I am completely weirded out—in an entirely happy way—by hearing from people from my past as a result of my Speedies/Student Teachers post a few days ago. Like most people, I imagine, I’ve used the Web to look for old familiar names for years now, at least since Yahoo’s people search feature launched (which was probably ten years ago or so). And I’ve turned up plenty of them—some quite easily, especially the ones with unusual names.
Last year, I even, finally, after years of trying, found Marina, the long-lost best friend I mentioned a few posts back. (She had an unusual surname, so it was odd that I couldn’t find her…though as a librarian type, I know that Yahoo and Google are far from omniscient, and as it turned out, she’d gotten married to someone with a much more common name.) I was fascinated and kind of strangely excited to find any details at all about her, sketchy as they were, and to find that she’d ended up kind of exactly as I’d predicted: living in upstate New York, where her family (used to?) own a summer place, and married to the guy she was dating when she and I had our falling out (and their dating and our falling out were not unrelated; the guy was a year behind us in high school and was best friends with a close friend of mine, and in a way, I was crazy about him, but he had this odd hold on Marina—actually, on me too; I took his advice and opinion way more seriously than I should have—and I’d be lying if I said I don’t blame him a little for the death of my friendship with Marina).
I e-mailed her and didn’t hear back, but it was through one of those awful Reunion.com places, and for all I know, my message wound up in her spam folder; that’s where my mail from those places generally turns up, even if I’ve signed up for them. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t want to hear from me, which I completely understand even if it makes me feel kind of like I just swallowed a knife. Maybe—okay, almost certainly—I’ve romanticized our friendship, though the truth is that I remember the occasional bad parts too. I’ve had more steadfast and loyal and trustworthy friends since then, if I look at it objectively. And though I realize that my behavior was the main cause of our friendship falling apart, she hurt me pretty badly and let me down at a time when I really needed her, so it’s not like I take all the blame. (All of this is getting kind of oblique without the full backstory, isn’t it, and I don’t have the stomach to tell the whole story just now…but the fact that it still causes me a little twinge of occasional pain more than 20 years after it happened should give a sense of how much she mattered to me.) But I’d still give almost anything to hear from her.
Generally, I’ve been happy to follow those people from my past from a distance, through Google, on days when things were quiet at work or when something suddenly reminded me of them. Sure, I could e-mail them; I’ve certainly thought about it, and I have no doubt that it would be nice to be in touch occasionally, the way I am with some of my friends from my Austin days. But mostly, I’m content to have them be a (warmly remembered) part of my past. People change, lives move on, and who knows how much we’d even have to say to each other again. Besides, I’ve become a hopeless slacker about personal e-mail, and once I start e-mailing back and forth with someone, it often becomes just one more opportunity to be a less than adequate friend. It’s good to see how successful some of them have been, and just knowing they’re out there and doing fine is pretty much all I need to know, I guess. Not that I’d be sorry if I suddenly heard from any of them; on the contrary, I’d be delighted, as I have been with the responses to the Speedies/Student Teachers post. When I think about how few people I wouldn’t want to hear from (long-ago ex-boyfriends, mainly), and how many I’d love to hear from, I feel pretty lucky, in fact.
And in a mostly unrelated episode, I stumbled across first an article by and then the blog of another friend from college days, another one with whom I’d had a falling out. That’s a really dumb story, and one which I doubt I’ll ever tell. The falling out was probably both of our faults, who knows, but I held on to the feeling that I was entirely justified in no longer being friends with him for a pretty long time and, if I’m remembering right, rebuffed an indirect attempt by him to get back in touch some years later. I’m only capable of holding a maximum of one grudge at a time, though (and right now I’m not holding any, which is a good position to be in), and the one against him fell out of the queue a really long time ago. Besides, the article was excellent and the blog was a very good read, so on impulse, I put in a little teaser of a comment and lured him into e-mailing me. Spent a good little while yesterday e-mailing back and forth, pleasantly and interestingly, and I hope we’ll stay in touch at least sporadically.
One of my Texas friends once said to me, when visiting me in Mpls., that I shouldn’t feel bad that we only saw/spoke to each other every so often, but rather that, given the physical distance and other practical matters that separated us, I should be glad that we were able to keep any kind of contact going. That’s a healthy way to look at it, I think, and as much as I can be content knowing that people from my past are out there doing well, I think I’d like it even better if I could hear from them just every now and then—even every few years would be okay.
In that spirit, today I e-mailed one of my closest friends from college days, who happens to have quite an unusual last name and is easy to find on the Web because he’s published impressive academic books ‘n’ stuff. I’ve followed his progress with admiration and some amusement (far as I can tell, he’s been working on his doctorate for about 15 years, which means he at least hasn’t changed entirely since we were younger). I think I last saw him not long after my first wedding, in 1990, and I’m not exactly sure when we lost touch, or how or why. I guess I stopped calling him when Eric (my first husband) and I were in NYC for visits because Eric, though a lovely and interesting and intelligent person, is very different from…from most other people on the planet, basically, and it can be hard to integrate him with others. And then I stopped calling when I was home for visits by myself, because I got into this phase where I just wanted to stay close to home and hang out with my parents whenever I went home. (I’m not sorry about that, either, because it meant extra time with my mom, and though I didn’t fully realize it then, every second I had with her was precious.)
