The Birthday Party that I very nearly attended

Dear Linda;

I was so pleased to be invited to your party at a tea house I was sure would be quaint and filled with finger foods and fancy grown-up drinks. I marked the date on my calendar and planned my day so that there was time to drive to the big old city in time to find the address. I had enjoyed an afternoon that day with an old friend and time went by rather quickly, but when I remembered about the birthday celebration, I was still only a little off schedule. Not being one to follow old fashioned paper maps, I googled maps and entered the address. Good! I thought. Its on my end of the city so I'll only be a few minutes late.

Quickly enough I found River Road and began to look for the correct number.
Non-existant.
And certainly not in the area of any historic churches that was mentioned on the invitation.

Well, no bother. We'd recently invested in a cell phone, wanting to be as important as all the other people we see answering urgent messages while shopping for ground beef and discount sandwhich meats. This was going to work out just fine.

I enlisted Brian to go back to the invitation, then google the name of the Historic church. There were five by that name, so we went with the one which included the words River Road. I was certainly in the wrong neck of the woods. Silly Winnipeg, having all these half and quarter roads that switch names randomly. And no wonder they used the word "river" so liberally. The city is practically overrun with the darn things.

It was going to take some time to get downtown, where the screen at home had shown clearly the address of St Andrews church on Notre dame and some other exchange district street. Makes sense! I thought to myself optimistically ; Linda and her sisters are always doing interesting exchange-district-y things. Of course the party would be there, and not in the suburbs!

While I was manuevering to Brian's googling to the sounds of the children apparently sawing off each others limbs with butter knives from KFC, I found that I had been driving west in my efforts to perfect the whole important person speaks on cell phone whilst operating heavy machinery and desiring not to be rear ended by more proficient cell phone handlers who had probably moved on to texting and google mapping while driving.

Well, never mind. I told myself. This is a very special oppurtunity and think of the posts you could write after meeting bloggies eating crumpets with historic churches in the background! You simply MUST drive on!

So, I made my way back east, and a lot north until I found the street that Brian had described so perfectly that cut between Portage and Main like a slice of pie that I could already picture in Linda's china plate.

I found cinemateque. And a nifty underwear store. And a coffee shop I'd once been to when my brother was alive and let me hang with him. I found a lot of historic buildings, the Ethiopian restaurant I've been wanting to eat at, and the old "Kaye's fabric" that my mother used to shop at.

But no tea house.

I was very determined and I criss-crossed that maze of streets for more than a little while, imagining Linda wiping the cake from her lips, taking a final sip out of her wine glass, and reaching for a coffee to round the whole thing out. Well, I thought, There's still time to give her a little squeeze, tell her how pleased I am to have met her, and how much more I wanted to learn from her before she would come to my fiftieth birthday celebration. But no matter if I bent that van in half or quarters, there was no tea house to be found. I figured I was about halfway to the gulf of Mexico by now with all the driving I had done, so regretfully I turned towards home.

Brian showed me clearly where the map pointed out the church and I thought it curious that I had missed it. I'd seen everything else all around it that the map indicated. So, I went again to trusty google. Aha! Here's something about a church AND a tea house and IT says ST ANDREWS! St Andrews! I tell you.

That would be waaaaay north.
Not south. Not south at all. Not even south of the Exchange.

Happy Birthday Linda!
Wish I could have been there!