In these days it’s rather easy to try and look up people that you used to hang with. I am dealing with a bit of nostalgia, maybe caused by the fact that my mother is going to be moving in with my sister, and the family homestead is going to be rented out, or flat out sold (I’d rather go for the selling of it, cut the ties and move on.)  That’s 47 years of memories tied up in a building, and it’s kind of stupid, but it’s a place that I had a lot of firsts in. You know, first steps, first dog… first girlfriend over to meet the parents… first car and lessons from dad (the yelling was intense when I would grind the manual transmission gears… I do miss driving a stick!)… Lots and lots of firsts… first computer (Apple ][e), First BBS with two phone lines (boy did that wind up costing me a wad!) First son over to visit grandma…

But as with anything, especially childhood, teenage years and early adulthood… those things pass on into the halls of our brains we label as memories.

But I tend to wonder where those people who I interacted with during periods of my life have gone, what they did, where their lives lead them.. do they still have lives? (you know, are they dead or something)

Over the years I’ve been poking around looking for those people who were in my life during some of my ‘formative years’.  Sometimes re-introducing yourself is a good thing, other times you learn what these people really thought of you, but never had the nerve to tell you back in the day, but with distance and time, they feel free and often obligated to set things straight (not necessarily right, but straight in their minds). And still there are days when I just hit google and start fishing!  Why? Boredom?  Curiosity?  I’ll never know.

A number of years ago I found one of my best friends from Junior High (but now they call it middle school, but I am not going to change my terminology because they are stupid!) and we have built that friendship back up.  This friend, Vince, was one of the guys who worked at the career center with me and used to hang out and use the schools time-sharing HP 2000A system.  The first computer system I really ever used. This was well before home computers burst onto the marketplace. And we were part of the beginning of the home computing landslide (who ever knew how this would turn out).

So in my experiences, some good, great, or bad… Be careful about who you try to look up. It has gotten easier since the introduction of facebook and other social media sites.  Sometimes the past comes to find you! That aspect of knowing where the past as moved is something that I am not going to go over in this post.  Maybe another post later….