Scarlett Letters

I joined Facebook long after it became a Thing, and only after being shamed into it by a coworker. Within the space of 24 hours, I had over 300 friends. Said coworker was blown away and asked how it had happened, given my reluctance to join. "Life," I said. "A long career," I said. "Lots of friends," I said. With time and the peculiarities of the internets, that figure has settled at around 950. I'd say that I know in person--or at least am personally acquainted with--at least 90% of those people. The other 10% are friends of friends whom I've gotten to know online. Though that number is high, I'm actually pretty careful about who I accept as "friends" on Facebook, and I do occasionally cull the list when it becomes clear that someone either isn't really very friendly or asked me to be friends for some reason that turned out not to be genuine or appropriate or disappointing.

One of the weirdnesses of Facebook--some would say it's a blessing, but given my experience, it's just been weird--is reconnecting with people from as far back as elementary school. My earliest best friend--from the low single digits--turned up, and she's as sweet as I could have hoped for: smart and funny and someone I'm glad to call friend again. Someone who was nothing but mean to me in high school turned up asking to be friends--and I decided I was going to be so nice to him that he was going to regret his behavior . . . and he did! He very seriously apologized to me, and now I'm "hon" and we joke pretty regularly.

Among the people with whom I've reconnected are friends from high school that I knew marginally well, with whom I shared membership in drama club and that kind of thing. I got together with a small group of them when I visited Long Island in 2011, like a mini-high school reunion. Among them was SSK who, as it turned out, had become a family doctor and something of a local rock star as a result. She was lovely, bubbly, funny. And we kept in touch afterwards, mostly in the casual way one does on Facebook. At the time, I didn't know it, but she'd just been diagnosed with cancer. Pictures of her with a scarf around her head started showing up online. More recently, her local friends ran a campaign to get Paul McCartney to sing happy birthday to her. The campaign failed, but a number of us stepped up to do it instead (including me). News came about a week ago that she'd gone into hospice.

This morning word came that she died at 3 AM. :: sigh ::

I'm glad that we'd reconnected, even in the way one does on Facebook, caring just enough to check in online, but maybe not enough to make a phone call given the casual nature of the connection. It was OK; it was OK with both of us. I'm glad I made the birthday video for her; she knew I was thinking of her. This is what we can do, at minimum. I know I couldn't have done more at such a physical and emotional remove. I even know that it might not have been appropriate to do more, all things considered. But I think about it.

In a conversation on Monday evening, I mentioned to a friend that I was feeling the press of time. It's always at times like this that said pressure becomes more intense. We ask ourselves questions about what we're doing with our lives, are we making a difference, have we been good family members, good friends. The answer is that we do the best we can do. And if we don't feel like our best is good enough we strive to do better--or whatever it is we think is better.

One day at a time.