Reconnecting

I guess the first thing I’m reconnecting to is this blog. I was horrified to discover it’s been nearly two months since my last post. Yes, things have been crazy here. I’ll try to do better.

What I really want to talk about is reconnecting with the people from our past. It’s amazing how time passes, life continues and we can loose people we used to be close to. Our lives go in different directions and that loss of connection can go unrecognized. Recently I’ve reconnected with quite a few people.

Patsy and Nancy Engelhard were my best friends growing up. Nancy was a year younger than me and Patsy a year older. Our mothers were best friends from the time we were in second or third grade until my mother died about 40 years later. Growing up, our families had Thanksgiving dinners together, spent Christmas and/or Passover together, had parties, saw each other all the time. We always lived close enough to each other to walk between our houses. Patsy, Nancy and I had sleep-overs, went to the swimming pool together, played softball in the field until the street lights came on, crated our own religion, talked on the phone for hours.

Once we got to high school, we began to drift apart. Patsy and Nancy were both very bright, excellent students, very verbal and had strong personalities. They were the “movers and shakers” in high school. I was shy, quiet and a passable student. I was sort of a late bloomer and didn’t hit my stride until college. Life continued. We all went off to college, fell in love, got married, had babies. Patsy went to law school, Nancy was an elementary school teacher and I bounced along from biology major to geology major. And we lost touch with other.

Bless Facebook. After some 40 years, Nancy found me. We shared pictures of our kids, now grown, pictures of ourselves and tried to sum up the intervening years. Nancy is a knitter and found our website. She passed the information on to Patsy. Patsy had learned to knit last year and was in the process of opening a yarn shop. I got an email from Patsy this past spring. Turns out she now lives in Oxford, MS. Her yarn shop is called Knit1 and opens today! How cool is that? She has bought quite a bit of our hand dyed and hand spun yarn and has invited us down to Oxford sometime next winter to teach a fiber weekend… spinning and weaving. I can’t wait to go. All of it will be fun but the most important part will be seeing Patsy again.

Bless Facebook, again. Several people from my high school graduating class have been re-connecting with others in our class. They have set up a Yahoo group for the Rich East High School Class of 1966. It’s been so interesting to find out what my classmates have been doing all these years. High school was not a good time for me. I spent most of the four years terrified someone might notice me but equally terrified no one would notice me. Being a teenager is tough and I wouldn’t go through that angst and uncertainty again for all the tea in China. It is so sad that we were all so scared at the time that we missed knowing some great people. All the relationships that we didn’t make then, we are trying to make now. I missed the last pizza party but will try to manage a trip to Chicago for the next Class of ’66 get together.