Blogger Pamela Ribon has a good entry about googling old friends.
You want to know what happened to Kacie Barton, your best friend in the fourth grade who had the best giggle. Her dad was the police chief. She had a pool party. There’s a picture of you there goofing around. You look so blonde and happy. Kacie had great hair — strawberry blonde. She had bangs you envied. She sent you a letter after you moved away. It had a cassette tape of her talking to you, narrating a series of photographs she’d sent from when her family went to Hawaii. You listened to that tape over and over again from your lonely new house in Fort Worth. You missed her more than she could ever know. But her name is too common, and you have no idea if she still lives in California, and there’s no way she’d even remember you after all these years…
My old friend Sarah Swan (nee Connell) e-mailed me last night, updating me on the last couple of years of her life, so I’m admittedly primed for such a story.