#150. Lisgar 175 (Friday, May 4, 2018)
What was your best day…of seeing an old best friend after the longest time away?
My alma mater Lisgar Collegiate Institute is the oldest high school in Ottawa. As some basic arithmetic with the title would tell you, it was founded all the way back in the year 1843—i.e., more than two decades before the country it’s situated in. That’s ancient.
And for this momentous occasion, Lisgar held a celebration. It had a lot. It had exhibits across the classrooms with old news clippings and historical artifacts (like the guns from when it was an artillery range during World War II). It had all the local news stations gathered. It had a special assembly that featured a band performance, a speech by the mayor of Ottawa, and a performance from semi-well-known impressionist and alumnus Rich Little.
One thing it didn’t have, for most of the night, was the attendance of anybody I knew from Lisgar. Almost all the alumni that were there must’ve been at least twenty years older. As classy and historic as this event was, a high school reunion this definitely was not.
Except, as a late-night extension (after the old folks had gone to bed), Lisgar did host one more event. The type of event it was mandated to host, because it was the school’s greatest extracurricular claim to fame.
A trivia night.1
A few days before this, my old quizbowl captain Nigel Healey (#14, #9, #1) had reached out to me (on Facebook, naturally) for the first time in five years asking if I was going to that trivia night. Well, if he was going, so was I. No fucking question. Were we going to team up again to win it all like the last Reach of the Top game we ever played (#1), or would he get his revenge for that lone one-on-one quizbowl victory I held over him (#20, in the last NAQT tournament we ever played)? Plans were not settled, but I was excited. And I sensed, so was he.
My friendship with Nigel had naturally faded a month after our life-defining national championship win (#1), as we both graduated and went to different universities. He attended the Royal Military College studying engineering, spent years posted across the country, and had recently gotten married to one of his former classmates. But we had completely lost touch; I didn’t even know he was back in Ottawa.
So, as I walked into our old cafeteria and caught his eye right away, all of that nostalgia came rushing back. (Note I hadn’t actually seen him in person since our high school graduation ten years ago.) There he was, the guy who had defined so much of my high school years, who had kind of fallen into the role of my best friend by sheer proximity and gradual respect, whose intelligence had probably pushed me harder than I realized toward what I eventually became (and could still become). We shake hands, hug, and get ready to do our favorite activity in the world. Just like old times.
It turns out, a lot of the old Lisgar trivia crew is there. Several members of the recent 2017 and 2015 National Championship teams, as well as a few I faintly recognize from earlier. The part-time coach Ms. Coakley (#10) is there too, now retired, along with my old history teacher, Mr. Muller (#11), who has taken over. It’s not a large crowd, probably forty or so in total, but seems like they’re mostly legit trivia players—who’ve been active much more recently than Nigel or me.
Nigel and I automatically team up. We’re joined by two recent graduates. And as the questions come and go, it’s obvious that our trivia instincts and knowledge base have fallen off substantially. But with the help of the other two, it feels like we’re still able to perform at that high level that used to be so familiar to us.
And in the end, we win. A much smaller win than our last one, but what other outcome could have been possible?
N.B. I meet Nigel for a drink near my office a week later. He’d apparently been back in Ottawa for a few years, designing helicopters for the government, and we spend an hour talking about foreign reserves and helicopter design like old friends. We vaguely promise to do it again sometime, but never do. With a friendship rooted so deeply in a shared past, maybe one good reunion was all we needed.