To old friends

This is an email I just sent to a close college friend and thought I'd post it here as well, since it encapsulates a lot of things I've been thinking about the last few days:

Hey Dan –


I was just thinking of you this morning on my drive into work. I just finished re-reading my journal from my senior year at EC. Actually, I should say reading it, not re-reading it. I hadn’t read any of it since I wrote it over 30 years ago. Anyway, I want to thank you for being such a great friend and apparently listening to me talk way too much about Ruth Fischer. Man was I obsessed. It’s embarrassing to read. But Ruth aside, thanks for being such a great friend anyway. You were a frequent source in the journal of many of my favorite stories back then. Those were a lot of really good times with a lot of really good people. Funny how a group of people we can feel so incredibly close to, who defined so much of our day to day happiness, can then be spread to the distant shores, leaving us with mostly just memories, really great memories, and so little contact. Kinda like going to war, I guess, being so close to people and then never seeing many of them again. And it’s really never replicated in our lives after that. As much as I love and adore my wife and my kids and current group of really close friends, they’ll never play the same kind of role that you did along with the Daves Nich and Coulter, Dalsimer, Ellen, Slocum, Clem, Jim McKey, Stew Young, Anne Fletcher, Reb, Xandy, heck, all of Spanish House, and lots of others for me, and no doubt by the time you became a senior, you had a mostly completely different group. (I remember, thanks to you, that I can’t qualify “unique”, but is it possible to qualify “completely”?).

I see Rellahan pretty much weekly, and Dave Nich once in awhile, but I haven’t seen any of Reb, Dalsimer, Slocum, or Anne Fletcher since they graduated. Well, I crashed Dals’ wedding, but not since then. Can’t even find her on facebook. I see Ellen Jones at Westtown-related events sometimes, and you every 5 years or so, not nearly enough. I haven’t seen Stew in awhile, but I know I will sometime.

Anyway, it’s weird having all those names fresh in my mind again after reading about them in WAY too much detail. But I really did bring all this up just to thank you for being such a great friend those 2 years we were together, and I’m so glad we’ve stayed in touch and see each other once in awhile.

Your friend,

Jamie