I’m also not sure why I didn’t start e-mailing him when people’s e-mail addresses became easier to find, because of all the people from that era, he and my friend Martha (with whom I’ve been in touch far more recently, though not for a few years now) were the ones who knew me best and with whom I spent the most time. I’ve been thinking about this for the past day or so, and I think it has something to do with—this is hard to articulate—the fact that my life has turned out, at least from a surface view, very differently from how I or anyone who knew me back then would have expected. But I don’t know why that would keep me from contacting Andy, exactly; I’m still trying to work that out. I’ve been in touch with people who are just as conspicuously and impressively successful—my beloved friend and former roommate Bill Maxwell, for example, who’s had a fairly stellar academic career—and I didn’t feel self-conscious about letting those people see how I’ve turned out. So I don’t know if that’s quite what’s kept me from getting in touch with Andy.
I don’t know if it isn’t, either; I’m just unsure about the whole thing, though I’m not sorry I e-mailed him (at least not yet! Let’s hope I won’t have cause to be).
Do I feel like I have something to apologize for, maybe? I dunno. I don’t have any regrets about the choices I’ve made (regrets about some individual actions, yeah, but not about the way my life has gone in general, and I’m certainly not embarrassed about any of it; in many ways, I think my life has been much more interesting than it might have been had I followed the expected path, i.e. staying in NYC, going to law school or something equally conventional, maybe marrying a yuppie Jewish guy or whatever (although that last one is highly unlikely; I’ve never even dated a Jewish guy, really—had a fling with one, but that’s it), and generally living the same sort of life as the million other curly-haired Jewish girls from the Upper West Side who are exactly like me. I’m sometimes (actually, very rarely) struck by the fact that I didn’t follow that path, but I’ve truly never been sorry about it. Life’s a funny old thing that takes twists and turns that you can’t predict or expect, and sometimes the results are incredibly cool.
(And yeah, okay, sometimes the results leave you sitting alone in a crappy apartment in Chicago with a job you despise, hundreds of miles from your new boyfriend, the husband you’ve just left, your adored family, and anything else that makes any kind of sense to you. But that’s a story for another day…and it’s also been the exception in my adventures rather than the rule—the only peripatetic episode that really didn’t work.)
Anyway, I’m exhilarated and a little wacked out by this flurry of contacts that I’ve initiated, and I think I’m going to need to take a step back from it after the weekend and just go back to being my boring old self and posting about all the new records I’ve bought lately. But right now, I’m still in conjuring mode. This evening, when I got home from work (and before I took my ritual Friday evening nap), I started Googling one of the few ex-boyfriends that I’d actually like to hear from again. (Generally, my romantic past prior to my first marriage is nothing to write home, or write blog, about, let’s leave it at that.) I was going to go into a long digression (”digression” might be too mild a term, since I could write a whole novel about the guy— he was fascinating, albeit in not entirely positive ways) about him, but then I remembered that I’ve already written about him in the past. I’ve actually been trying, sporadically and half-heartedly, to find him since before the days of the Web; I used to look him up in the NYC phone book every time I went home, but he too has a fairly common name, and it seemed entirely possible to me anyway that he might not even have enough income at the time to have a phone or an apartment in his own name. But tonight, for whatever reason, I had the patience to browse through endless Google results pages, without any real hope of succcess…and bloody hell, I tracked him down. (Sometimes, apparently, having the kind of mind that can’t remember that I’m supposed to be at a meeting five minutes after my online calendar has reminded me of it but can remember things like where ex-boyfriends from the 1980s went to junior high turns out to be useful after all.) I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this newfound information; I’ve always told myself that more than wanting to resume contact with him, I just wanted to know what had become of him, since he was someone who could have easily ended up, well, y’know, dead at a young age, but then again, there was always the chance that he’d grow up, as most of us seem to have, and actually make something of himself. I’m comforted that the truth turns out to be the latter, and maybe I should leave it at that.
Because really, what reason would I have for contacting him? It’s not like there’s a romantic interest; I am very thoroughly married and, honestly, don’t even look at other men (except having crushes on cute actors or musicians, but that doesn’t count, obviously). My attention may have wandered during my first marriage, but that was highly atypical behavior for me and was of course symptomatic of profound problems in the marriage, and enough about that. At every other time in my life, I’ve been almost quaint in my monogamousness (that is too a word, because I say so), and right now is no exception. And the estranged friend mentioned above, the one with whom I exchanged a slew of e-mails yesterday, who happens to also be the person who introduced Kevin and me, just told me something about their last encounter that took quite a bit of the shine off of my already not-so-shiny memories, and it made me slightly less enthusiastic about trying to find him.
Maybe not as much less enthusiastic as I should be, though, because I’m still thinking about contacting him. I think maybe it’s that I hate loose ends and things that were left unresolved (I had a best friend in junior high whom I dumped, basically, in graceless and even rather cruel fashion, when we were about 15, and about once or twice a decade, I think about trying to make amends/peace with her too; these aren’t things I think about very often, but guilt comes naturally to me, and sometimes it comes along and bites me when I least expect it). But it’s equally possible that that’s not it, that it’s more like a bad tooth that you can’t resist poking at with your tongue (I assume I’m not the only person who does that)— you know it could cause even more trouble, but the temptation is still there. That’s why I’m not going to do anything about it for a few days, because I need to think more about whether playing with the past is always such a good idea. And of course, I need to get back to the present, whether or not I continue to travel down this bewilderingly enjoyable detour into my past.
Next entry will be music-related and/or firmly based in 2005, I swear.