{"id":360,"date":"2007-06-17T00:00:04","date_gmt":"2007-06-17T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=360"},"modified":"2026-01-01T21:22:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T03:22:35","slug":"entry-119","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=360","title":{"rendered":"Old Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As promised, I’ll take a few lines and talk about what made me so happy<\/a> a week ago Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Take a journey with me in the WABAC machine<\/a> to a time before there was Internet in people’s homes… a time when in order to get our online fix from home, most of us had to point our modems either to a locally-run dial-up BBS or to subscribe to a proprietary online service. About my senior year or so of high school, my Mom bought a surplus PC that came with a modem and the software to connect to one of those services, called Prodigy<\/a>. I somehow ended up talking her into letting me sign up, and probably several times a night, I used to uncoil a 25-foot phone cord to the nearest jack and dial in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being from a very rural area my whole life at that point, I loved being able to meet and trade messages with kids in other parts of the country. I even had a map on my wall for a while with a push-pin for each of my new pen-pals. One that I became especially close to was named Catherine and lived out on the west coast. Since Prodigy’s mail facility had limits on how much you could write, we ended up trading a lot of snail mail. I shudder to think how many trees we killed sending letters back and forth. At some point, we both ended up dropping the service, and I went off to college. We kept trading mail, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a lot of ways, Catherine and I at the time lived almost in different worlds… geographically, culturally, and to a large extent ideologically. I was learning to “stretch”, so to speak, but it was a very slow process. One day Catherine sent me a letter at a pretty vulnerable time in her life that in effect asked me to step outside of my comfort zone. In my defense, it was a pretty big step for me, but I dropped the ball pretty seriously. I was scared, and I planted my feet, to continue the metaphor. I said some pretty nasty things, and she felt very betrayed. Our friendship stopped abruptly and bitterly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some years later she emailed me offering an olive branch. By that point, all my rancor over the situation was gone, but I wasn’t ready to admit I’d been wrong. I was polite, and we traded a couple of emails, but it was a shell of the former friendship. The emails dropped off pretty quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those close to me realize that I’ve been big on introspection and self-understanding the last few years. I’ve cleared a lot of cobwebs and learned a lot about myself. I ain’t perfect, and I’m never going to be, but I like to think I’m improving in a lot of ways. A couple of weeks ago, my mind drifted back to a friendship I had long considered lost. I realized I was finally in a place to let go of a lot of the crap that I had put in the way so many years before. I figured I was too late to salvage anything, and I really didn’t know if there was anything to<\/em> salvage. I decided to give it a try, though. With some creative use of Google and other resources, I managed to find an email address for Catherine. I sent the email on a Thursday night and then figured I was going to be sitting on my hands for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next morning, a very surprised Catherine sent a quick message (bless you!) saying that she would indeed like to try catching up. It made my day in a way that I felt I had to post about. \ud83d\ude42 She and I have been catching up for about a week now. Like I said, it’s very much still a story in progress. We’ve both changed a lot over the years, but we’re both having a lot of fun filling in the gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So… now you know about the mysterious “Cat” who commented on my last post. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As promised, I’ll take a few lines and talk about what made me so happy a week ago Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-life-eventsnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1796,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions\/1796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}