Fading memories, old friendships

My father sent an email with photos he’d taken while visiting his hometown recently. Most were photos of family members but he also took a couple photos of the apartment where my parents lived when they were first married. This was effectively my first home, if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen black and white photos from the time we lived there in the past. I’m pretty sure my parents have shown us the house when visiting family too. But it was kind of interesting to see it’s still standing and looking pretty decent after all these years. At least it looks okay from the outside.

I was just a toddler when we last lived there so obviously have no memories of the place. But I have reminisced about other places I’ve lived over the years and it seems so many of the memories are fading. And it’s not just places either. I was flipping through my high school yearbooks the other day. I recognised only a few faces in the sea of senior photos. The names triggered better recollections. Those I remember most would have been in my home room. I can’t say I knew them personally all that well , having been one of the quiet, shy students hidden at the back of the class. But at the time, they were extremely familiar to me and it seemed I would remember them forever. I was wrong, of course! 

I worked out there were three people I knew well during that period of my life. I’m still in contact with one, who happened to live on our street and who happened to go to the same college as I did. But even in that situation, we’ve been out of touch for a year or two now. Not that we couldn’t easily reconnect… and we will at some point. We have just become busy with our individual lives.

One friend lived fairly close to us and we spent a lot of time together during our high school years. Somehow, we moved in different directions after high school and our paths have never crossed again. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I’ve managed to work out sort of where she is now and perhaps I’ll one day contact her. What little I have found makes me feel she is still much the same as she’s always been: kind of off-the-wall and kooky, but lots of fun. She was the sort of extroverted complement to my introverted self.

There was a third friend from that time that I recently found on Facebook. I wasn’t completely sure it was the same person but I wrote to her anyway and it was confirmed that I had the right person. But now I’m left wondering where to take this information now. The response I got was brief and not particularly encouraging towards resurrecting the connection. I also realise that we probably didn’t know each other as well  as I first thought. She slept over at my house once or twice but mostly I knew her from the school bus. To be honest, I suspect she and I probably have very little common ground these days. So that brings it down to two friends from that era.

There was another girl from a year behind me too. But the fact is, I don’t even remember  her name. She went to my high school and her family attended the same church but she lived somewhere far off from where we lived, on the other side of the school intake area. I remember she spent the night at our house on a couple of occasions and we used to go out out places on weekend days. She didn’t get on well with her parents and she had several younger siblings. And I don’t remember her name. So I guess that was more of a brief acquaintance than a friendship.

I used to think I would remember certain people or places or events with great clarity forever. I think my memories from college are the closest I get to that ideal. It helps that I was more intimately acquainted with a number of people during those years. Most I knew from our dorm and the others I mostly knew as associates of people from our dorm. By this time I was also writing a journal of sorts, rather haphazardly. One year I happened to make a list of everyone in the dorm and I wrote something about everyone. I only did it the one year but I have occasionally found that list while rereading the journal and it was good to actually remember just about every person on the list in some sort of way. I’ve continued to keep various journals over the years and rereading them is quite useful at keeping some memories from disappearing into the abyss of my brain’s archives. I’m think maybe  I will start writing privately in a book or notebook about people I know now. It might come in useful one day when I am struggling to come up more than just a vague idea of who these people I once knew were.