Finally, a happy ending!
Speaking of dark happenings. Here is a story that fits the vein. In general, I like this gal’s story and animations and share it with my kiddo (who also likes it).
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I moved away from my best friend when we were 12. I googled him 20 years later only to find out he was in jail for soliciting nudes from the teens on the soccer club he coached. Wish I hadn’t googled that one.
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40 years ago, France developed and online phone directory with the Minitel. My father was fascinated with the system and realized he may be able to find old friends. He look for the name of one, a relatively uncommon name, and found it.
These were the parents of the old friends. They answered the phone call and told him their son, his friend, died in his 20s over 30 years ago.
My father did not call the others.
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After too many years of finding former friends on Facebook and discovering that they’d become wingnut Trumper scumbags, I mostly avoid looking up anyone I’m not already acquainted with. But I do know that one mildly religious friend went crazy-religious after college, another became the kind of person who’d say he’d want his kids to be shot if they talked back to police, and another is apparently the co-leader of a cult.
On a more positive note, despite what the author may believe, “Eight Years Old and Full of Beans” is a fantastic title for a memoir.
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Like most, my elementary school had its alpha bully. This kid was strong as hell, could beat up kids older than him, and liked to push people around. Adding up lots of clues later, I’m pretty sure his dad was sexually abusing him. All the anger came from somewhere, certainly.
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Seventh grade bully, liked a girl I liked, got in fist fight with me. He became a Psychologist. We’re both on facebook. Funny how all that knowledge of how the human mind works didn’t lead him to apologize for being such a dick.
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5 boys from my grade are dead. (Graduated high school in '95, we’re all ~42ish now.) Cancer at 23, suicide at about the same age, sleeping pill overdose, two others for reasons unknown to me (but one of those two died on a Christmas Day, which seems ominous).
My high school crush now has an account at a swingers’ hook-up website and looks significantly less chirpy than she used to, to put it mildly.
The guy who tried to bribe me out of turning down a position as School Captain (student president, basically) runs his own solar electricity co. and was on the local council for a couple years.
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Something along those lines came out when a parochial school buddy and I got together some years back. Eventually we turned to the subject of what-ever-happened-to and – specifically – one particular girl, a classmate, who lived across the street from me. Starting in the 5th grade, and all the way through the 8th grade, she was aloof. Even snobby; that was the consensus. My school buddy never left the neighborhood, and seemed to be plugged into the goings on. That’s when I learned that the girl was being sexually molested by her father during her time in parochial school. My mother knew her family back then. When I told her the story, she said she had always thought that there was something odd about the father.
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Some 10 years back I tried to reconnect with a friend of mine that I had been thinking about. We weren’t super close but he was a cool dude that I really enjoyed hanging out with. I tried to friend him on Facebook but he never accepted.
I then friended a common acquaintance who didn’t remember me - I explained that I was Mike’s friend and the three of us had hung out a few times back in the day. He still didn’t remember me but he said, “you know Mike died a couple years ago, right?”
Shocked, I came to find he died suddenly from a ruptured brain aneurysm during finals week at his final year of college. He was only 24. That one still haunts me - he was a really cool dude and super talented artist that I have no doubt would have gone on to do great things.
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Was thinking the same, a metal detector would find it asap, but also maybe it was best to both leave the tin in the past and the future, where pete’s story could be for ever innocent…
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Obligatory is the Connells’ song, “'74-'75” now with a 2015 update of where they are now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6l3Lh2cb_g
One of my childhood friends sent me a friend request on Facebook a few years ago. I use Facebook infrequently and never send out friend requests of my own, but I accepted his request and promptly forgot about it.
He had been my closest friend in junior high until his family moved away. We quickly lost touch, though our mothers didn’t. As I grew into adulthood, I’d occasionally hear updates through my mother on what was going on in his life.
A few times after making the connection online, I’d feel a slight twinge of guilt that I hadn’t reached back out to him. Still, a combination of laziness, aversion to social media, and mild introversion kept me from doing so. I’m good at responding to online conversations, but not so good at initiating them.
Roughly a year after the Facebook connection, my mother let me know that he’d had a heart attack and was in a coma. A week later, he was gone. My mild guilt over not sending him a message grew exponentially.
Months after his passing, I open Facebook Messenger for some reason, and there sits an unread message from my friend. The date is shortly after his initial friend request, almost exactly a year before his death. He’d sent me a message which I hadn’t seen, with a quick reminiscence of our junior high years. I’d missed the message, he likely thought I was actively ignoring him, and I would never get the chance to correct that assumption.
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A childhood friend – we lived in the same building for a few years – reached out to me about 10 years ago and we met up while she was in town. Her family had moved cross-country back when that used to be a much more definitive break for kids who were friends, but the wonders of the internet meant that a relative of mine dying came across her mom’s social media, who told her, and she decided it was time to try to find me after many decades.
She became a nurse because of me. She taught her daughter to stand up for others, and how to report to a responsible adult if she saw or suspected abuse, because of me.
She described a memory, seared in her brain, of crouching in the dark in our front hall closet, so scared, unable to move, and not knowing what to do. She said she decided then and there that she would grow up to be the kind of person who is able to help in such situations.
Her father, it turns out, was such a person, although back in those days, a man from another family really couldn’t do much. So what he did was get me away as much as possible, under the guise of doing things with his daughter. I went to swimming classes with her for years, for example, paid for by him. Unfortunately, by the time she got back in touch with me he had died, so I never got to thank him.
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Some writers still like to tip back some cuckoo juice AND surf the internet for inspiration. Especially late at night.
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