Tuesday, July 22, 2008

From out of the blue!

This has been a morning of surprises!  I got two blasts from the past even before I could get to making my tumbler of iced coffee -- first, a confirmation on Facebook from a classmate in law school, and then a comment from another one, Nola, who had stumbled into my corner of the blogsphere with a little help from Google.  It's one of those days when I get a reminder about how we are now connected by the web, no matter which part of the world we are in.

I have a third note from Therese but I am a little lost, I have to admit.  Therese, can you e-mail me at pinaynewyorker@gmail.com?  I have two or three faces I'm putting to the name and you didn't leave an e-mail address.

I've been all agog catching up on friends of old from high school, college and law school.  Sometimes, I hesitate to just request to be added to a friend's list, and I have already had at least one "rebuff" of sorts because she couldn't remember me.  I don't take any offense because I knew her from elementary and high school and wasn't really a batchmate.  I was just kind of hoping she'd remember because her last name and my maiden name were the same.  So I usually prefaced my request with an "I hope you remember me."

Some will say it's just another social network -- but I think I like Facebook because it's a social network mostly for a more matured crowd, whereas others like Myspace and Friendster are peopled with a lot of kids.  I have used the latter mostly to find long lost relatives more than friends and it was just heartwarming to see my pamangkins and inaanaks there.  But here on Facebook, I've reconnected with friends of old.. even managed to send a message to an ex-boss.  (And what totally made my day was when she had me add her to my list of friends...that's another blog post altogether.)  Many of them are just discovering that I am actually in New York.  One of the more remarkable reconnecting I've done is with someone I knew from college who was like a younger brother to me who has been in Manchester, CT all this time.

Still there are some you keep away from.  (I am reminded by posts on Jher and Jerome's individual blogs, particularly what Jher recently wrote on friendship here.  But I am straying from the topic of this post.)  I have been totally preoccupied with reconnecting and renewing ties the past couple of days.  Why didn't I do this sooner?  (Probably because I hardly have any time at all to browse other people's lists and find out who I might know there..)

I'm trying to go slow but I'm terribly excited.  It is just one other way of being "home" as I used to know it.  It's reconnecting with people who were part of my circle in some of the most important phases of my life.  High School, college, law school... some of them, like myself, have families of their own now. Some are still single.  There are those who are single again. =)  While it is a way for me to go back to that part of my life again, I realize it is a different world and we have all changed.

That is why I am not expecting everyone to be as excited as I am to bump into them -- and I proceed with caution lest the years of being out of touch have brought us to places that are poles apart -- literally and figuratively.  I myself remember some faces but I am racking my brain for names.  There were names with no pictures that took a while to register some form of recall in my head.  But it feels good to say hello again, or to receive a greeting... it tells me I'm back home with friends.




Posted by Pinay New Yorker at 07:18:25 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Reconnecting

One of the most rewarding finds is reconnecting again with friends of old you have lost contact with.  Last week, Alan bumped into an old friend he had known from college and who we had last seen a few years back.  He was even one of the four best men during our wedding in 2000.  This old friend was also one of the godfathers of my stepson, and Alan was a godfather of his daughter.  He had ventured into turning a personal passion into a business and turned his back on the corporate world.  I have always admired him for having the fire to do that and doing something he truly loved.

Around a year ago, I told Alan I thought I saw this friend of ours in our neighborhood taking the bus with me some mornings.  His first reaction was his friend was now living in some other state and that guy couldn't have been the same one.  Last week, however, they bumped into each other in a neighborhood pharmacy and it turns out it was him.

We had dinner with his family last night at their home which, it turns out, is just a few blocks from our home.  Talk about it being a small world.  It was great catching up on what had transpired in our respective lives in the last few years.  He is back in the corporate world now, realizing that while he was doing something he was passionate about, there were other things that mattered more like family.

Now we can't wait to get together with the rest of the gang and to tell everyone he's back!  Indeed quite a find.. 

I have been mulling about starting a new category here in my blog about my attempts to locate friends from way back and reconnecting again.  Sometimes there are just dead ends, and although I do not believe in the concept of six degrees of separation through and through, I believe in fate and how someone might bump into my "panawagan" (call) here, and lead me to find one of those I've been looking for.

Sometimes you don't even have to go looking before someone finds you. 
Posted by Pinay New Yorker at 18:02:17 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |