out of the blue which means down from the sky of which there is none in my computer despite its funky blue(berry) shell, i find electronic communication from a former student. class of '84. mount carmel high school. houston texas. former student ... sounds so creepy to be known by a lack. he's got a name. it's lawrence.

i'd forgotten - he had to remind me - that i've already used his name in this space ... and that mention, in fact, brought about the reconnection. it seems lawrence ran into an equally old friend - john - who then plugged his name into google or something and came up with my obscure reference to a memory involving lawrence. so john told lawrence and lawrence tells me.

and now here he is almost twenty years later. and here i am. happy to meet him again. this is unnatural... but not unwelcome. in the natural course of events on this billiard table life we would have met, known each other for awhile, and parted.... end of tale. this is certainly the nature of most student-teacher connections, barring the occasional class reunion or even rarer chance re-encounter....

(especially given my tendency to lose contact. if you know me, you know about that. my only possible justification is that i'm not a moving target - that if you want to find me odds are good that i'll be fairly close to the last place you saw me - i tend to stay where i'm plopped)

but these chance reconnections are not rare any more. this machine does it daily. i have had several. some very pleasant, others not so. one or two very painful, in fact. i guess it's part of the price we pay. i'm hoping for the best with this most recent... almost twenty years ago lawrence always made me smile. while adhering to all requisite legally and ethically mandated student-teacher proprieties, we (and a small cohort) found ourselves comrades in music - a crew of ramonified new wave oddballs, on the adolescent fringes of houston's shitkicking urban plowboy turf (try as i might, never could master that cotton-eyed joe or that fiendishly simple old two-step - lacked the boots, i guess).

another matter for ponderation: look how quickly the search turned up my tiny reference to lawrence in an utterly insignificant post in a thoroughly miniscule back room of the internet - this journal. nothing out here is private. though it can seem awful lonely. the spyders from google and who-all never sleep. each crumby bit is as worthless or valuable as the next. watch out.

i was teasing dominic at dinner tonight - who knows who's out there typing away to the universe all about brother dom? saying what wonderful creepy embarassing true false or impossible things about him? i guess i can know... if i search it.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Arthur Schopenhauer