May 18, 2007

I've been engaged in a deliberate effort to meet new friends, and reconnect with old ones.

Recently, I found my friend Lauren. I met her in 1992. That's fifteen years, people.

I last spoke to her in 2002, at her wedding. I was drunk at the time, which I knew, and also running a fever of 102 due to an ear infection, which I didn't know. Pea and I were still house hunting, and I was still in the throes of post 9/11 trauma. Then, in the way that sometimes happens, Lauren and I just sort of fell out of contact with each other.

A few weeks ago, through some sly Googling, I discovered the name of the school where she teaches, and I called to leave a message in the school secretary's voicemail box for her. Not knowing that it was Spring break--you tend to lose track of such things when you're not actually in school--I waited a week, and heard nothing. So I managed to find an e-mail address for her husband, and sent an e-mail to him. Finally, a couple of weeks back, she called, and left a voicemail on my cell. I cried when I heard it.

When we finally spoke, she told me one of those strange stories that always disturbs the skeptical me. She used to rely on the Caller ID memory on her telephone to keep track of phone numbers, until, one day, her husband replaced said phone. She went out and bought an actual address book, determined to remedy the situation. When she wrote my name in it, she wondered where I was, what I was doing, and just how it was that we had managed to lose track of each other. There was a time when a Google search for my name put me somewhere within the first page of results, but that hasn't been true for awhile now. She did manage to turn up a reference to a book of obscene (and mostly bad) poetry that I wrote back in 1993, but the address associated with it was, of course, useless. So, she decided that fate would determine whether we would ever be in contact again.

12 hours later, she walked into her school, and the school secretary asked her, "Do you know someone named Ian Wood?" Lauren told me the question needed to be repeated three times before she could respond.

That's real Trembling In The Force action, that is. We talked for two hours and--cliche though it is--it was as though we'd last spoken the week before, rather than five years ago.

Before I reconnected with Lauren, sometime back in January, I decided to look up another friend of mine from my summer theater days in 1995. Through some more clever Googling, I found out where Melissa worked, but only had a phone number for her. I didn't call. Three weeks later, she found me, via this website, and e-mailed. More Force-style action, and we've been in touch often since then.

These people--Lauren, Kate, Melissa, and Pea--these people save my life, over and over again. Sometimes in small ways, other times in big, important ways. I don't know what I've done to deserve them.

So: if you've got someone who used to be a close friend, who used to be part of your life, and who has since drifted away into geography and time...find that person. Talk to them. Do it now.

I'll wait.