Didja ever have some people exit your life, and you ended up wondering about them years later? People who don’t leave a huge digital footprint on myspace and linkedin and orkut and facebook, and yet you get curious about what the hey happened to them?
I had some friends two houses down when I was a little kidling, and I really loved spending time with them. Their parents had really tricked out their house, and what they managed to do with seventies technology was pretty impressive to a first-grade me. Their mom would feed us white bread, yellow mustard and baloney sandwiches for lunch, something that was verboten in my house – my mom was perpetually on a diet and fed us roasted turkey deli meat on dry high-fiber bread that had wood cellulose in it. Sawdust bread. Yeah.
Like all good deals, this came to an end much sooner than anyone expected. Not long after my 9th birthday, my friends’ parents divorced and moved their separate ways. I’m not sure where the dad went, but my mom and their mom were good friends (they used to lay out in the sun all day, thoroughly basted in coconut tanning oil and continuously guzzling Pina Coladas) so one fine day, we drove out to where they moved.
Where had they moved? Far beyond the limits of civilization. Out by the nuclear reactor. In corn country, where one was more likely to drive a tractor than a four-door sedan on county roads. Easily a two hour drive from our neighborhood, mostly on interstate highways, but also featuring some lovely gravel roads as we approached our destination. The town had no stop signs or traffic lights. There may or may not have been streetlights. I remember Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love” was number one on the charts, and when we arrived, my friends had the LP playing in the big cabinet stereo which I loved so much when they lived a couple doors down. This thing had an oscilloscope that moved in time with the music being played and I thought that was just the coolest piece of tech I had ever seen. The futuristic green oscilloscope had a setting that made it look like it was a pair or lips, mouthing song lyrics. Not to be outdone by the technology of the day, I have a vivid memory of buying green apple flavored gum on a visit to this town’s Ben Franklin store, which (if I remember correctly) was a down-market version of Woolworth’s.
Fast forward 12 years, and one gray and cold March Saturday, my friend and his mom show up at 11 am on my mom’s doorstep. I had moved back home, taking care of my mom after her first bout with chemo. I was laying on the couch, hungover and trying to gather myself together, when these invaders from my past just started hammering on the front door. I let them in, we talked about nothing, they were obviously displeased with my dissolute self, and they moved on their merry way. I never heard from them after that.
Almost 20 years after that, on a whim, I decided to google-stalk my friends and their mom to see what they were up to. Maybe they turned out OK. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they won the lottery and I needed to reappear in their lives and ask for money which I did not deserve. One never knows what one’s former acquaintances could get up to, does one?
A few keystrokes later, I find my friend has several degrees, has lived all over the country, was married for six months and was in a horrible, vicious custody battle with his ex-wife, and, by all accounts, is a tight-ass control freak. I found a picture of him and he kinda looks like a teabagger or white supremacist. Guess what? After living hither and yon, he now lives a few towns away from me.
And the mom whom I remember lushing around on her custom-built patio with highly spiked polynesian cocktails accenting her barely-there swimwear, is now a vacation bible school teacher at one of those churches that is a few degrees away from snake handling.
Maybe this story is about not being able to go home again. Maybe it’s about letting people pass out of our lives on their own accord.
One thing I can tell you is, these are people I am not going to go searching for again.
Image credit: Celsias.com
