A Voice from Beyond

Amy was a free spirit, a mischievous elf, a scathing critic, a talented musician, a trouble-maker, a saviour, an aviator, a conundrum.

It was 1991. I went to a job interview - the kind where you had to sit in the front of a room while a panel of 7 or 8 interviewers sit like supreme court judges in a semi-circle and grill you mercilessly. I answered all previous questions to the satisfaction of the group... Explain the differences between second and third normal form. Can you elaborate on when you would choose to use foreign keys (not to get into your friend in Madrid's flat when they weren't home). You get the idea. Amy was the last to ask a question.

Amy: "What is your name?"
Me: "Albi-Zia"
Amy: "What is your quest?"
Me: "I seek the grail."
Amy: "What is your favorite color?"
Me: "Blue, no yeeelllllllllllllllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww"

Who would have thought that my college extra-curricular activites of watching Monty Python's Holy Grail about 30 times (my first time was with my friend J.T. - it was his 45th time) would help me through a job interview. Well, it was a British company. I guess truth can be stranger than fiction sometimes. I got across the bridge of death, landed the job, and Amy and I became friends immediately.

One year after I started working there, my fiance and I broke up and I had to move out of our shared apartment. Amy had just bought a house that she was sharing with her brother and her 2 cats, James Bond and Agent 99. She offered me a room. It was a hard time for me, and she helped me through the tough parts... sharing bottles of wine and cheese on slices of green apple, addicting me to freshly brewed coffee and salt bagels, and forcing me to watch marathons of Fawlty Towers. It was one of the best times of my life. We would sit out on her back deck, she would play guitar, we would sip margaritas, and we would sing for half the night. We started a small musical group called The Blue Notes and performed in the bar that her brother managed. On the spur of the moment, she took me to a Spanish restaurant where no English was spoken and introduced me to fresh Sangria while we were serenaded by a mariachi band. She grew controlled substances as houseplants, and she was generous about sharing. She tried (in vain) to teach me how to drive a stick shift. An idea would seize her and she would implement it immediately. She was the most dynamic person I have ever met.

Funny thing is, as kind and wonderful as she was to me and as much as I liked her, there were many people who hated her just as passionately. She would try to stir up trouble between people. If she didn't like you, she would do anything she could to try to throw roadblocks in your way, just because she could. And you never knew why she would decide not to like you. It could be the way the planets were aligned the first day you met, that you looked at her breasts when talking to her instead of looking in her eyes (she really really hated it when guys did that), that you slept through her Database Design class, that she got up on the wrong side of the bed that day.

I lived with Amy for about a year, then I moved to New York. I'm not very good at keeping up with old friends, and we sort of lost contact. While I was living with her, she was studying to get her pilots license. She eventually got what she wanted, she got out of "the computer biz" and became a cargo pilot.

Last year I heard the news: "Two die in plane crash immediately after takeoff... " I said at the time that it is the way she would have wanted to go - out in a blaze of glory. I felt bad then that I had never repaid her for all of her kindnesses to me - and there were many, very very many.

The past week or so, Amy has been popping into my head at odd times... while stepping out of the shower, in the middle of walking across a room, sitting at my computer at work. I get the oddest feeling that Amy is trying to communicate something to me from the other side. I wonder sometimes what her message might be. Probably something like this:

Live. Laugh. Be happy in every moment. While you can, Live.