FRIENDSHIPS AND TIME TRAVEL
I had a lot of time to think about things as I stared out of the train window, chin cradled in the palm of my hand, mesmerized by the blur of the landscape rushing by, as I headed for Paris. Time and space and friendships. How much has changed since the last time I saw this friend I was off to meet. 30 years! My mind flew back to those days of long-distance friendships when we counted the days and weeks we would next climb on an old Greyhound bus and make the long trip for a weekend visit, or those telephone calls, few and far between, spent gossiping and giggling as only high school girls can do. I grew up at the beginning of the Space Age right smack on Florida’s Space Coast. We watched men head off into space, men walk on the moon. But the changes that I’ve seen, changes that our worldly, technically-savvy kids take for granted as much as eating and drinking, have also changed the substance of our friendships in ways that I had never even dreamed of back in those days and which still leave me stunned and amazed. Is it any wonder that I find this invention, these advances so much more amazing than even walking on the moon. We are over the stars!
30 years ago, that gangly, awkward girl that I was would never have dreamed that I could be face to face with someone, chatting away to our hearts content with just a click of a button or two. How could we have imagined that friendships could and would be made simply and easily through a lap-sized box that could be folded closed and tucked under one arm? To think that I am off to Paris on this high-speed train to see a friend with whom I had lost contact for so many long years yet found again thanks to this strange, fascinating, magical technology! So many friends from so long ago are now sitting across the table from me, day in and day out each time I turn on my computer. I have reconnected with so many that I would never have spoken to again, old friends that I never would have imagined simply bumping to on the street.
And new friends. Wow! That girl that I was, running barefoot on the hot Florida pavement, biking to school and wishing she was popular, well, if she had only known. That girl that I was sitting on the front lawn eating peanut butter sandwiches and potato chips whose only chance to travel and discover worlds outside of her simple, small town existence was through the pages of a book, traveling to farms and green pastures, across oceans and continents, if she had just bottled her impatience and bided her time. She never dreamed that one day she could have it all at her fingertips.
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