You know, memory is a funny thing

So, several times I’ve met this guy Chad at ruby events. Nice guy, works at Pivotal. I forget his last name, if I ever knew it. (Sorry, Chad.) But the details of Chad’s identity aren’t important to this story.

I saw Chad again at RubyConf this year. “Hey, do you remember me?”, he says. Well, kinda. (Plus, it was dark.) “We met at a SF ruby meeting, where you talked about your pattern matching language.” (I’m paraphrasing.) Whoa, that was so long ago… you can’t expect me to remember back that far. Wait, a minute, I remember you now, but not from SF. I remember you from Denver, where you and me and Brian Takita sat at the back of RejectConf.

But then, after a little while, I remebered remembering Chad in Denver. We sat, drinking beer in an Irish pub after my second meeting in the SF ruby group. (That was a long time ago.) It’s like, the first memory gave me access to the second, and then the second memory was crystal clear. I remember Chad, and Chris Wanstrath, and Dave Hurrel, and Bosco So and his wife, and my father and I all sitting around laughing after the meeting. It was loud in that pub. And now I can’t imagine not remembering that incident.

Weird stuff, memory. You can’t always trust it, even when it seems rock-solid.