A blast from the past

I got facebooked by someone entirely unexpected the other day. The younger sister of the girl who had been my best friend all through elementary school.
Woohoo! She said, I've just moved to New York, want to meet up?!

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief at my Facebook page. Talk about a blast from the past! All my memories of her were from when we wee skinny kids (well, they were skinny, I on the other hand enjoyed food way to much to squander my childhood on such irrelevant qualities as skinniness). I remember once when we had helped ourselves to the potatoes in the kitchen and spent an entire day painting potato heads. And then got yelled at because her mother had been planning cook the potatoes for dinner. And the times we used to play battleship games on our bunk beds.

And now, here we were all of a sudden, some twenty years later, sitting across the table from each other sharing a veggie burger and sipping wine. How entirely surreal. How disproportionately preposterous. And so we set about the arduous task of scaling the last twenty years. She had lived in Buffalo, Iowa, Chicago, Cyprus and had now moved to New York. We hadn't been in touch for at least ten years.

But now, here we were, after all this time, with similar jobs and similar lives, having reached pretty much the same point albeit through our entirely different routes. Sharing anecdotes and laughing at life's foibles. Bonding over an upcoming summer of biking in the city. And the years apart suddenly seemed irrelevant.

I must admit, I never thought I'd find myself feeling glad that I'd made that leap over to facebook!