By Jim Hagarty
I attended a meeting recently and because I had arrived late, chose to sit down quietly at the back of the room.
I could see a friend of mine sitting half way up the row of chairs, on the other side of the middle aisle. Suddenly, towards the end of the meeting, he stood up and strolled out of the hall, walking right by me, practically brushing my shoulder as he went, and neither looking at me nor speaking to me.
Taken aback by this unexpected turn of events, my mind immediately started performing mental gymnastics, trying to figure out all this. Unfortunately, as a gymnast, my brain is a bit of an klutz, and so it doesn’t always catch the rung it’s reaching for.
One conclusion was firm, however: My friend was mad at me. The details of how this loss of affection had developed still had to be worked out in my head but it was pretty clear that I had done something wrong to deserve such a snub.
So, I spent most of the rest of the meeting and beyond, examining the ins and outs of our relationship to see where I might have gone off the rails. I went over everything I could remember having said to him, that might have upset him. I looked at the things I had done, and not done, that might have caused him to think poorly of me. I tried to remember things I might have said about him to other people – an unflattering word, perhaps, that might have gotten back to him.
On all counts, I found lots of areas where I could now see he could easily have taken offence. Or maybe he’d just heard something about me he hadn’t known before and had suddenly decided he couldn’t be friends with someone with a character as flawed as mine.
Over the next week, from time to time, my mind resumed the search for why I had one less friend in the world. Each day the phone didn’t ring from his place to mine convinced that our friendship had ended.
Then on Monday morning, six days after the snub, my former friend dropped in to see me, smiling ear to ear, as is his style. In the course of our conversation, I casually worked it in that I had been wondering why he had taken no notice of me at the previous week’s meeting.
“You were at the meeting?” he said, surprised. “I never saw you.”
Of all the explanations my nimble imagination had come up with, this was not one it had even come close to putting on the table. Never saw me? I was sitting right there. How could he not see me? In fact, I was almost certain I could remember making eye contact with him.
So I was tempted to begin another week of heavy thinking, this time trying to decide why my friend had suddenly taken to lying brazenly to my face. But I gave it up as a bad deal. My friend is unable to lie. He’d give away vital information to a car thief who wanted to know where he kept his keys.
It goes against my nature to do this but I guess I will have to accept the simplest explanation.
He didn’t see me.
