The cat came back

In which our Hero doesn’t know how to pass a blast from the past

Social Networks are a mess of connections, wanted and unwanted. Unlike most of the people frenetically trying to drive up their friend count like their pay depended on it, I’ve always seen friends as having claims to my attention and my care, and so I generally try to be pick about who I allow to claim that care.

And so it’s always been strange to me that something like Facebook drives people to contact you from out of the darkness of the past, on the basis of acquaintance however warmly remembered. With apologies, and with loving happy memories of my elementary school days, most of my friends there were kids I shared geography and age with, and that does not make the kind of connection that makes me reach out.

Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe I’m not valuing or remembering the something that was special about my friends from the first grade, but I’d argue that the demographic circumstances that made us friends are not the things that would make us meet, or align, or like each other now. And for most people, it isn’t till at least high school that you really start to develop enough of your own personality and tastes *and express them* to figure out the kind of people you’d actually end up staying in touch with.

Me, I’m lucky in that. I left the standard school feed and got pushed into one of those academic programs which meant now I was with people who were being selected for attributes rather than geography. And in point of fact, a few of those people I met in the fifth grade are still people that I spend time with. But even there, it’s a small percentage of that larger group that I count as friends.

I’ve never had a great desire to go back to class reunions. I look back at my past with affection but without any great unresolved issues. I don’t need to find out what happened to people, because the ones I kept in touch with are the ones I kept in touch with. And if I cared that much, I’d have stayed in touch with the others. On the other hand, through the miracle of social networks, now you don’t have to work so very hard to find people, nor wait for the class reunion.

But now the past bubbles up and people I have known are finding me and asking to be connected to my social graph. Most all of them have been past professional contacts, and I guess I should be honoured that they remembered me or respected me enough to want to connect to me. But the horrifying thing is that for the most part that they have been contacts that I did not respect or consider friend nor wish to acknowledge contact with. Friendship is not symmetric, nor is acquaintance. (This is why I like Google+ and one of many reasons why I don’t like facebook).

More and more people have been stumbling over my “self” on the internet since I chose to go public with my existence. Cousins have found me. More recently, someone in my parent’s generation has discovered the unmentioned-by-me fact that I’m an independent contractor now.

And the other day, a classmate from engineering school contacted me on LinkedIn, giving me her name as it was in halcyon days, and asked, “Do you remember me?”

I do.

I remember an appearance: She was a pretty girl, slender, with what I remember as short brown hair, bobbed past the chin if I understand the hairstyle.

I remember two specific moments.

The second memory is from the last day I saw her, the last day I saw any significant part of my class of 70-odd fellows gathered in one place. It was our convocation, and she sat next to me in our alphabetically designated places, in Convocation Hall of the University of Toronto. My class was a drop in the bucket of roughly a thousand graduating engineers, and collectively, it took us and our loved ones to even come close to filling that massive space. She sat next to me, as I said, and being a girl and concerned about things like appearance and photos, was not wearing her glasses. So during the ceremony, she asked to borrow mine. I remember being shocked, baffled and amused, because glasses are not so easily shared as pieces of gum, but she used them a little like opera glasses to check out the scene, before passing them back to me. Now, the residue is the amusement.

The first memory is of our girl filling in the last part of her problem set by moving from guy to guy in our common room where a number of us were lounging, being sweet and pretty and charming a look at one of our answers to “compare” or “check” her work, before moving to the next. And I saw her doing it, and I let her charm me because she was pretty and it was fun to be flirted with and because most of us would have shared our work if she’d tried just asking, because we took care of each other that way.

But that’s kind of my memory of her as a student. Not top of the class material, nor the same kind of bottom of the class as me. More like the class kitten, cute and fuzzy when she wanted help, generally decent, but more acquaintance than anything.

I remember her. I could tell her about the glasses thing, that’d make her laugh, I bet. I could tell her about the problem-set thing, but we’re not friends enough to give her reason to find it a funny story rather than judgmental.

And then what? Hey, yeah, I remember you, and some small talk to catch up and… now we’re friends? We weren’t really friends back then, we were classmates. So what does that relationship mean now? What do you want from me? Or is it just enough to reach out and say hi and check off that connection that says that we talked?

It’s funny how far I stretch my boundaries and yet how quickly I can run off the edge. I don’t have a policy for this. I don’t have a habit to fall back on.

I will acknowledge her. She was not a friend, but she was a pretty girl who was friendly to me. Not that the girls in high school were so much aloof, but they were that clique from high school where she is an engineer.

Godiva was a lady who through Coventry did ride
to show all the villagers her fine and lily-white hide
The most observant villager, an engineer, of course,
was the only one to notice that Godiva rode a horse
— Engineer’s Hymn