A few days ago in Denver, my brother and I had dinner with Christina, a childhood friend we had not seen in 23 years. The last time the three of us occupied the same room, Tyler was dirtying diapers and I believed my Baby Katie doll was capable of the rational thought I was not.
This reunion was made possible because today’s social media doesn’t make it weird or creepy. Thanks for that Facebook. In a age where people are meeting up with strangers based on their ability to like their face and push the heart button on Tinder, sending a childhood friend an FB missive that you are traveling through her town is pretty standard fare.
Social media is being used for far riskier endeavors I’m told. Back in the day, to send and destroy a dick pic, a person would have had to develop the DP in a dark room, seal it in an envelope, attach postage, go to the post office, mail it, wait until the recipient had seen it, break into the recipient’s home, grab the photo from his/her hands and set the pic aflame. Nowadays the kids, according to a reliable 17-year-old sibling of mine, have an app they use to send and destroy DPs at the touch of button.
Still, I had to be careful. My most vivid memory of Christina was when she was four years old trying to convince me to pierce my ears. Her rational was simple: she had had her ears pierced. Her methods were, even to my four year old understandings, questionable. The plan was to stick her earrings through my ears. I argued that this would make me bleed. She countered that her piercing, undertaken by someone who was presumably not a child, had been painless. Perhaps it was this experience that led me to shy away from piercing as an adult? One never knows.
Thankfully, Christina has moved on from her desire that I pierce my ears. Nowadays she’s piercing photos, doing what I believed would be called crocheting them. She spends days stitching patterns around a single image, often an old photo. The Conjure Movement, (IG: @conjuremovement) is her appropriate name for it. I’m not just saying this because she used to let me feed my orange peels to her sheep, the results are noteworthy. She conjures up something nostalgic and wistful from those photos, bringing novelty to what is anchored in the past. That it takes an absurd amount of time pull-off, is probably the reason no one else is doing it.
We all met up at the end of Christina’s second job, Denver’s The Kitchen, whose deliciousness is worthy of
more than this casual mention. She brought a binding of her artwork and we passed these around the table. Briefly, everyone told the three drink abridgment story of their life.
When I think back as far as I remember I see simple settings in Montana from which bubble ephemeral words and impressions. I remember blue mountains rising on the horizon. Having seen these mountains as an adult, I can tell you they are not blue, but in my memory their blue is as marked as the sky’s. I remember holding onto a red gummy bear. I remember a laundry basket where our children’s books were kept. When I ate an ice cream cone, I used to make believe that two men who lived in my stomach used the pieces to build playground equipment. I remember feeding our big red dog, Sandy, a treat. I recall being carried on my mother’s back along trails in Glacier National Park. My dad’s friend Scott looks into a deep glacial pool filled with wishful change and says something like, “Imagine how great it would be to get down there and get all that change.” My dad laughs and says something about how freezing that endeavor would be and there this wisp of a memory disperses.
Dinner marched toward goodbyes and the satisfying regret that the night had ended prematurely. That with every turn everyone, near and removed in the world, scurries towards their future is fairly self-evident, but that whole night this realization hit me with the glint of an ah-ha moment.
Though I remember little specific, I remember that Christina was my friend. The first one I was aware of having. I can still conjure up a feeling of pride I felt at the fact of our friendship in the abstract. Any day where I had been informed by mom that we’d be playing together, the outcome was preordained: it would be a mar-velous day.
I remember wearing a blue windbreaker and a wire fence where I would put my hands through a rectangular opening and the spark of elation that erupted when one of Christina’s sheep ate an orange peel from my hand.
Sometimes I imagine that the past still dances on in some transcendent somewhere. Even though it likely only exists in our dustier-with-time minds, it’s a comfort that if I think back as far as I can I remember I learned that a friend was someone who made you feel happy, and at the same time cause rabble rousing mischief with.
It’s good to be able to check in with your most distant past. I’m glad that though Christina and I once got a talking to for rolling in irresistible mud puddles, that today she appears an adult who is happy and confident with the path she’s on. And yes Facebook and your friends, it is delightful to that our current age of connectivity allows for this sort of checking in on the past’s present. All DPs aside, keep up the good work social media.
