Motivated by this article in my RSS feed this morning, I googled an old friend today.
Mmmmm, okay, “friend” is probably a strong word. “Crazy bastard I used to hang around with when I was young and even stupider” is unwieldy, though, so I’ll go with it.
Long story short, this friend, who has over the last 35 years or so of my life mostly been the villain of various stories of misspent youth and often the butt of many “I used to know a guy so crazy that…” anecdotes, died in 2011.
He was well spoken of in his obituary, which I found online pretty easily, but pretty much everyone is spoken well of in their obituary. RIP, dude. You were, hands down, the craziest M.F. I ever knew.
Earlier today, I was thinking about my favorite high school French teacher and I thought I might see if I could find him and send him a note. Yeah, I found his obituary - he died 3 weeks ago. I haven’t seen him since 1972, but all of a sudden, I feel a void.
That article was great. I mean, I almost came here and posted a link to it, but I didn’t know what to say about it, except that I really appreciated reading it. So I’m glad somebody posted it. Lost friends, and wondering about the trajectories that led them from one point to another in their lives.
I’ve done the googling old acquaintances bit too, and found some surprises, but nothing quite as shocking as the author of the article found.
I ran into an elderly woman in a grocery store. Being tall people often ask me to reach something up high. She did, and I retrieved a jar of olives for her. She looked at me funny and asked me 'Do I know you?", I shook my head, no. And moved on.
Later, driving home I remembered she was my first ‘real’ boyfriends Mother. When I got home I went and googled him. Turns out he had died. On my previous birthday. That dude broke my tiny little teenage heart and then had the temerity to die on my birthday. Jeez.
I joimed Facebook to see if I could locate my senior drill sergeant from Army Basic training. I wanted to tell her something, thank her actually, for something from basic that she did. I did find her, as I knew she could not be all that much older than I. So I did have the pleasure of finally thanking her for something she did. Glad I thought of it when I did, who knows when we will not be around to do something?
In 8th grade, my math teacher was Ralph David Delaney. Being so good at math, I quickly became “teacher’s pet.” Delaney would ask the class a math question, and go around and ask everyone’s answer. He always got to me last, since he knew I’d always solve the problem correctly. In all the years since, he remained my favorite teacher.
I knew nothing of his life, and just assumed he’d remain teaching 8th grade math. I thought someday I’d reconnect with him and thank him for being my favorite teacher. But having moved to NYC, the miles and years came between us. I was completely oblivious to the events in his life, until I relocated back to Ohio, got on the internet, and looked him up.
Apparently, he taught math only a brief time, then continued his extraordinary life. Here is what became of Ralph David Delaney.
I had a teaching nun like that in the 4th grade. So full of life and loved to teach. Died in a car crash. I still have the ceramic frog she gave me 50+ years ago.
I googled the name of a girl I had the hots for in high school and encountered the transcript of the malpractice suit resulting from her death after an operation. I’d heard rumors that she’d died (that’s why I was googling her), but reading the transcript was so disturbing. It went into detail about the days after the operation as she feared for her life. And then her fears came true.
I started a thread about a similar thing a while back.
I got a PM from one of my Facebook friends asking if I knew what had happened to a mutual friend of ours, because she couldn’t locate this person online. I replied that she had died many years earlier, IIRC from a brain tumor. My friend was totally shocked; she hadn’t heard a thing.
I had searched for years without success for my high school best friend. He just seemed to have vanished, so I gave up. Then one night about ten years ago I had a dream about him. So the next morning I thought “what the hell” and typed in his name and Anchorage, Alaska, and I got a hit for a winery in Walla Walla. Looking at the short bio for the guy, I immediately knew that it was him, as I had talked him into going to college with me.
Turned out he had done a career in the military like I had, then worked for defense contractors like I did, then retired for good. . .like I did. Except that he financed his son to start a winery, which they are still running. I’ve visited there a couple of times and they make pretty good wine.