saying goodbye forever to ppl you've known a long time who you like

Often the worst part is seeing them for a really brief moment after a long time away, like going to the wedding reception for one of my best buddies from language school, or spotting a couple of my drinking pals from that period when they came out to Maryland on extremely short TDY assignments. You pause and think about the last time you saw them and what you said and then you realize you can't hardly remember.

In college, this other guy in the trombone section who I liked but never talked to much was graduating and it was his last night with us before setting off to greener pastures - he said "See you in the papers!" and that's since become my phrase I try to use in situations like this. It's as sincere as anything else that could possibly come out of your mouth, and at least in his case, memorable.

And there are a lot of people out there, and it's good to have some friends you stay with for decades and a bunch that you only know for a while but still touch and change your life etc., etc. Not to get too Hallmark.

It is sometimes weird to run into people; I breezed right past someone I used to hang out with a lot on the street like two weeks ago. She looked away from me and I looked away from her. There is just no reason to contact each other, even in such a close range situation because it was a time and place neither of us (me definitely, her assumably) want to revisit.

The worst ever is this: Right after I joined the air force and I was in California I got a phone call from this girl Beverly who used to eat lunch with us our senior year of high school. She was lots of fun, she shared the same bizarro sense of humor we all did and I could never tell if she had a crush on me or not. Anyway I get this phone call and she had called my parents, gotten my contact info and then rang me up. She had a baby and was married and doing the housewife thing (we were both 21 at this point). She told me that eating lunch and fooling around with our crew back in those days was like the most fun she's ever had and that she wanted to know how I was doing etc. etc. and that still sticks in my mind as one of the most depressing encounters I've ever had.

Once I did something similar by calling up the family of an old schoolmate and getting his number from his dad. Turns out he was out in the great untamed West with a firefighting crew, living in the woods and cooking stuff over an open fire and drinking a lot and shouting at the moon over a lake and stuff, doing seasonal work in between winters at the ski lodges. He told me he was having a great time and I should come out and visit. I told him I would do my best.

Basically I've learned that if you don't have the opportunity to actually visit someone and sit down and eat a meal with them at least it's really not worth it. It's much more likely you'll just wind up depressed by the end of it all. Then again, I never was great with the telephone anyway.

Anyway what Tom just posted is all very similar to what I was going to say and then deleted out of my last posts, I find out through some means or another what people or up to or what they've become and it's just very uncomfortable for me. The worst was getting in contact with my old best friend, who had totally changed. Or maybe I had totally changed. Sometimes we still send each other Christmas cards but that will go away eventually.

get rid of this I'm !

someone also once did this to me the whole finality saying goodbye thing but i thought we would keep in touch and he didn't and that was k-lame.

college years are like that though and i don't know beyond that how much things are worse coz yr. not expecting it the same way?

i guess it wz abt his acknowledgment of mortality (he had a major heart attack two years ago and has always anyway been very lucid abt and clear-eyed abt such things: he's a psychoanalyst) (i'm not sure if that follows automatically but it does in his case)

*[= an org we were both on the board of which we both stepped down from a couple of months ago]

anyway i shall miss him :(

I think that growing up military probably has skewed my view of this situation as it affects other people. As I said while chatting with some folks last night, my friends and I have always been very mobile people, and so I've gotten used to people moving around a lot and not seeing anybody for long periods of time. I did once get to hang out with a high school friend I hadn't seen in years because he was living out in Oakland for a summer internship and I was in Monterey for language school, I went up there on a weekend and crashed on his floor after we drank some really strong gin & tonics, it was a good time. I think he's still at Cornell, I should e-mail him.

Also, Dan, I don't think that's really so bad, if you find the people you've stayed in touch with to be a fulfilling group then I wouldn't get too upset about it. When do you guys want to come down and hang out in DC?

One last thing:
HAHAHAHAHA "Friendster" GAG CHOKE

O. T. M.

I moved around quite a bit growing up too. I don't know what it's like to have a friend for very long at all, especially one that actually lives in the same city as you. I think my sisters are my closest friends in that regard, though we haven't always lived near each other.

I went to a wedding reception for my first best friend ever a while back. She was my best friend until I was 11 years old! Anyway, it was weird seeing her all grown up. I hadn't met her fiancee/hubbie before. I was just there to kind of watch, say hi, and get hugs from old ladies that remembered me when I was this little.