Unless you're a paleontologist, thirty years is a long time. If you're guilty of unbridled nostalgia, and successful at using the internet to reach back into your childhood or teens to find an old friend, thirty years is a very long time.

With rampant globs of information about everyone who exists filling every corner of the worldwide web, one blessing and simultaneous curse is the proliferation of nostalgia databases. I'm responsible for several of these, so you know where to toss the credit (as well as the blame). Among baby boomers there is apparently a serious epidemic of middle-age longing for reaching back.

It used to be almost impossible to use phone books to find old girlfriends because they'd all changed names when they married (and who did they all marry, anyway?). It wasn't fair. The girls could always track their old crushes who moved from cities to the 'burbs or back again, while they remained relatively safe in the anonymity of their "Mrs." personas. But now, finding old school mates, buddies and those old heartbreakers is almost too easy. Online, these ladies are apparently coming out of cover and seeking a link back to those days when they weren't worried about crows' feet, laugh lines, or the ever-encroaching gray. Aren't we all...

Maiden names (a term I have to laugh about in many cases), schools, classes and addresses are all finding their way into these web directories. The email among those finding their old crushes is not just electric, it's electric. In many cases, the renewal is thrilling, and the gap across the years seems as small as if it were only a few days.

The charm of email is how it affords a chance to communicate in a leisurely fashion, fueled by pleasant memories and imagined visuals. There's a "you" that emerges with every click on the keyboard that may have been too busy all these years, raising a family, working the work, living the life, to have been maintained. A thirty-year calyx is opening, and it feels great. No wonder these reconnections are so popular.

I never attended any class reunions. I attended a city school with an enormous student population, and except for the commercial reunion mill circuses that try to reunite several class years simultaneously, only one reunion for my high school class was ever pulled off, to my knowledge. Having moved five times since graduating, I assume I was rather difficult to find, and had never received an invitation. Or perhaps I was not on the "A" list of students from Evander '67, and deemed an undesirable. Whichever the reason, it's been over thirty years since I've seen most of my classmates. However, I've managed to make contact with several using my online databases. In the absence of face-to-face meetings, these communications have been more like time travel than phone calls.

The people I've "conversed" with using email are not real in a sense. Rather, they're conglomerates of my memory of what they looked like thirty years ago, my illusions of who they were and what they've done though the years, and a smattering of their actual contemporary identities that I've managed to glean from their notes to me. It's a very weird state of affairs. In some cases, I feel like these people are close, old friends, to whom I can say anything. In other cases, I feel like a seventeen-year-old connecting with someone after a long, awkward silence. In still others, it seems like I can't understand how I ever could have really known the person. But in all cases except one I've managed (and not always intentionally) to avoid face-to-face "reunions". Is there a bubble at risk of being burst here? I'm not sure. A friend once cautioned me to never seek out old friends because "the memory is always better than the reality". So far, events have proved him neither wrong nor right. When and if that circumstrance sways definitively in either direction, I'll probably have a lot more to say here.

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