Everything Old Is New Again

Amidst the flurry that is shopping for a new car, I got an e-mail. It was a voice from the past, but one that had never been fully introduced. Years ago, I wrote about an anecdote that my friend Darren shared about his little sister. I never really thought much about how I was putting someone else's life out on Al Gore's Internet. I just figured it was an interesting story and wouldn't everyone who regularly read this blog find it interesting? Well, it turns out that Darren's sister read that blog. And she's been keeping up on a somewhat regular basis with things here in Entropical Paradise. Enough so that she was able to track me down when she and her kids came through town on their grand tour of the left side of the country.
A lattice of coincidence occurred over that past few weeks, wherein a number of threads from the past, including driving up the canyons near Boulder where Darren made his last road trip, as well as the renaissance of communication with a number of friends from the past that culminated in this visit by the youngest sister of Mister Tupperware, the inventor of Hungry Drunk-Boy Pizza, and the funniest person I ever met, the Okie From Muskokgee. And so there I was, at the confluence of the past thirty years of my life. With a sudden rack-focus on what I was when I was nineteen and what I am now. I want to tell myself that I haven't changed that much, as Waldo so kindly assured me when I saw him at the Jeep dealership in Boulder. I want to believe that I am every bit the friend that I was in my twenties as I am finishing off my forties. Only much wiser.
It will be some time before I get all the odd and amusing tangles out of my web of the past, and I look forward to these renewed connections as opportunities to build. I know that I have grown as a person, parent, professional over the past quarter-century, but it's very satisfying to discover that all those years ago the lives the paths I crossed became part of a map that I could rely on all these years later. It made me feel like all those dark times and pain were eventually warmed over by the light that really was at the end of the tunnel. It made me happy to see that what we have all become when we grew up wasn't so bad after all. It let me know that I was on the right track, more or less way back when, and I look forward to what is going to happen next.