Voices from the Past

At the top right of this page you'll see a link in the Blogger tool bar that says "Next Blog." occasionally, when I have a little time to kill and it's late enough in the day that I can no longer use my brain for any thing constructive, I start clicking there and play Blogger roulette.

I was doing that Sunday evening when I saw a reference to "Shelly at Zebra Entertainment" on somebody's page. It stopped me a moment as back in high school, 27+ years ago, I knew a Shelly who, along with another friend, started a company called Zebra Entertainment. A quick Google search and a couple of clicks later I was sending a short email to say hello and see if was really her.

We've had a couple of phone calls this week to catch up and it's been fairly interesting and just a little bit weird. We probably last saw each other around 1982 or 1983, just about the time that she got married. That's got to be the longest I've lost touch with somebody and then accidentally crossed paths with them again.

She's now called a couple of our other friends who I've been in touch with to continue the reunion. With as much as all of us have changed, moved, grown, and adapted over the years, she's remarkably the same. Only the addition of a few kids sets her apart from the Shelly I last saw 23 years ago.

I'm not sure what to think of that. Has she stagnated all this time? Or was she just that much more put together and ready for life than us guys she hung out with? She seems to be mostly happy with her life, and that's the important part.

NOTE (added 4/28): I need to clarify a point in that last paragraph about "stagnation." I wrote that thinking of the outward trappings of a fictional character who we don't see from age 22 to 44, but still lives in the same place, with the same mate, and doing the same thing for a living. Our friend has certainly grown in many ways that are less immediately apparent, but in a story we'd say "something's got to be different besides the age."