How Facebook Found My (Real) Friends

I'm a fairly regular presence on Facebook.  This is a bit surprising since I'm not a fan of technology and resisted the onslaught of the internet, Microsoft and anything that had a chip/gigabyte/portal.  When my boss first announced that we were getting rid of our IBM Selectrics and moving to word processors, I protested mightily.  Waving pieces of carbon paper in his face I recall saying something along the lines of "and what do you want me to do with the 20 boxes of this we have in the storage room?"  Wisely, I did not give him much of an opportunity to tell me what to do with…or where to put…it.

Eventually I got used to the change, and even came to like a world without "White-Out."  But email was a tough sell for me since I missed the homespun charm of handwritten notes, so you can imagine my initial opposition to social media.  It seemed very sterile to me, this attempt to make "virtual" friendships across the cyber miles.

It never occurred to me that Mark Zuckerberg had actually found a way to bring me a little closer to myself.

Next April I will be going to my 35^th high school reunion. I remember Merion Mercy with an inordinate amount of fondness, probably because it was a time when even though I looked like a plumper version of Joan of Arc (really, really bad hairdo) I felt happy with myself and my world.  Not for me the angst of the average teenager who wondered if she would ever find her true love (this was a girl's school after all.)  Not for me the wild nights to rock and roll sound track (this was, again, a girl's school and even though some of the other 'girls' might have been boogeying to the disco beat, I had enough trouble getting the wrinkles out of my kilt to have time for extra-curriculars.)

In short, I was not one of the most popular girls at MMA, but that's the beauty of the place:  I didn't have to be.  Even the beautiful, straight-haired blondes and Farrah-maned brunettes were exceptionally nice.  The kohl-eyed girls from South Philly with the sexy voices (yeah, I know they smoked!) were quite sweet when you talked to them one on one.  The prepsters who lived around the corner from the Main Line school wouldn't hold it against you that you lived in "HaverTOWN" instead of "HaverFORD" and the athletic  girls who brought glory to the school even took pity on the plump girl with the wrinkled kilt and disastrous hair experiment, such that some of them even picked me for their intramural teams.  I mean, I wasn't always the last one drafted.

I've heard so many horror stories from so many other people, women especially, about their high school years.  I didn't get it then, and don't get it now.  While that academic stretch was far from my peak, it holds a very warm and special place in my heart.

That's why Facebook has provided a very important service for me. It has given me a portal back to a treasured time.  My first high school reconnect was my friend Regina.  We didn't actually hang out in the same crowd at Merion, but I always liked her smile and her winning, easy laugh.  I also liked the fact that she wore glasses proudly, like me (they just looked cool on her while on my they looked somewhat like what I think the Hubbel telescope looks perched on its hill.)

Through Regina's Facebook page I found others, like lovely Beth who was smart, sweet, pretty and musically talented in high school.  I would have hated her, except it is impossible to hate an angel.

Then there was Heidi, who I remember having the most luxurious hair, thick and chocolate dark and usually twined into a long braid down her back.  For some reason, I always remember that her birthday is November 6, probably because her wonderful mother, our sometime art teacher, would bring in the best cupcakes for the class.

I've reconnected with brilliant Donna, my onetime nemesis.  I say nemesis because if I would struggle for that treasured B+, she would easily come up with an A.  And yet, I don't think I was envious of her in a bad way.  Having Donna in my life made me work much harder.  And finding her on Facebook reminds me of how much I admired her long ago, and how competition has its upside.

I've also found Nell again, a woman whose accomplishments as an adult were foretold by her days at Merion.  She was a born leader, our class president, and could make friends with no obvious effort. Nell became a well-respected, Emmy award winning journalist.  And I can say I knew her when (the "when" being the oratory competition at Archmere in 1974)

Without Facebook, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to reach back and find these wonderful women of my youth.  So while we often lament the march of technology and the negative impact it has had on our lives, I'm here to celebrate the occasional jewels that can be excavated in an otherwise dark mine of irrelevance:

Friendships.  And on this Thanksgiving weekend, that makes me grateful.