Esprit de corps

I have been utilizing facebook over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, it takes some of the time I would ordinarily use for my submissions on this blog. We live in an odd world. We have so many ways to communicate with others, but seldom use the modes of communication we have for anything serious. With facebook, I have thrown a net out on the internet and have caught quite a few people who I knew in the past. On the other hand, I have been caught myself by people who are apparently connected to me, but whom I cannot remember to same my life. It is rather strange. It is like fishing. You never know what you are going to catch. Or for that matter, by whom you are going to be caught.

For example, I caught my former roommate at W&L who is now a surgeon in Arizona. I caught a classmate from law school at Georgia who now lives in Irvine, California, where Cindy's family used to live and where I was married. I caught two people with whom I went to high school, only to find that they both lived in Griffin for some time several years ago. I caught a number of people who I have not had any contact with over the years and probably had little contact with, even when I was in high school.

But we all have connections and facebook makes use of those connections in order to link us together. It doesn't mean we are any closer. I graduated with a guy from Dunwoody. We didn't really have much close connection when we were there. I don't suppose I spoke with him more than a handful of times in school. However, I caught him on facebook. Now he is a missionary in Benin on the west coast of Africa. He has been for twenty years. So now, someone with whom I had little contact when we both went to school together knows more about me than he probably knew then, yet lives on the other side of the world.

Odd indeed.

Still, it is nice to make contact with someone I knew before. It makes me feel like I am not alone, even though I am really not alone anyway. Still, the group to which I am attached, however tenuously, is now bigger. A large net of fish. And I can make us closer, if I so choose and they decide that that is alright as well.

On the other hand, we are not that much closer, in the real sense. No, we are still separated by time and distance and the years that have fallen between us since we inhabited the same high school or college or law school or little league football team. The connections sometimes are stronger in my mind and memory than in reality.

For I can still see Bud Schreiber in Fort Myers when we were down there in 1970, playing football against a little league team from Fort Myers and I can still remember the sadness of those little boys, thirteen and twelve, crying in the visitor's lockerroom after we tied the Fort Myers Rebels 0-0 on a cool night in December. We had not lost or tied a game the entire year. Going into the game we were 12-0. And yet there we were in the lockerroom in Florida, weeping for failing to win that last game.

And I remember standing on the field at North Dekalb Stadium talking to Bud Schreiber after we beat Chamblee High School in the final football game of our senior year at Dunwoody. And Cody Conarro and Eddie Jackson and Blake Mitchell and Gene Geeslin and Frank Hovey and Tom Schreiber were all there. All guys I played with in little league, who were now together on the opposite side of a high school football game, but brought together one more time. Before college and law school and work and marriage and children and whatever. Some of the same little boys who shared a good cry in a room in Fort Myers, Florida.

Esprit de corps, to some extent. I suppose.