It’s interesting how certain memories return, unannounced, as if they’ve been waiting patiently for the right moment to be seen again.

This one came to me as I lay in bed, somewhere between waking and sleep. No warning. No obvious reason. Just a quiet replay of a moment from Grade 5.

Her name was Eunice Shumick.

At that age, I didn’t have the language for what I felt. I wouldn’t have called it infatuation or admiration. I just knew that when she was around, something shifted. She was, in my young mind, the most beautiful girl in the school.

Eunice, however, had her own story playing out.

She had an expressed crush on Lloyd Gache.

She would say it openly, without hesitation or self-consciousness. “I love Lloyd.” “I’m goi...

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