being blasted from the past

As I have mentioned a couple of times this week, Facebook has completely hooked me.

After a 3 a.m. chat with an old orchestra buddy (she played cello, I violin and we formed a quartet with two others for part of our high school career) the other night, she mentioned trying to dig up some of 'those old photos' from The Past...

Well... I instead decided to beat her to it.

And what fun it has been. I have not had an excuse to go back and look at school pictures in a very long time. I took out a handful I could find with a number of others in them, scanned them in, and then set myself to trying to tag faces and names. Much harder than it looks, especially when there were identical twins in your class. I hated the fact that I went to the same schools and never moved once in 18 years when I was young; now I am thankful as there is a bond between those of us who grew up together that time has not permitted to break.

As I sit in She-ra's dining room, reminiscing and giggling over memories evoked by these pictures, a chat window popped up. Rob. Dude, we went to Kindergarten together! We ran in separate circles back in school, but we were classmates. All the way up to graduation. You can't take that away. Anyhow, he remembers me as the one who beat him up at the bus stop in the 4th grade.

I told him that he must be mistaken; I'm too much of a wimp to have ever beaten anyone up!

We were in the middle of the loveliest reminiscence when, click!, came another chat window. J and I went to Ecuador together back in 1992. We had separate circles in college but respected each other's identities and have actually had more contact now that we are older. However, it's been a good year since we've even emailed (both with young children, time zones, career changes, etc.) and she popped in. So I juggled two different conversations with two different worlds colliding on one computer screen, then managed to keep it up while having to pick bees off my daughter and She-ra's daughter who had walked into a nest of some sort. Yikes.

Fortunately all the action calmed down and I was able to return to task at hand. Overnight there were comments made and lots of blanks filled in on names and faces I just could not remember. It's a group effort. Thanks to technology working in our favor, it is easy to bridge the geographical gap existing between all of us, come together and remember the most basic connections that we share, that make us who we are.

My heart feels light and my existence seems a bit more complete. And that is so important.