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| Finding long lost friends and family has been made easier by the Internet. |
There was a girl I went to grade school with. I had such a crush on her. I remember thinking about her every day for almost a whole school year. And then she moved away and I never saw her again. And I have never forgotten her. Her name was Sheila, or Sarah, or Samantha, or something. She had the most beautiful eyes and long brown hair. Why can't I remember her name?
My friends and I like to reminisce about old school days. There are a few people we all remember visually. We can tell each other stories about those folks. But they are known to us as "the guy with the thick glasses", "the girl with the pony-tails", "the jock who cried after school" (really nice guy), the so-and-so and so on.
There are a lot of people I remember whose names I don't remember. And yet when I knew them in school I could have told you where they lived, what their parents' names were, even the names of their dogs and cats. Somehow after all these years that information is just not important enough for me to remember any more. I will take these half-forgotten memories to the grave.
That's an ironic thing. We live in a world police can track you down with almost nothing but a grainy surveillance camera picture. We have this amazing technology that makes it possible to find people we never knew in the first place, but we struggle to reconnect with people who were once so important to us that our parents knew to call their parents to see if we were okay.
Despite what I read in the news, it's always easy to find people online. I admit to doing a few checkups on old friends and flames. I've spent years looking for one old girlfriend. I think she may have died in a car accident but I am not sure. When you look for people on the Internet you find a lot of mixed up information.
But you should ask yourself what you would do if you reconnected with some old friends. Why did we lose touch in the first place? What happened to end our friendships? Did we have fights? Did we simply drift apart? You may miss the old days but there is no going back.
Maybe it's just a fantasy but some people do try to reconnect with their lost loves. I don't know how often they succeed. I guess it happens enough that some psychologists help people deal with the quest. You could spend years searching online for someone you once knew, and much as you'd like to gush about how much you missed them, the best advice the experts can give us is to take it slow and easy. That's like pouring salt onto the wound. Isn't this someone you once trusted to keep your deepest secrets?
And that's a real fear some people might have. What if you reconnect with someone who knew something embarrassingly secret about you? Maybe they kept your secret while you were friends, but what if they added that anecdote to their library of funny stories they tell their current and new friends? Do you really want to be the guy who shows up only to learn that all these strangers have been laughing at you for years?
Searching for people, even strangers, has become an almost universal obsession. If you see someone in the news you start to Google them right away. Who is that? Have I seen any of her movies? Did he appear on a show with anyone I like?
These are casual quests and most of them lead nowhere. You satisfy your curiosity and move on. That's about as good as it gets. But then you find a story like this one, where a photographer tracked down a girl 17 years after her took her picture. That's an incredible story, by the way. Sharbat Gula was a 12 year old Afghan girl whose parents had been killed in war. She fled with the rest of her family over the mountains to Pakistan and there her famous picture was taken. Having no more than that photograph and the name of the refugee camp where they met, the photographer set out to find her. And find her he did.
Those are the kinds of stories that make you think, 'If they can find someone like that, I should be able to find Charlie ... or was his name Peter?"
