#122. Matthew Robinson-Shaw (Saturday, December 3, 2005)

What was your best day…of doing something for the last time?

This was a day of two lasts, neither of which I knew at the time.

For most of my freshman year of high school, I had made limited efforts to broaden my social circle. Despite being in a completely new environment with over a hundred new classmates (in the Gifted program alone), I basically just hung around my twenty or so middle school friends for the first part of the year. The one exception was Matthew Robinson-Shaw.

I’d met him at freshman orientation the first week, and we hit it off right away. He was a unusually chill guy, who could also be highly insightful at times, and had lived all around the world in his childhood.

This friendship carried over into our sophomore year, where we teamed up for a boat-building project for science class. This involved several trips to his house, during which he generously gave me two things of note: (1) a CD-ROM of The Sims 2 game that I’d desperately wanted ever since it came out a year ago; and (2) his secret that he had a big crush on Julia, a girl in our grade who lived in my neighborhood.

On this day, Matthew is having a birthday party at his house, for which he invited me and about twenty other classmates. The first cool part is going there directly with him and three others following Saturday morning language class. It’s fun enough just navigating via bus from that school to downtown to his house in Rockcliffe¹.

For the first few hours that afternoon, it’s just the five of us eating chips and playing Dance Dance Revolution in his basement.² Eventually, the rest of the party arrives, so Matthew sets up the film projector and we watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the giant screen. The basement is huge, so all twenty of us are strewn about on various couches and cushions in the dark room as the movie plays on. Too cool.

The rest of the party is a bit of a blur. Afternoon becomes night³, we all put on our coats and head to the park to go sledding/rolling down the hill, then return to the house to chat and play DDR for the rest of the night.⁴

The party ends at around eleven at night. And since it’s a long trek back home (and there’s a ton of snow and the buses are sketchy at this hour), I end up hitching a ride home with Julia and her parents⁵.

I may have imagined it, but I recall a look of disappointment on Matthew as he waves us goodbye. In hindsight, that may not have been the best way to repay Matthew for everything he had done for me – seeing as there was a two-week period in freshman year when I though there might be something between Julia and I, before I lost interest.⁶

In the moment the party was fun but didn’t feel like anything special. But its status has only risen with what happened (or didn’t happen) after.

First, this was the last true party I attended in my high school years. Shortly after this, I kicked off a two-year period of being blindly ambitious and willingly eschewing these normal teenage activities for more “meaningful” (to fifteen-year-old me, at least) academic/extra-curricular pursuits⁷. And so, in a sense, I look back on this night as symbolic of the adolescence I missed out on.

But much worse than that, this was the last time I really hung out with Matthew. We slowly drifted apart the rest of our high school years, then in his second year of university in Vancouver he tragically passed away at the age of nineteen.

Rest in peace, Matthew.

The notably wealthy Ottawa neighborhood where he lived.
Castles in the Sky is the one song that sticks with me from all this.
I don’t even recall what we had for dinner, probably pizza.
The part that stands out here, oddly, is when a few us from Latin class are grabbing chips and spend five minutes discussing how utterly confusing the ablative absolute concept from our latest class was.
I was “too cool” back then to have my parents drive me places (or to plan ahead).
Of course, Matthew did start going out with her later that sophomore year (end point unknown), so no harm no foul.
More on all of that soon enough.