Another Random Moment (Washed Onto My Shore By Facebook)

I admit I have some ambivalence about Facebook. Maybe all of its 1.4 billion users do. It came up in conversation (again) just last night. Some of us were being cynical, too-cool and disdainful about it, and Katie, a friend (on Facebook and for real) pointed out how much easier it makes it to stay in contact with people who might otherwise have vanished from her life.

"I don't keep everybody's email addresses and phone numbers on hand," she said. "So, say I'm going to be in the town where so-and-so lives, I can just send a quick message via Facebook, and maybe we can meet for coffee or something. It just wouldn't otherwise happen."

So it facilitates that touching base kind of socializing. Katie also pointed out that it can give us insight into the diversity of political opinions that exist even within our network of "friends" and while we may still disagree with those who espouse certain perspectives, we can't necessarily dismiss them all as idiots.  Suddenly they have names and faces and histories at least partially known to us. We can perceive the nuance and reasoning in their stance, better understand how they arrived at this viewpoint, ponder it more respectfully, perhaps. Well, I guess that's sometimes true. Katie might also be seeing more intelligent discussion on her Facebook page than many of us do.

For me, Facebook is like a corridor of doors that open onto the lives of former students and people I once knew in the real world. The doors open and shut quickly and what they reveal is quite selective, but it does give me a sense of how their stories are unfolding. It's reassuring to glimpse the travels and new babies and wonderful accomplishments of the young people who once sat in my classroom, fascinating to notice posts from my own high school classmates about their grandchildren, enjoyable to look at images of daily life as documented by certain talented observers (although I now understand that this is what Instagram does in a more specialized way).

But what I like about Facebook most of all is its almost magical power to occasionally toss random people from our distant past onto the shores of our present with delicious, out of the blue unexpectedness. And that's what all this Facebook blabbing is leading into...because early this morning, in the coincidental aftermath of last night's conversation, I found a message on Facebook from a guy named Joe who grew up in the same Long Island town where I spent my adolescence. How did he find me? He typed my name into the search bar of Facebook. And why did he decide to contact me? Because he had just gone back to his mother's house on Long Island, and she had a couple of old snapshots he thought might interest me.

Boy, did they ever interest me! My favorite is above. I wish it were clearer, but even the ghostliness of it renders it kind of special. I would guess that it was taken around 1966. The girl to the far left with the flip and headband and hand on her chin is Roe, the one in the middle in a checkered dress holding up a magazine is Barb, and then there is dark-haired me, smiling so much more brightly than I ever remember smiling throughout my teen-aged years.

"I used to love when you and Rosemary Dunlap stopped by!" wrote Joe. "Do you remember when I smiled you called me Crinkles?"

Oh my goodness, yes, I called him Crinkles because the corners of his eyes kind of crinkled upwards when he smiled, which I found quite adorable. I haven't thought about that in years, and I'm sure I never would have thought about it ever, but it's a funny little detail that tells me something about how I looked at things back then. I'm glad to know I was present.

And I have absolutely no memory of the event pictured, but it looks like a backyard summer barbecue. I love the various bottles and jars on the table, the stack of paper plates, the pile of flatware, the trellis, the Venetian blinds, the mid-century chair. I love seeing beautiful and confident Barbara Carlson, with her fashionable 1960s look (she had the best mohair sweaters), and I'm certain that Roe was making some amusing wisecrack about whatever Barb is pointing out in the magazine. I have a pang knowing that both of those girls-women died years ago.

But it's as if Joe has opened a tiny portal through which I can view a long-forgotten moment of my own past. It's another of those unlikely developments that everything has led to, and I am grateful and delighted.