Catching Up’s Not Hard To Do
When I graduated high school in 1995, the best hope I had for keeping in touch with my friends was to know their phone numbers and mailing addresses. Nobody I knew had email. In fact, I only knew a few people who had ever been online. So, I had many notes in my senior yearbook from friends and classmates that included a telephone number, and for a while I did stay in touch. Indeed, I used to get actual letters from my friends off at college. Life being what it is, however, I had, by 2000, lost track of many of those who had once been close to me.
Social networking websites have wrought much evil, but they have reintroduced me to several friends who had, for all intents and purposes, dropped off the face of the Earth. Facebook has done more to counter the diasporic effects of time than anything else, and on Monday I experienced a rich reward: I had dinner with Erin Alvarez.
It had been almost ten years since I had seen her last, and until we found one another on Facebook, I couldn’t have guessed she lived here in Gainesville. But she does, and she has a nice boyfriend, and we had a great time at Big Lou’s, and I am looking forward to spending lots more time catching up and hanging out.
Now if I can just persuade my friends Dan and Burt to move to Gainesville I’ll be set.
Filed under: Friends, Nostalgia, Technology on May 12th, 2009
Yeah, good luck with that!