even knowing exactly where she came into my life. She looked and sounded exactly like a friend of mine from a life gone by. But has it really gone by? No, it’s just relocated to a place where if you linger over your giant beer for too long, they start to give you the bum’s rush. But on the bright side, the water is bottomless and free, unlike like in Spain. But sobre todo, the friendship remains the same—finding comfort in the silences because we know we found a new way to roll. Rolling through the hills of Pittsburgh, no less.