I Still Can Recall

In elementary school I had this one friend, he was a bit of an oddball and a happy-go-lucky character, even for elementary school. At some point in time he stopped showing up to class. I heard he moved to Africa.

That's it.

I knew the guy for couple of years before I even reached double digit years of age, but I will always know him as that one guy who up and moved to Africa. For all I know he could be back in America, if he ever left, and fighting crime as a masked superhero. I don't know, but it did make me wonder. Why do I remember him?

It's not like we were the best of friends. I am not sure how you were raised, but as for me, I was raised in the 90's. A childhood chock full of the classic Disney fluff and Nickelodeon, you know, back when Nick taught you that it was swell just being a kid and that having friends is the best-ety best thing in the whole world. That said, just about everyone and anyone in elementary without cooties was my friend. Hell, even the cootie ridden kids knew me as a nice person. (I was a very mature 3rd grader. I developed a cootie vaccine very early on.) Why do I remember him?

If you think I am going to find out why by the end of the post let me save you some time and say that I have no idea. I have asked a couple of people about this phenomenon, and it seems that everyone has a couple of those memories of people they will just always remember for some reason or another. Good, bad, terribly obscure, there is always someone. It does not matter how long I have known them. There are people I worked with all of college or high school that, come a couple of years, I am probably not even going to recognize their face. There are people I have met at bars that, for all I know, will be the last thought I think of before I leave this mortal coil.

I wonder how I will be remembered, or if I even have that kind of impact on people. I hope I do. Good, bad, or terribly obscure, deep down I hope that my relationships with people affect them as much as they affect me. I love meeting new people, and being with people I have already met. Now, two years out of college and starting a career, I hold the friends I have have now closer to my heart than ever. A good lot of them are still in college or still schooling, and even though I can hope that we will all be together forever, realistically I know that we each live our own lives. We all have things we want and, for some, just need to do in life. Whether or not that includes myself, is not up to me. I had a joke with one of my friends named Larry, I met him through a mutual friend who was his roommate at the time, that when we would say farewell after meeting with each other that it will be the last time that I see him. I have not seen him since 2008. We are still friends, I think, I just have not physically seen him. I hope he is doing well.

(I can't think of a picture to post with this. I wrote it on a plane ride.)