Hello Again, Old Friends!

This is one of my favorite photos from growing up... This was taken at the MORP dance... We were all sophomores in high school at the time... MORP is PROM spelled backwards, so everything was done backwards from prom... You came alone, instead of with a date, and you dressed like idiots, instead of renting a tux... It was a total blast...

The guy in the pink shirt is Jackson, although I know him as Jay... He and I were inseparable in the small town in the Pacific Northwest where we grew up... We played football together... We ran track together... We were in band together... We were in several classes together... We hung out in school together... We hung out after school together... We wore the ugliest neckties we could find over t-shirts and completed the ensemble with Vans or Chuck Taylors... We were in Boy Scouts together, worked together at a Boy Scout Camp, and went on countless campouts and 50-milers with our Troop together... We liked the same music, we liked the same kind of pizza (ham and pineapple!), and only a couple times did we like the same girl... In the vast majority of my pictures from that time period, Jay is right next to me... Jay was really, really, REALLY small when we were growing up (he weighed 67 lbs. in 8th grade, if I remember correctly), and I was a dork, so we also watched each others' backs a lot in school...sometimes more successfully than others... About the only thing we didn't do together was wrestle... Jay competed quite well on the wrestling team, while I could never muster up an interest in the sport...

The guy on the far right, doing some sort of meditation pose, is Shekar... I went to school with Shekar from elementary school all the way up to the middle of high school... We played football together... He lived just a few blocks away from me, and he was in the same Boy Scout Troop as Jay and I were...so he was on all those campouts and 50-milers, too... He would give me rides home from the Troop Meetings in his VW Rabbit... Shekar was all legs and feet growing up, and he was easily the most uncoordinated clutz I have ever known... I was with him when we were all playing at recess in elementary school, and Shekar fell and hit his knee on a sprinkler head... Split his knee open to the bone... It was pretty darn gross for a kid our age... He was constantly tripping over stuff, knocking stuff over, and generally being a clutz... And he was a schemer... We'd walk to school together in elementary school, and I wanted a new lunchbox... By fourth grade, I didn't think my Emergency 51 lunchbox was as cool as I thought it was in kindergarten... Shekar said that if I beat the hell out of my lunchbox, my parents would have to buy me a new one... So I beat that thing on every rock, curb, and tree I could find (lunchboxes were metal back in those days)...but all my dad would do was hammer out most of the dents, fix the hinges with wire, and rig up some sort of replacement latch... I never did get a new lunchbox... I carried that damn thing to school every day forever...

I'm the one in the back in the orange shirt... I still have that orange shirt... I think I also still have that fake leather thing with fake studs in it that's on my forearm...

I moved away in between my sophomore and junior years in high school--just a couple months after that photo was taken, actually--and before long, I lost track of everyone I had grown up with, including Jay and Shekar... The years passed and, regretting that I had lost track of everyone, I tried doing some internet searches... Never could find anything on these guys...

Then, this past winter, the Mrs. twisted my arm into setting up a Facebook page... I was grumbling about how stupid it was, but she finally mentioned the possibility that I could find old friends through Facebook... The light bulb came on above my head...

I set up my page, and in a matter of minutes, I found Jay... The Mrs. thought I was having a heart attack, the way I was yelling in excitement when Jay accepted me as a Facebook friend, and we had our first contact with each other in over two decades...

Minutes after that, I found Shekar...

As days and weeks went on, I found more and more of my classmates from both high schools I attended... Last I checked, I had found almost 60 people who I went to school with in the Pacific Northwest... Over the past few months, Jay and I have kept in contact over Facebook, catching each other up on our life paths (which were incredibly similar, by the way)... About a month ago, Jay--who is an avid baseball fan--sent me a message that he was treating himself to a special birthday present... He was coming out the Midwest to attend a few major league and minor league baseball games... He was flying into Indianapolis...

Yesterday, there was a reunion that was 23 years in the making...

The guy on the left is Jackson... That little tiny guy is now taller than I am... He owns four successful businesses in Oregon... And he coaches high school wrestling...

The guy in the middle is Shekar... That clutz is now a surgeon...a SURGEON!...and a rather successful one at that... He was the first doctor around here to use some sort of innovative surgical techniques... Oh, and he practices in Indianapolis... Same city I live in... What a small little world it is...

After dinner, Shekar had to head home to pack for an out-of-town trip the next day, but Jay and I took a two-hour road trip to Fort Wayne to watch the minor league Fort Wayne TinCaps play in their inaugural homestand at their brand spankin' new ballpark... (Really nice ballpark, by the way!) Two hours up, two hours at the game, and two hours back to my house, we talked about our families, we talked more about what we've been doing for the past 23 years, we shared memories of growing up, Jay filled me in on the current goings-on of former classmates, and it was just like old times...

We had breakfast this morning, and then he hit the road to watch the Minnesota Twins battle the Cleveland Indians at Jacobs Field in Ohio... He'll catch a few more games in Ohio this weekend, and then swing back over to my house Sunday evening before flying home early Monday morning...

We're not waiting another 23 years to see each other again, I know that for sure...