I’m just home from a river cruise (Basel to Amsterdam, on the Rhine) with a friend, and while I’m thinking back at what we did and saw, I’m also thinking about friendship of a particular kind — not a long side-by-side as some are, but a then-and-now-again.

Miriam and I roomed together in a 2-room basement suite our first year of university in Calgary. When I do the improbable math I see that this was more than 50 years ago. I haven’t actually asked her how she found it, but I recall telling people she had been my “easiest” room-mate. I moved to Toronto the next year and she stayed in Calgary, where she would teach, but eventually she went to Europe, living in France, later Vienna, her base for work related to supporting the underground church in Iron Curtain countries like Romania. She also lived in Russia, where she did research for her PhD. She returned to North America after many years in Europe, leading and teaching in theological schools in Toronto, Chicago, and Calgary.

During the same years my life involved marriage and a family, study and writing, and living in Saskatchewan a spell, also Paraguay, but mostly Manitoba until Helmut and I re-located to B.C. Miriam and I kept in touch, but quite intermittently. I think there may have been a couple of short visits in all those years, one of them in the Winnipeg airport when she was between flights. Now and then we wrote letters.

In recent years, we’ve been in each other’s homes on occasion — mine in Tsawwassen, hers in Calgary — and somehow the idea of doing a “celebration trip” of our upcoming milestone birthdays developed, and so it was done.

I’m not sure where this rumination is taking me, except to register the marvel of a strong early connection in space and time, followed by a huge divergence in entirely separate geographies, and then an intensive mutual experience — a trip together — once again in shared space and time. The picture I have is of a rainbow, say, touching down on two ends and bridging a long stretch of earth between points. (The same thing happened when an even longer-time friend Eunice and I travelled together several years ago, after living in different provinces since childhood.)

Sometimes one meets someone from the past and the reunion is lovely but once the catch-up is done, there’s little to sustain it further; it’s simply a renewal of memory, a sweet brief gift. Other times, however, once-upon-a-time friendship can carry more.

At times, in our close ship cabin quarters on the cruise, it might have been yesterday and two girls getting ready for classes again, but next moment we might be leaning into the other’s “good ear” on account of diminished hearing in both of us, and there was no illusion about the passing of time. And when I observed her connecting with ship staff from Hungary, Romania, or Belarus with her “I was there” capacity, or me exchanging mutual experience with a widow, the awareness of differing life histories asserted itself. At any rate, we did this wonderful adventure together, strolling in a chain of cities on the Rhine, eating rather extravagantly, and looking at art, and it was a new fastening, a solid gift for which I’m grateful.