Me? Oh yeah.

Someone walked up to me and tapped me on the back. “Are you Henry Power?” I felt myself stiffen. Not very many people know that’s my middle name… and it was a very narrow time span when they did.

What made this interaction unique was that I was in a lunch line talking to a group of very dignified psychiatrists about dissociation, something with which I am intimately familiar. They were quite curious (I thought) about the interaction.

“Why, yes,” I said, “that’s my middle name, and I did use it in a couple of years of high school and college…” I paused.

“I wouldn’t have recognized you except for your voice! I remember you either on crutches or in braces or in a wheelchair or on a motorcycle in a nun’s habit!” She squealed with delight. I shrunk thinking “Oh help.”

“Really? I’m sorry, but I can’t quite place you,” I said, wishing I could sink into the floor.

“I was your roommate for a few months,” she said, “my name is…” and gave me a big hug.

You just never know how your past is going to show up in your present. And the best way to respond, in my opinion, is with some degree of humility for having survived as long as you have. We didn’t reconnect after that, and I have no idea what the illustrious docs thought--I was just glad she didn’t remember me in a way that was negative or upsetting, just quirky and eccentric.

And all those ways in which she remembered me? All true. BTW, that’s me in 1971.