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January 12, 2007

Friday Shuffle - The Found Edition

If any of you have seen the news tonight, I'm sure you know that I, like just about everyone in St. Louis, am overwhelmed. What happened today will surely be one of those news moments I will remember for the rest of my life.

On Monday, a 13-year-old boy was snatched while running home from the bus stop after school. These stories are always sickening, I know. My pal PKB and I were IMing when the story broke. In fact, she alerted me to it, and we talked about how such stories fill us with dread.

This afternoon, Clara Jane and I were playing in my bedroom. The TV had been left on in the living room. The volume was low enough that I couldn't make out what was being said, but I could tell that Oprah had been preempted for a news bulletin. "Fuck. They probably found that poor kid's body." I had no desire to rush to the TV to hear the gory details, preferring instead to stay on the bed, snuggled up with Clara Jane and listening to the rain outside while I considered the possible ramifications of not letting her out of my sight until she's in her mid-thirties.

I returned to the living room about ten minutes later, just in time to see photos of the missing boy and a boy who'd been missing since 2002 on the screen. I figured they were simply comparing the cases, since they were similar. When I heard the truth - that both boys had been found alive and physically healthy in the apartment of a known sex offender - well, overwhelmed.

I don't have anything more profound or insightful to offer. I just had to express the obvious that's being expressed all over town tonight.

Thing is, though, I was planning to write about finding people today before this amazing thing happened. PKB and I had lunch today, and she told me about recently reconnecting with an old friend. Funny, because in the past week I'd reconnected with two people from high school who found me online. When I came home from our outing, I had an email waiting from a third.

Now, I wasn't exactly popular in high school. I wasn't unpopular. I pretty much went to class, did my duties in a bunch of extra-curriculars, worked a part-time job, and stuck to a handful of friends who were as inocuous as me. I haven't attended any of the three class reunions, and I've kept in touch with very few people from that time in my life. I always assumed that, since being a teenager wasn't the most pleasant time in my life, I didn't care to spend any of my adult life reminiscing about my not-so-great old days.

If I'm good at anything, it's cutting ties. Maybe a little too good sometimes. Which might explain why the three reconnects this week have made me so stupidly happy. I don't have the desire to relive the past with any of them, and I don't get the impression that any of them want to do that, either. What I'm loving is learning what they have become, what they have done, how they've lived. I have no doubt that, if I didn't know any of these people and I was introduced to them by a mutual friend, or we met in a coffeehouse, I'd like them.

A few weeks ago I was reading a back issue of the Oprah magazine from my never-ending pile of hand-me-down magazines. There was a great piece written by a woman who reconnected with her childhood best girlfriend nearly fifty years after the author had moved away. I can't remember how they reconnected, but I know they corresponded for a bit before meeting face-to-face (only to learn they lived minutes from each other). Before that first in-person reunion, the author asked herself, "Will I like her as much now as I did when we were young?" Turns out, she did. The women, who were in their early sixties, hadn't even been teens when the author moved and they lost touch. And yet, they picked up their friendship.

As I read, my mind went directly to my old pal Kara Joy. We had been friends in elementary school, drifted apart in middle school, sat by each other at our high school graduation (a situation brought to us by the letter W, which began both of our last names), and that was it. Until, about this time last year, she tracked my ass down on MySpace.

We're so different now than we were in middle school and high school when we drifted apart. You know how those years are, when you're so busy trying to figure out who you are that you can't be bothered to realize you are exactly who you were all those years before. Do I like her as much as I did when we were kids? Hell, yes! More, even. She's just like tht girl I knew in fifth grade, only moreso. And yet, totally different. It's the difference between grape juice and wine. Grape juice is tasty and all, but wine's even moreso, and with a lot more depth, flavor, and character.

I think we reach a point in adulthood where, whether we want to or not, we gain a degree of comfort and acceptance in who we are. And more often than not, who we are isn't much different than who we were when we were ten years old.

Which makes me think about the kids who were found today. Because of what he experienced, the parents of the boy who went missing on Monday will have to get to know him again, but not nearly to the degree of the parents who were without their son for over four years. He was 11 when he was taken hostage. The four years between 11 and 15 are some of the longest years in a lifetime. I can't imagine what it's going to be like for that family to reunite. After four years, do they know each other at all? Does it matter? I don't think it does. The older I get the more I realize that no matter what happens to a person or how much time passes, they're essentially the same. There's a lot of comfort in that, just like there's a lot of comfort that comes from innocently checking your email and finding someone from long ago, who knew you when you were moody, zitty, and nerdy, who has taken the time and effort to say, "Is that you? What have you been doing all these years?"

Isn't that what we all want? To be important enough that there is always someone out there, willing to find us when we get lost?

Anyway... I guess this is sort of in the same vein. It's National Delurking Week, or somesuch business. Yeah, there's a graphic.

If you normally read and don't comment, I'd love it if you'd come out and say hi. If you knew me when I was moody, zitty, and nerdy, I might even sing the ol' Smith-Cotton fight song for you. That is, if you can tell me the lyrics. I really wasn't paying that much attention back then. Or maybe I'll just warble something I found on my shuffle.

Posted by Robin at January 12, 2007 07:28 PM

Comments

Posted by: Brenda at January 12, 2007 09:22 PM

Posted by: suzie at January 13, 2007 06:54 PM

Posted by: jenB at January 13, 2007 07:17 PM

Posted by: canadian_sadie at January 13, 2007 09:22 PM

Posted by: Debbie at January 14, 2007 12:06 AM

Posted by: whimsicalwoman at January 14, 2007 01:55 PM

Posted by: Chris at January 17, 2007 10:00 AM