Fun Monday - Reconnecting

Wendy is our host this week, and she's been doing something a lot of us have been doing - finding people from her past life on FaceBook! Which made her think of our challenge for this week:

1. What memories do you have of your school years at any stage of your education?

2. Did you keep in touch with your friends who were there with you in your formative years, or perhaps you lost touch as I did and are finding them again? Tell us about some of your school friends.

The timeliness of this Fun Monday is somewhat amazing. This morning I got a notification from Classmates.com that events were planned for my 30th high school reunion (!). I don't know why I even joined that website, but I did several years ago. I may have the most under-visited page on the entire site. And the few guestbook "signatures" that I do have leave me scratching my head - who are these people? The names don't ring a bell. When I go to their pages, whatever pictures I find don't help much either.

See, I was one of those kids... the ones who are quiet, smart, and don't really socialize. I hung out with the freaks on Freak Hill - not because I smoked dope (didn't even try that until I was in my early 30s), but because they didn't really care who I was as long as I wasn't a narc. I suppose that if you're high, even a minor geek like me can be somewhat entertaining...

I only went out with one guy from my school - he was a year ahead of me and a MAJOR geek. One of those so-smart-people that when they open their mouths, no one understands what's coming out unless they speak the geek-language. We went out once. Movies, pizza, then home to a chatfest on the back deck with my brothers and a serenade from the drunk professor playing bagpipes half a block away. My parents loved him.

All that leading up to the fact that I didn't really have any friends in school. My real friends were in the youth group at church. Some of them went to my school, but we were all in different grades and almost never saw each other there. I lived for Sunday afternoons when we would all hang out or the weekends we'd go to the beach. Sometimes we all stayed at the church overnight and played Capture the Flag in the big cemetery next door. We had a volleyball team that played in the city league. We went to see "Rocky Horror". We built and ran a haunted house at Halloween in the basement of the church and went carolling at Christmas time. It was, for a time, a very closeknit group.

But as we graduated from high school, we went our separate ways. College. Marriage. Moving away. Careers begun. And we drifted apart.

But these days, nearly 30 years later, we are finding each other again. One friend lives two blocks away in my neighborhood. Others have returned through funerals or weddings. FaceBook keeps us in touch even when our too-busy lives keep us from getting together in person. There are still the promises to get together for a drink or dinner to catch up, but follow-through is hard. I can probably speak for everyone else when I say my job, my family and my own endeavors keep me pretty darned busy. The yearning to reconnect is strong, especially with these people who I loved so dearly all those years ago, but the reality is that except for the occasional wedding and funeral, that reconnection may have to wait a couple more years until my boy is more indpendent and my time is more my own.

Until then, we'll always have FaceBook!

Now, go visit Wendy and see how others reconnect. And Gattina will be our host for next week (March 8th)!