'I'm Going To Meet Your Dad'

How a trolley stop photo gave one charlotte family an unexpected connection to the past.

- Jodie Valade

I had just plopped down on the metal seat at the trolley stop near McDowell and East Trade streets. My husband and I were headed to a concert at the Visulite Theatre, and we like to take the streetcar whenever we have a chance.

But as soon as the man appeared, I jumped up and shuffled a few steps away so he could peer at the artwork behind me.

The man motioned to a woman and a teenage boy standing a few steps away.

“Here it is!” he said, excitedly.

He was staring and pointing at a photo on the clear,

Plexiglas wall of the trolley stop. The woman was overwhelmed. She sat down and began to cry.

She had just seen her father in the photo, 50 years after she last saw him in person.

“It was, by far, one of the most pivotal moments of my life,” Pam Howze would tell me later.

MY HUSBAND TELLS ME he doesn’t believe in fate. Sometimes, I agree with him. The idea that we all have a predetermined future no matter what decisions or actions we take is both terrifying and preposterous.

Sometimes, though, I can’t help but believe that things eventually work out the way they’re supposed to.

How else do you explain our story?

We began dating in college 21 years ago. After a little less than two years, he broke up with me and broke my heart. I hated him for about 12 years. In 2008, he sent me a Facebook friend request, which I accepted … until I remembered that hatred and unfriended him two days later.

But the ice had thawed. I sent him a friend request a year later, and finally, in 2013, we talked on the phone for the first time in all those years. A couple of months later, we saw each other in person for the first time since that 1997 breakup. Two months later, we were engaged. We’ve been married two years.

Fate? I don’t know. But it seems like something pretty close.