As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

Fresh out of my rather disastrous first year of uni, during which I got caught hacking the school’s DECsystem-20 mainframe and was…well, technically not expelled, but I was told if I returned the next year they’d be trying out some of Pennsylvania’s shiny new computer tresspass laws on me, I came back to Florida, where I got a job working at McDonald’s.

While I was there, I met a woman named Beth.

She started working at McDonald’s after I did. She was gorgeous and charming and smart and engaging, and she spoke with a subtle musicality, a kind of lilt in her voice I’d never heard before. Not an accent, precisely, but an understated cadence that I couldn’t quite place. When I asked her about it, she laughed and explained she’d grown up in China, speaking both English and Mandarin, and she unconsciously imposed some of the tonality of Mandarin (a tonal language) on English. Her parents worked in China, apparently, and had since she was a toddler.

We became friends quite quickly. She came over to visit me one afternoon whilst I was working on my Volkswagen Bug (one of the old ones, not the neo Beetles, so of course I was always working on it), and brought cookies.

I only knew her for a couple of months. She left McDonald’s maybe two or three months after she arrived, back to China apparently. I got a letter from her a year or so later, covered in writing in both Chinese and English, saying she’d been delighted to know me and was now traveling about in China.

This happened before the age of the Internet, so I never saw her or heard from her again. I still think about her occasionally, almost thirty years later, evidence that she left an outsized mark on me from our brief friendship.

The subtle, random strands of fate sometimes bring us together and then pull us apart again in unexpected ways. Wherever she is, wherever her life has taken her, I hope she’s happy and well.