Somewhere in the mid‑’90s, I found myself trudging up MacKenzie Avenue near Rideau—one of those late, empty weeknights when the city feels hollowed out, like someone forgot to wind it up. The street was quiet enough that the sound of my own footsteps felt intrusive. Up ahead, a lone figure moved toward me, the only other soul foolish enough to be out wandering at that hour.
As he drew closer, something in my brain lit up. His face—familiar in that unsettling, insistent way that nags at you without offering any details. I knew him. Absolutely knew him. Except I didn’t. No name, no context, no memory slot to slide him into. Just that eerie certainty: you’ve seen this man before.
Cue the rising dread. The social anxiety of an unexpected recognition ambush. I could already picture the moment: he’d smile, say my name, maybe toss out some shared anecdote, and I’d stand there grinning like an idiot, praying he wouldn’t notice the blank vacancy behind my eyes. Do I fake it? Nod, smile, hope he keeps walking? Or confess immediately—admit that his face rings every bell except the one with his name on it?
Neither option promised anything but embarrassment.
He kept coming. I kept failing to place him. I tried to avert my gaze, hoping maybe he was caught in the same fog of half-recognition and we could pass each other like ghosts—no words, no awkwardness, no forced reunion.
A few steps away now. Our eyes flick up, meet for a heartbeat. Nothing. No spark of recognition from him. No name surfacing for me. We pass. Silent. Clean. A perfect non‑interaction.
Relief washed over me. Bullet dodged.
I walked on, putting distance between us, but my mind kept clawing through old memories, trying to drag his identity up from whatever dark corner it had fallen into.
And then—like a trapdoor springing open—there it was.
“Holy shit.”
The name. The context. The whole damn thing. And suddenly it made perfect sense why he hadn’t said a word.
We’d never met. Not once. Not ever.
R.I.P., John Mayall.
Perhaps five or so years earlier—sometime between the summer of ’88 at the earliest and the summer of ’90 at the latest—we were out drifting around Ottawa in my friend’s car, aimless and restless in that particular way only the late‑teen years can produce. Back then, late‑night boredom still felt like a perfectly legitimate, and entirely sufficient, reason to cross provincial lines. We weren’t chasing anything specific; we were just hoping the night might cough up some kind of diversion, some unexpected spark to justify our wandering. It didn’t. So, on a whim, he said, “Let’s go to Montreal.” And because we were young and stupid and had nothing better to do, we did exactly that.
Hours later—well past midnight, maybe one, maybe two, maybe three—we rolled into the parking lot of a Seven‑Eleven somewhere in the city. The kind of fluorescent‑lit outpost that feels like it exists outside of time. I was going to run in and grab drinks and snacks for the long haul back home while my friend stayed in the car. We sat there for a moment, pooling our meagre funds, negotiating the fine balance between sugar, caffeine, and salt.
Then another car pulled up beside us.
A young woman stepped out—long, straight blonde hair, striking in that way that snaps your attention into focus. She walked into the store. Instantly, I felt that same jolt of recognition I’d felt years later on MacKenzie Ave. Except this time, it wasn’t vague. It wasn’t foggy. It was sharp, electric.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Do you know who that was? I think that’s—”
“No way,” my friend cut in. Then, after a beat, “Wait. Holy shit. Is it?”
“I’m going to go find out.”
I took our crumpled bills and coins and headed inside. And there she was. Exactly who I thought she was — standing under the humming fluorescent lights of a Montreal convenience store at some ungodly hour.
I didn’t say a word. Too shy. Too stunned. But I made sure to get a good look—just to confirm the universe wasn’t playing tricks on me.
She bought whatever she was there for, walked out, got back in her car, and disappeared into the night.
I gathered my armful of snacks, paid, and returned to my friend.
“It was her,” I said.
R.I.P., Sass Jordan.
And then there was the third one—the last of these strange, fleeting brushes with people who lived mostly on my television, my stereo, or the cultural periphery of my youth. This one didn’t happen in the quiet of a late‑night street or the fluorescent isolation of a Montreal convenience store. It happened in broad daylight, in the middle of Ottawa, with the city at full roar.
Late ’90s, maybe very early 2000s. A blisteringly busy summer Saturday afternoon on Elgin Street. The kind of day when the sidewalks swell with bodies and the traffic moves like a slow, irritated animal. I was driving north, inching through the chaos, my wife beside me, both of us half‑distracted by the sheer volume of humanity spilling across every intersection.
I rolled up to a stop, waited for the crosswalk to clear, then eased forward when the way looked open.
Except it wasn’t.
A woman stepped directly into the path of the car—so suddenly I barely had time to register her shape before instinct took over. I slammed the brakes. Hard. The tires barked against the pavement. She froze, startled, then hopped backward out of danger. I crept forward, shaken, heart thudding.
From the passenger seat, my wife let out a sharp, breathless exclamation.
“Holy shit! Do you know who that was?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t really get a look at her face.”
“You almost ran over…”
And she said the name.
A near miss with someone who’d been part of the cultural wallpaper of Canadian TV for years—someone whose face I’d seen a hundred times, but not in that split second when it mattered.
As far as I know, Brigitte Gall is still with us. And long may she ever be.
Looking back on these odd little collisions with the fringes of fame, I’ve come to appreciate them as something more than mere anecdotes. They’re reminders—gentle, peculiar, sometimes jarring—that the membrane between the ordinary and the extraordinary is far thinner than we tend to believe. Most of the time, the people who shape our cultural landscape exist for us only as abstractions: voices on the radio, faces on a screen, names printed on album covers or TV credits. Yet every so often, they step out of that abstraction and into the same physical space we occupy—walking down a quiet street, buying snacks at a convenience store, or nearly becoming an unintended hood ornament on a hot summer afternoon. And in those moments, you’re confronted with the strange truth that the world is always smaller, stranger, and more interconnected than you give it credit for. These encounters linger not because of who those people were, but because of what they revealed: that life is forever capable of surprising you—especially in small, yet delectable ways. Even when you think you may be getting close to having seen everything it has to offer.
Update: I’ve recently been informed that no 7‑Eleven has ever operated anywhere in the Province of Quebec. That strikes me as oddly discordant, because I remember that store—clear as day—as a 7‑Eleven. But that was nearly forty years ago, and memory has a way of sanding down details, swapping out one logo for another, rewriting the scenery to suit whatever story it’s trying to preserve. Whatever the place actually was, it sat tucked away in some out‑of‑the‑way corner of Montreal, a small convenience store with maybe four or five parking spots lined up directly out front. In my mind, it was a 7‑Eleven. I suppose I’m wrong about that. Memory insists; reality disagrees. And reality usually wins.
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