The woman was a little older than I. My brain went into its Search and Remember Mode. We were standing at the entry way to a church north of Seattle. I was there because Uncle Frank had died. I was looking for his sons before things got started. I was also looking for Betsy. Betsy used to be a juvenile detention minister and a volunteer at the adult prison in Monroe. Now she works at this parish and we were going to spend a few minutes catching up.
"You look familiar," the woman said again. I looked at her face. I'd worked only with men at the prison for eleven years, no matter how often people thought I worked at the women's prison. It's only in the last fifteen months that I've worked with women on a regular basis, and this woman did not look like anyone I knew from the county jail.
Another woman came up to us just before I started to say something. The two of them together made the connections in my brain work faster. There it was: we are cousins. We haven't seen each other in a few years. We remade the connections and talked.
I came away shaking my head. These days, when someone says, "You look familiar," I immediately think of the jail/prison context. Forget family. Forget other places I've worked.
