I have one of those old free-at-the-time Classmates.com accounts. I refuse to pay to be a full-fledged member so I can see who all may be trying to get in touch with me for whatever reason. I have looked over the member list for the years I was in school and I recognize maybe half of the names. I rarely see anybody I was “friends” with and certainly nobody I “hung out” with.
I may have seen 20 of my classmates since I graduated. I’m not on any of the “social networking” sites.
I graduated in 1959 and moved away from the hometown later that year. On trips back home I didn’t make any effort to see schoolmates again. I have never been to a class reunion.
Every once in a while I will Google an old classmate’s name and usually don’t get any meaningful hits. It’s like my class has vanished as far as I can tell.
None. The only one I cared at all about was my best friend, and we kind of grew apart while she was in college. I know where to find her, though, as she still lives near my home town.
Among my college friends, however, I’ve kept in touch with most of them and we get together every few months or so. (Which reminds me, I’ve got a barbecue to schedule!)
I’m in regular touch with three of them. They were all friends from before High School though. One is from Jr. High, one from Elementary School and one from pre-school.
Yes, as does e-mail and snail mail and even phone calls. Face-to-face would be nice as a separate number, but if you feel you are “in touch with” those people, that should count.
I have gotten announcements of class reunions because the person in charge of such has my home address. But to the best of my knowledge nobody from school has my e-mail address.
What besides Facebook is a source for “staying in touch” these days? Just curious.
You still have a Classmates account? Facebook offers a lot more and you don’t have to pay a dime for it.
Anyway I graduated in the late '90s and out of a class of about 300 people I’ve kept in semi-regular touch with two - I talk to them on the phone one or twice a year and see them once every two or three years when I happen to be in town and can carve out enough time to see them. I’m friends with a few others on Facebook, but I don’t really count those, as the only contact I’ve had with pretty much all of them was when I accepted their Facebook friend request, or vice-versa.
There’s a couple of people I’ve tried searching for online, but their names are common enough that Googling them (even with the name of the hometown) will bring up a plethora of unrelated hits, or there’s no sign of them whatsoever and they just appear to have dropped off the face of the Earth.
And I too am amazed by how many people I’m unable to recognize when I look at my senior yearbook. When I graduated I knew who almost everyone in my class was - that’s not to say I was close to them, but I knew their names and faces well enough that I could pick them out of a line up and could probably have told you what cliques they were a part of. These days I look at a lot of their pictures and draw a blank.
Do I detect a note of sarcasm? This is 98% of why I don’t want Facebook for my own use. The people I have been able to identify at Classmates who have been aggressively trying to get me to say something to them are the types of people I would turn around and walk the other way from when I saw them in the halls! Not that they may not have changed over the years, but why take the chance?
I’m in regular contact with just two–we were in a garage band in high school. The other two guys still play/record together and I send them lyrics from time to time.
I moved pretty far away, makes it tough. That said, I had one friend from high school visit recently when he was in town on business. This is thanks to a Facebook post he made.
That has been the only face to face meeting in many years. The rest is via Facebook. Base on those posts, the people who stayed in the area still get together every now and then.
One, an old boyfriend, who I got back together with thanks to Facebook.
I have a few more on Facebook but I still don’t consider that keeping in touch with them because we rarely interact. I hesitate to say “never” because I’m sure I’ve made the odd comment to status updates and stuff and I know one girl commented once to tell me about her friend who tried the gender predictor (a urine-based OTC test similar to a pregnancy test which determines fetal gender; I think it’s probably crap) and it turned out to be accurate. I still didn’t buy it though.
Graduted in 2002 - I generally haven’t kept in touch with my high school friends that often, but I do on occasion. And in fact, I’ve got a couple crashing at my place over the Labor Day weekend - should be fun!
My husband and I just spent a weekend with three of my classmates and their spouses, Class of '66. There are several others of our group who were unable to make the trip for various reasons.
I have two girlfriends and a male friend of fifty-seven years - all the way back to kindergarten. We stay in touch by phone and email and travel to visit with each other. The male friend lives nearby and we spend an afternoon together several times a year.
I feel fortunate to have had friends for such a long time. It’s a rare delight to hang out with people who know just about everything there is to know about you and love you still.
In fact at breakfast on Sunday we had a brief conversation about the nature of our relationships and all agreed that “love” wouldn’t be too strong of a word to use for our lasting friendships.
We are also glad to have the spouses included as they have fit in well with us. Of course over the years things shift and change. There have been divorces, moves across the country, various hurt feelings and hard times but ultimately we have remained bonded. I don’t think I ever laugh with as much joy as when we get started on old stories.
As one of us left this weekend he said something about the little get-togethers as a large part of keeping him feeling youthful. I think I could second that. I feel about fifteen years old with these good people.
