That night I said it to him out loud, I said, “I’ve fallen out of love with Calgary... there’s just nothing here for me.” This love-hate relationship with where I live gets particularly harsh post- passionate affair with Paris or Italy. His response was typically optimistic. “You have to look for the treasures, hon ... You have to remember what you love to see and do and then look for them here.”
 
What is there for me to love in Calgary? What do I love to see and do here? And so started our adventure, a mutual fascination with spur of the moment outings to satisfy wanderlust. I pretend to be visiting, like I’m from somewhere else and all this is new to me. Half the time, that’s not too far off because I end up in places I never knew existed here at all, and the other half of the time, ordinary places that I’ve known for a while end up reinventing themselves and becoming new little wonders. It may have something to do with the company I keep, and it may also have something to do with adjusting my outlook.
 
My treasure hunting with him is like that... spontaneous, delightful, surprising. Who knew that the Greek restaurant he took me to, Spiros on 17th at 33rd , would turn out to be so fantastic? It is modest and seems as though it hasn’t changed in a million years, but the food was sumptuous and the quirky atmosphere was delightful. When we stop to take in a new venue, which usually at some point involves eating, the iphones come out and we take a few shots of the action. I notice that most of our shots, which we immediately study together and usually howl over, are detail-oriented... like the fact that his shirt matched the exact blue of the tablecloth that day. He caught one of me impersonating Audrey Hepburn (as per) with a pair of my mother’s vintage gloves on. It’s like that.
 
It’s not difficult to have an outrageous time with him. The spontaneity is key, and the fact that we’re both slightly to the left of normal. (He would agree). Take that time we decided to track down a fake taupe Christmas tree to match his wall colour. This was a post-Spiros’ brain wave. We found it at Wal-Mart nearby of all places, where deep and meaningful conversation erupted over what kind of Christmas tree would most reflect my personality. It turns out none of them at Wal-Mart... With twenty-eight minutes to go before I had to be home, fervent guerilla warfare tactics for shopping was organized. In and out- that was the plan. They wouldn’t know what hit them. We swore we could pull it off with the right kind of concentration and pluck.
 
We took off for Market Mall at breakneck speed, somehow just knowing The Bay would have a perfect tree, reflective of the many wonders that are Angela. (Insert angelic choral music here). It turns out the Gluckstien 7 ft Classical Tree, at 30% off is most representative of my personality type (on the Myers-Briggs tree scale, it rates as an INFJ, a slightly introverted tree, highly intuitive, feeling-based). We hoisted it into the back of his truck, laughing hysterically and head-bobbed our way back to my house to another one of his homegrown cd mixes that has collections of songs I have never heard before and am always astonished about. Like a hungry mongrel starved for new tunes, my treat usually comes at the end of the ride, where the cd is offered to me with the same shrug of the shoulders and the same line every time: “Oh, hon, just take it. I’ve got all these songs on my computer. Enjoy.”
 
All it takes is a great friend and a plan to have no plan to rediscover Calgary’s hidden gems. Yep. True story.