Vignette

Back in the last and second last year of high school, at about the time I got my drivers license, I became good friends with B who happened to live in a big house with a big basement with a ping pong table that had plenty of room around it. I (and occasionally others) would go to his house very regularly to play ping pong. I have many memories of having so much fun doing this; especially since B and I were pretty much evenly matched, so as we played more we both improved.

High School finished and we kept playing, then sadly, his dad died and soon after he and his mother moved out of that house into a smaller one where there was no room for a ping pong table. I and other friends spent a lot of time with him during the time that his dad died to be with him through that, but a few months later I wasn't spending as much time with B as I had been and soon after that I started working where I really wasn't spending any time with anyone.

Years later, I no longer remember now how I found out, but I did hear that B was rather upset that I seemed to disappear pretty much as soon as access to his ping pong table was removed from the picture. That he felt 'used' by me just to access the table; that our friendship was based only on me wanting to play.

Here we are, twenty-five years later, and still, occasionally, I think about this. Nothing of what I did or failed to do was with malintent and yet still my inadvertent behaviour had an undesirable effect.