This morning I pulled up one of my social networks and read that two of my friends had both recently become online friends with another one of my friends from high school.  I didn’t know this person had an online life.  It was fun just seeing his name in writing.  And so, as we all do, I clicked on his name to view his profile and see what his current life looked like – at least online.

And I was not disappointed.

( Backstory: spent my middle school and high school years in a suburb in the mid to late 70′s – and then into the early 80′s – it was a great time to be in high school )

The last memory of this person was in the late 70′s.   We were over at a friends house and he came in with another friend and the two of them were laughing.  They had just been questioned by the cops and almost taken in for questioning.  What was their big offense?  They were sitting on the sidewalk.  His mother was not allowing him to smoke in the house so he had grabbed a bag of oreos and some smokes and the two friends had gone outside and were eating oreas sitting on the sidewalk – having a smoke.  Sure they looked like hippies there is no doubt about this.  I think they almost enjoyed being hassled by the Man.  We were born just a little too late to protest the War and there really wasn’t that much to protest ( not at least in our neighborhood ).  There were long gas lines but most of us kids walked everywhere or rode our bikes so it didn’t fully impact us.  And in general life was good.  There were not really any large protests going on against Disco but that was one of the big controversies of the day.

So, today as I read through recent blog posts of my poet friend it took me down memory lane.  I was going to say took me quickly down memory lane but that is not entirely accurate.  The stories he writes about were all from those times spent on foot, taking time to talk with friends and taking time to explore the spaces surrounding your every day life.  It was a peaceful journey down memory lane.  I’m not even sure if this person would remember me – I was just another person listening to some of his wild stories.  Most definitely if we saw each other on the street we would probably walk right by each other with perhaps only the slightest feeling of deja vu but not actually recognizing each other in our “grown up” state.

His posts were poetic and they used really big wonderful words to describe the way things made him feel at the time, not just describing the things he was seeing or the places he was visiting.

What to make of all this.  It just made me think about how nice it is to get together with friends and be able to just sit down and talk about things.  Not necessarily having someplace to go or having some thing that was the focus of the get together – just being with friends.  And in this life even if we have a short time to get to know someone it is a wonderful thing to be able to share these little moments with each other.

In my high school yearbook my Sr. quote was from a Jackson Browne song and it still rings true to me today, “If only for a stolen moment we will live forever”.   It’s life’s little stolen moments that fill our memory banks.

The Internet gave me this little treasure today.