Lest auld acquaintance be forgot (Part III)

The blog is a good example of how easy it is to keep in touch other than phoning or writing. My sister Gabriella does so through a Flickr page; my sister Nicki’s partner Laura does so through MySpace. My pals at work (I work in a small room with three other reporters, all younger) all have Facebook pages and keep tabs with each other that way. Because they’ve bugged me so much about it, I now have a page too, but haven’t the faintest idea what I’ll do with it. I had a MySpace page, but having to have (company founder) “Tom” as a friend irked me, even if he was there to help, as did the number of solicitations you get from people wanting to be your “friend” just long enough to sell you something. Still it’s annoying that you can’t contact other people on their MySpace pages unless you’re a member. My cousin Dave has a content-heavy page, and I was tempted to leave a comment, but didn’t feel like signing in.

Which brings me, in the most god awfully-long roundabout way possible, to the point of this entire post. I was working late one night, not too long ago, when a song came on by the band The Cure and the name of the girl who introduced me to the band, M.J. Slazak, popped into my head.

M.J. was on the staff of the yearbook with me in college. We weren’t really friends, but had nothing against each other either. She was a bit punk, or Goth, or whatever they called it then, always wearing black and such, but she struck me as a kind of conservative in nature as well. I seem to recall her smiling a lot.

So, this song comes on and I think, “Whatever happened to M.J.?” And so I did a Google search or two and her name popped up, responding to something on someone else’s blog. I dropped her a note in response, bookmarked the page and put it out of my mind.

The other day I was cleaning up my browser links at work and ran across “The stream behind the house.” It tingled in my brain that I must have bookmarked it for some reason, but I could remember why, so I clicked on it. It took me to that same post of mine, but below it was one from M.J. herself, reacting in shock and surprise to my out-of-the-blue note.

I responded with a few words and reacted to her comment that she’d have to check out my blog by figuring I’d better get back on the blog again and make some posts. Hence, this very, very, very long post which, on advice from crazyjohn, I’ve broken up over several days).

I guess if I’m to try to keep in touch with long lost friends and acquaintances, I’m going to have to make myself more Internet-visible. And a call to George and Jeff wouldn’t hurt either.