During a break in the action at the Montreal Worldcon last Saturday, I snuck away from the convention center with power couple F. Brett Cox and Jeanne Beckwith. After lunch at Rôtisserie St-Hubert, we paused at a strip club, wandered a church, and toured the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

As we moved through the museum, I was very conscious of the passage of time. The Locus gang was going to be hosting a wake for Charles N. Brown in Gary K. Wolfe’s room at 5:00 p.m., and I wanted to be there to help remember. Little did I know that there was something the universe very much wanted me to remember.

I learned this while examining one of the the massive photos hung for a special exhibition of the work of Robert Polidori. Mixed in with pictures taken in Chernobyl, Beirut, and Jordan was the following image, which was labeled, “La Guarida, Restaurant Entrance, Havana.”

Why was that meaningful?

Because I had amazingly found myself, an hour before I was to attend Charlie’s wake, looking at a staircase he and I had ascended in 2002 during a week-long trip we took to attend Cubaficción 2002, the annual national Cuban convention.

I had traveled from the U.S. to Canada only to find myself serendipitously looking at a place I’d visited in yet a third country, mere hours before I’d been planning to say a few words about Charlie.

The restaurant La Guarida was actually on the third floor of a beautiful but decrepit building, and the image above was not taken at the entrance level as the label had indicated, but rather on the second floor. Here I am with Charlie and Jennifer Hall by the staircase at the main level:

As you can see, the statue on that first level, unlike that on the second, is missing its head. Here’s a picture taken on the same level as seen in Polidori’s photo above:

And here we are inside the restaurant, where we had our favorite meal in Havana:

As I looked at Polidori, memories of that night, and of the entire trip which surrounded it, came flooding back. I left the museum shortly thereafter and headed for the Hotel Intercontinental, still boggled by the nudge the universe had given me. And when it came my turn to speak at the wake, I told of that trip, and of what it was like to see Charlie acting as ambassador for science fiction in a country desperate to learn more, a role he’d performed on many trips to many countries.

Since we lived on opposite coasts, Charlie and I never got to spend as much time together as some, so I was grateful that our dual desires to attend Cubaficción that year had given us that week together.

And grateful that the universe chose to remind me of it at exactly the right moment.