Delving Into My Past

Lately I have found myself on the computer a lot and spending more and more time delving into my past. I don’t really know exactly why, but for some reason, I am fascinated with getting in touch with people I have encountered in my life. As the internet grows, the easier it is to find people whom I have long since lost touch with. Perhaps it is the fact that I am now a mother and really miss the reckless abandon of my youth? Maybe I just want to know what path others took? Maybe I need a new hobby? I don’t know.

What I do know is how much fun I am having. My internet adventure started almost 10 years ago. I logged on and made a whole bunch of new friends. It was so cool to have people to talk to at any time of the day or night. Since I was a student, I could often be found online at any time. It was a lot of fun.

I came online about the same time as Google. I can say that I have been using Google since it was fresh out of its beta stage. I wish I had applied for a job with them back then. Oh what could have been.

Google was neat because you could find almost anything on it if it was online; including old friends. I didn’t have much success in those days, but that changed when Classmates.com came along. The idea sounded interesting so I signed up. I immediately got in touch with the guy who had a locker next to mine in high school. His was an interesting story. He was a preppy guy who was on student government. He was cute and friendly and all the girls with lockers in his vicinity had crushes on him or at least a moderate fascination with the man. Sadly, he got into drugs and dropped out of school without graduating. I had heard he was on track to be Valedictorian before his downfall. He eventually fell off my radar and I was left to wonder what ever happened to him or even if he was still alive.

When I got in touch with him, he was almost giddy to hear from me. Apparently, he remembered me and laughed that I thought that he may have been so far gone that he could have died from an OD. Yeah. Silly me. Anyway, he told me he was happily married and had a son. It was obvious from his email that he really adored his wife and I could almost see his chest puffing out with pride as he talked on about his son’s martial arts class. He is now a football coach at the high school we attended and it sounds like he is in love with the life he has.

Sadly, one major fault of mine is that I am so terrible at keeping in touch. I would have to say, if I were being honest with myself, that the majority of my friends fell by the wayside because they got tired of waiting for me to return phone calls and/or letters. I didn’t return the last email this guy wrote to me and I am too embarrassed about that fact to email him again. I am happy to know that he survived his drug phase and went on to have a good life.

After I found this guy, I became interested in finding out more people to see how their lives turned out. I reflected back to my youth and thought about how all these people had crossed paths with me at some time or other and we had enough in common that we forged friendships. I figured that, as our lives merged for however long, we were, in some way, on the same path. When our travels caused the path to diverge, it led us to separate adventures in life. I would often wonder how my life could be different had I (or someone else) made a different choice along the path. I wanted to know how their decisions had affected their journey and if I would even recognize in the adult the young person I knew back when.

Finally, I decided that I had to stop thinking and start doing. In the meantime, MySpace and Facebook came along. Google has much more information in it thus making it easier for me to hunt for people. I don’t have a lot of spare time, but I do have enough that I managed to find one of my old drinking buddies, several of my old best friends, a friend I was not so close to, and an old boyfriend. Sadly, not all the tales are happy ones. I found out that one friend didn’t want to talk to me since I had caused so much emotional damage upon parting, that he was still angry. I felt bad, but after 15 years...let it go. I left him alone. One person has apparently never gotten past high school and was a little too stuck in the past for my taste. Not surprisingly, she is still single.

I continue to hunt. Just yesterday I found an old friend who apparently lived near me in San Francisco and I never knew it. It looks like she belongs to a scooter club. Something I find so cool and so fitting for her. Looks like she never lost her punk rock edge.
I don’t know what the reason is for me enjoying this so much, but it certainly is fun when I find a friend and find out where life has taken them.