Facebook

I generally hate trendy social networking sites but I was asked to join Facebook for work reasons.

I'm hooked. I'm looking up all kinds of people from all over. Man, it's weird. I mean, we have all Googled people but Facebook has teasingly small pictures for people not "in your network". You can almost make them out but not quite. But cybersleuths know that people expose their friend-list which implicitly provides information about them.

Long-time readers know that I was in a very close-knit class at elementary school. Essentially a core of 20 (?) kids went through 6 years together, learning French. I split off from the group and am now searching for some of them years later.

It is the weirdest feeling. I found some of them and recognize them immediately, despite not having seen them since we were 10 years old. One woman is posed in a rather prissy, arms-crossed stance that is precisely the way she used to pout as a child. So many weird areas of my brain are firing that I feel like I'm coming back from a stroke.

I've also come to realize, in a profound way, that these people had lives after we separated. They went on to have their own adolescence; their own triumphs and tragedies; and now their own careers and children. This all seems obvious but for some reason it has really hit me with respect to their own high school years.

Would they remember me? I wonder. I haven't had the guts to request "a friend" from that era yet, but maybe soon. I suppose if I remember them, they no doubt recall me.

*sigh* This is precisely the hook of Facebook. The irresistable draw of finding out about the characters from the momentous chapters of our lives.

CC

ps. Make no mistake: one visits the past but one does not overstay. The St Louis years are a huge chapter with vibrant, wonderful characters. If you are on said wretched site, look me up. (And a hearty hello to all my friends.)

pps. As always, I cannot resist pointing out that my cousin, and Binky's wife, now teaches at my alma mater. Though charming, it ties the strange loop on a 4-dimensional knot.