On old friends and Facebook

Yesterday I had lunch with an old friend who I’ve known since junior high.  We both shook our heads in amazement over Long Island Iced Teas at the Cheesecake Factory in Danbury when we realized that eighth grade was 40 years ago.  Diana and I were close friends throughout high school, sitting next to one another every morning in homeroom for three years.  She was the friend who knew instinctively what kind of mood I was in based on whether or not I had used a curling iron that morning (straight hair = depressed).  We frequently went out for lunch in my red VW Beetle to nearby Italian Pavilion where we always got a slice of Sicilian.  In the years since, I’ve never had Sicilian to equal IP’s.  We smoked cigarettes and talked boys and laughed (she cried too) when she realized she had missed an entire section on the English Regents Exam in our junior year. 

Diana and I stayed in touch through college, and I met my husband through her (he was her boss at Radio Shack where she worked during her breaks from school).  She went to my wedding; I went to hers.  And then almost 15 years went by until yesterday.  But we’ve been FaceBook friends for several years – I learned that she had married again; she saw pictures of my three boys growing up to be men.  We “liked” one another’s photos, occasionally commented on some, but we never got together.  And then one day she messaged me with this: “I've seen a few of your posts lately, and want you to know I do think of you and really do miss you and our friendship - I know life happens and family/work priorities + distance has made it hard for us to get together - I'd love to see you so let's see if we can schedule something.  Love your old friend, DC.” 

So we met, and we hugged and we laughed and all the years washed away.  And when you’re with someone who knew you when you were trying to know yourself (because let’s face it, isn’t that what adolescence is all about?) you understand that there is a powerful context for that friendship.  Maybe that’s why people of a certain age have the need to connect with old friends on FaceBook – we want to maintain a connection with those we knew when we were young.  We want to know where they ended up in life; whether their lives turned out the way they thought they would.  Presumably they want to know this about us as well.

Maybe there’s a better question we should be asking ourselves, though: Am I the person I want to be?  As I sat there with Diana catching up on our lives over lunch, I wanted her to know that I am, in fact, the person that I want to be.  I never thought I’d be a teacher, but as it turns out, I love teaching.  And I needed my old friend to understand this – that the girl who was trying to figure herself out all those years ago, finally did.  So thanks, FaceBook, for facilitating not only a walk down Memory Lane, but for an opportunity to reestablish an important friendship.  Sometimes old friends make the best friends.