Old Friends

Yesterday I met up with a high school chum I hadn't seen in 40 years, and I'm telling you, I'm beginning to think you can rehab your high school experience if you live long enough. I'm humbled by this. It was really more convenient to package up my high school years, the slights and humiliations, the loneliness, the wanting to be popular, toss this package into the far corner of my mental attic, and tell myself that what happened between 1964-1968 did not matter. I was a grown-up now, and to hell with it.


Then I found I could snoop on Facebook, scout out classmates without their knowing it. I could see photos of them at 60. I could guess at their marital status, find out what kind of job they had, and sometimes see pictures of their children. People looked older and worn. I look older and worn.

I kept coming back to the page of one friend, Lin, whom I'd always liked but lost touch with. I came back to this page many times. I studied her picture. I debated, and then one afternoon I "friended" her. We caught up via e-mail. Yesterday she came to Berkeley from San Jose, and we had lunch.

Well, she is the same funny, sensible, sensitive, thoughtful person I remembered. Like everyone who's 60, we've each been battered a bit. We've lost our parents and cleaned out and sold off the houses we grew up in. People we loved have gotten sick and died, some unexpectedly. But we've each been blessed with a long-term marriage, and Lin has a daughter, a beautiful girl of 24 in whose face I see Lin 40 years ago, particularly the shape of her smile. It's nostalgic for me, looking at a picture of Lin's daughter.

I don't know if I'll look up anyone else from high school, certainly not the mean girls, but I'm thinking twice about waving off that entire era of my life. My friend Claudia, a therapist, says this could be a "corrective emotional experience." And I got to meet up again with someone I really like.