Scanning back over my life I realize something – is it not funny as hell where we end up!!

As I sit this morning at the computer poking around on face book I just got tickled after electronically chatting with an old friend from high school.  I have not seen him since high school, we were actual friends then but now we are more electronic friends.  That in itself seems weird to say but the social media has allowed us to reconnect.  I wonder if it has really allowed us to rekindle friendship from days gone by.  In this case, it was probably graduation in 1983 since I saw him and best I can remember I was stoned and drunk so most likely I would not remember even if I did see him. 

Anyway, he is now a preacher of a small church in a small town in Ohio and I would have NEVER guessed back then that he would be a preacher when we got to our mid-forties.  I have been somewhat retrospective lately anyway and after chatting with my friend maybe even more so.  I got to looking at the course my life has taken – what a ride I have gotten to be on!!!  I have been very blessed on my ride so far, great experiences, great friends along the way and a wonderful Bride who can tolerate the truckload of idiosyncratic behaviors I bring along with me, and she acts like I don’t have them.  I love that woman more than anything else in the world, and she loves me even more than that and I find a lot of solace and balance in that knowledge. 

Has the ride always been peaches and cream, hell no!!  But I did not and still don’t dwell on the bumps longer than I had to in order to extract the good or the lesson from them.  I have many friends that I have reconnected with using the social media, which span from grade school at Graham South Elementary school (torn down since I attended), to this very day.  It is interesting to look at them and read their walls, look at their pictures, posts and even look at who their friends are now.  Seems weird, sometimes I poke around on their profile page trying to piece their lives together from the last time I saw them until now.  It is not always easy though.

I wrote a blog sometime back about my life, I reader digest condensed version of my life so new FB friends could see what I have been up to.  It makes me wonder, is that what Facebook has done to us, removed the real relationships and created superficial, condensed versions of our previous relationships?  A friend of mine had a high school reunion recently and realized this as well, she wrote a blog about http://arathersimplerecipesaltlovelight.blogspot.com/2011/06/big-reunion.html

I am very careful about who stays on my friends list, if I were to create a bucket list at the top of that list would be to reconnect, in person and in a real way, with each of the folks I keep on my list in the ether world that is the internet.  I understand what FB is and have made friends that I feel connected with, I feel that way anyway - but who knows, I may just be one of 3,568 friends that they have, I might be lost in the noise of a busy wall.  Nothing can replace a real physical relationship, it can be augmented by social media but nothing beats a hug from a good friend and sitting around laughing together.    

Anyway, back to how it is interesting to see how we have all gotten to where we are today.  I like to think of it as the river of life, we get in, we ride along seeing the sights and enjoying (or enduring) the ride.  Back to the moments in time I talked about in the last blog.  We get in and as we float along life is happening, we better hold and realize that we cannot get back upstream.  We also need to understand the end of the river is the end and we better make the best of the ride and enjoy the scenery on the trip. 

I am going to stick with the river analogy here for a bit.  As I look at folks I see some who are riding along in different modes of transportation.  Some seem to have gotten in knowing the exact spot they were heading, fired up the powerful speed boat and set course for the destination.  They appeared to have a life plan from an early age, whether they did or not that was the perception I had of it.  That is not to say that once out of my sight the engine on that boat did not give them no end of trouble, but I did not see that.  Others hopped into a sailboat, still knowing where they were heading but maybe it was not as clearly defined but the life plan was in place.  Seems silly talking about it because it was my own narrow perspective that created that perception, funny how we do that huh? 

Others jumped on the raft, having never been on a river before – or those without an exact plan but were forced to jump in all the same.  Some of those on the rafts were also dealt the hand of no damn paddles and still others may have just gotten an old inner tube with a slow leak.  And then of course there are those who were traveling a proverbially polluted estuary without any manual means of transportation (up shit creek without a paddle for those who did not get that).  

Some of us get in and along the way we switch rides, maybe from the powerful motor boat to raft, or vice versa.  Some on the inner tubes may just bounce along the shoreline stopping when something looks interesting, something that would not have been noticed if one were racing by on a speed boat.  I guess my point is that the method is not important, both the speed boat and the tuber have great experiences and horrific challenges.  The boat may hit a sandbar that a tube could easily slip over top of and a rafter will be less concerned with the depth of the river bed than say a sailboat with a long daggerboard.

I find it crazy to imagine my friend from high school being a preacher, but I have no real idea what his trip down the river of life has been like, and he cannot understand my ride either.  When I got in the river I had no destination in mind, no place that I was trying to get to.  When I was younger I think that might just have been dim-wittedness but as I have gotten older I am rather happy that I started like that.  Bouncing along the shore line, into the good and bad and still continuing my ride.  I look at it like this, all those experiences have brought me to where I am, the good the bad and the ugly.  Each stop building on the last to create the man I am today.  Who knows if I was speeding down stream in speed boat I may have missed Bride there on her inner tube and left nothing behind but a woman screaming obscenities at a passing boat for going too fast and overturning her inner tube.

Along the way we accumulate partners who ride along with us, some stay longer than others and some are there for only a moment while we are stuck on the snarled roots of a mangrove tree.  Each having some contribution to who we are, even the ones who did not even realize they had an impact on us.   There have been so many on my ride I could not even begin to count them, some I never even liked but I still got some bit of wisdom from them that I put on my raft for use, maybe a figurative length of rope I used of when my tube came to the head of a waterfall to save myself.   I have enjoyed the ride so far, I am looking forward to going to church and listening to friend preach up a storm the next time I make it to Ohio.  I will probably smile remembering the two of us getting drunk at the girl-scout camp that used to be out at Kiser Lake.  The one thing I know - I am looking forward to taking a look at what his transportation and course have been since I saw him all those years ago.