Friended by Old Friends

By Robin "Red Hot" Kaye

This past weekend I was procrastinating. I know, hard to believe, huh? I went on Facebook and found that a friend from high school had posted on my high school’s Facebook page. I commented and then looked at the other graduates who liked the page, wondering if I could find my old friend Ed. Ed had graduated from the same school several years before me and came to mind last month while I was driving through the town where Ed had gone to college .

Ed hadn’t liked our high school’s page, but I typed in his name and sure enough, a guy who looked like him popped up. Wow! I messaged him and asked if he was the same Ed I called a friend all those years ago. Sure enough, the next day I was friended by him and received an email catching up on 25 years in five paragraphs. It was amazing. After that, I was on a roll. I tracked down his stepbrother, Steve, the same way. More emails, more OMGs, and more catching up. It was wonderful!

I’m now back in touch with old friends I thought were lost to me forever. I was thrilled to find that the three of us are all happily married, we all have great careers, beautiful families, and even after all the hell we raised together way back when, we turned out just fine.

I also discovered that after all these years, we’ve changed very little. Steve still sports that same boyish grin/smirk—one photo and I was tossed back to the summer between my junior and senior year in high school and could hear his voice in my head spouting a New York accent and a smart-ass remark. Ed still plays guitar, and wore the same look he wore while playing the lead on a Crosby, Stills & Nash song.

The best thing is that our friendship is still there. Both emails mentioned shared memories that were ours alone—my father’s penchant for threatening to shoot them in the kneecaps if anything happened to his precious daughter—moi. The road trip to the beach where we were trapped inside for an entire rainy weekend with no TV, the seemingly endless string of summer days sitting by my pool and drinking all my dad’s beer. I can still hear Steve greeting my father when he came home, “Have a beer, Mr. Williams. It’s the last one. We saved it for you.” They mentioned the years we spent together, supporting each other, being each others’ bullshit meters, helping each other through rough relationships and broken hearts. It feels as if we’re back where we began, except with different families and jobs. Life is good and finding my friends again just made it all the more better.

So what about you? Have you rediscovered old friends on Facebook or MySpace? Did you feel the same absence of change?