It took me a few days and two false Marshas to find her.

Her husband answered the phone. I asked for Marsha, still a little unsure of whether this was the same person with whom I worked on the ambulance. Two other Marshas to whom I'd spoken earlier had been nice, but the wrong Marshas. But to my amazement, her husband recognized my name. "We were just talking about you," he said and then he was passing the phone to her.

I'm not so good at keeping up with people when time and geography rise up between us. I offer little resistance when the forces of entropy have their inevitable way with my friendships. It's hard to say why. People begin to carry the lingering scent of an old time and place. They smell like time, the attic odor of loss. It permeates even positive memories, making them strange and unfamiliar to me.

Marsha was a Paramedic of approximately my mother's age, stature, and toughness. We worked day shift together, and she was quietly my hero. The worst calls I ever had were invariably with her. We got a reputation for inviting tragedy merely by being together on a shift, a superstition that we heartily encouraged among our fellow crewmates. My last summer at the ambulance I saw things that still rise up out of the murk of dreams to warn me never to take life for granted. In time, we began to function as a sort of flawless rescue machine, anticipating each others' actions and moving without even having to speak much. Years later, I would realize that this experience had screwed up my ability to work happily in a real office. Having functioned as one unit for life-and-death stakes in one job, it was hard to really enjoy playing divisive office politics for relatively unimportant achievements in another.

I had intended to contact Marsha for some time, but the invisible grip of inertia kept me from it. When I decided to start volunteering at the rescue squad here, I knew I'd be calling her sooner or later. Now, after at least 5 years, I was hearing Marsha's familiar wide Ohio vowels on the phone. She and her husband had just been wondering aloud if I had survived my years in Senegal. We quickly caught up on recent developments, and then -- of course -- we talked about rescue. She's still running on another squad in the same area, and teaching a new generation of EMTs how to do what she does best. She sometimes discusses one of our particularly bad calls in class to illustrate the difficulties of the job to new students. She still faces moments that mark her forever. I told her about the dead woman who got to me. She reminded me that when you don't give a shit about death, you don't care much about life either and it's time to retire from the rescue biz.

We talked a long time, about a lot of things. I can't explain how I knew that she would be able to understand the whole thing, the now-passing thing, with the dead woman. She did. We didn't drum it into the ground like I'm doing now. It just got mentioned, held out, and carefully placed on the ground for me to walk away from. I thought about how much fun it would be to run rescue with Marsha again. She's one of those people whom I count on to help anchor my faith in human beings.

Today I went out and got most of my hair cut off. There isn't really much connection between these two events, except that they both made me feel good. I like that feeling of scissors and clippers removing a shell of hair, taking away old growth, freeing my head to breathe again.