Friends in Past Lives

Today I'm meeting a friend from middle school for a drink. We were really close in middle school but grew apart in high school. I haven't seen her since then, but we recently connected on Linkedin. I'm really excited about it.

I find the way that friendships ebb, change, end, and begin to be extremely fascinating. There is just so much variation. Sam grew up with a bunch of cousins his age who were his automatic best friends, so he has these friends that he has known since before he was actually a sentient being. He is also very close to friends from high school. I don't really share this and only keep in touch with a few people from high school. Speaking of hometowns, I am also friends with a group of people who lived in Corvallis. While they weren't all close when living there, they have grown together and become closer friends as they've gotten older. I think that's really nice. It's also odd, because Corvallis continues to be this strange theme in my life. I'm always meeting people from Corvallis. I personally maintain friendships with only a few people from my hometown. I've never really used Facebook as a tool to catch up with those people and I'm not really interested in doing so. I don't necessarily expect our shared youth or shared hometown to mean that we need to maintain a connection. People change and grow.

But that doesn't mean I'm totally unwilling to make some effort. I mean, Charissa and I were in the same 4-H group. We were called the Spirit Catchers, which at the time, was a name that we thought completely magical. One of the Spirit Catchers' highest achievements was creating a float for the Newberg Old Fashioned Festival Parade. The float was a plywood barn on the back of a flatbed. As we rolled along we popped open little doors (painted to look like stall doors and decorated with our misshapen portraits of our horses) and chucked candy at people. While you would think this shared experience would automatically bind us all for life, there was a time when I lost touch with Charissa. Thankfully, we both moved back to Portland the same year and Charissa lost her phone during Arctic Blast 2009, prompting an email request for phone numbers. We reunited and have been friends ever since.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to catching up with this old friend of mine. It could be that we have nothing in common anymore, or it could be that we could pick up where we left off, and become friends again as new people with shared experiences. New frontiers, even friendship ones, are always exciting.