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In the past 10 days or so, I’ve finally started using my Facebook account. Blame second grade. In second grade, I broke my arm. That’s not important, I just remember it. I “fell off” (was jumping off) a top bunk onto a beanbag. The other things I remember: watching the first space shuttle take off (a moment that gained serious poignancy in 8th grade when the 25th shuttle launch FAILed, but poignant in its own right because somebody’s parents brought a TV to school for us to watch, which was probably more exciting than the launch itself), our awesome hippie teacher being pregnant and viciously morning-sick, and same awesome hippie teacher and her husband having us out to their new house in the woods (was it a log cabin? seems like it was) and my classmate Chris L. freaking out about poison ivy.

Interesting aside: same Chris wanted to invite me to his slumber party, I don’t think it was that year, it must have been fourth grade, because there was serious parental tightrope-walking over me being the only girl at a boys’ slumber party. There was, actually, a lost-underwear incident that proved it may not have been a good idea, but I was a naive kid, so it went over my head.

It was a tiny little private Episcopalian school, so even in second grade we weren’t a huge class (though fifth grade was 7 kids, so by comparison it was probably enormous at 20 or so). But, anyway, all this came up because my relatively static facebook account first saw activity a couple of months ago when Chris found me and sent me a message about the 30th reunion of our second grade class next year. That only came up because when we graduated high school, our teacher found us and we all (at least who was left) had dinner together about a week before graduation. We’re all (somehow) 36 going on 37 now, and we all turned 7 in second grade.

And one of the themes that keeps coming back to me is: “and then the internet happened.” That’s how I found our second grade teacher (luckily not yet retired, teaching third grade in a nearby school district) this week in about 5 minutes of Googling. It was a pretty astounding moment for me, getting a response from Ms. T. a couple of hours after my search for her.

And so in the same week that that happened to me, something else happened that blew my mind in an entirely more relatable way.

B’s company holiday party was this week. He’s only been there barely 6 weeks, and it’s probably only the open plan office that made it possible for him to introduce me to most of his coworkers. They are very, very nice, and it was really cool to meet all these people that I know nothing about. And in the sea of names and faces, one of them was someone, let’s call him Jonathan Green, who I met and shook hands with and made nice-nice and that was that.

In 1993, I think, or 92 or 94, I went camping with my pledge sister M. and her guy Jon, who had been the roommate of a pledge brother of my college boyfriend. It was a kind of off-the-cuff spring break vacation, being as it was at a point when I knew about the Internet but hadn’t mentioned it to anybody. So we just went to this state park on the rumor that it was there, and it was Amistad National Park on Lake Amistad that straddled the border/Rio Grande between Del Rio, Texas, and Ciudad Acuna, Mexico. By all rights, it should have been a crappy vacation, but it was phenomenal. We got up in the mornings, M. and I would go out to the car and drive part way out of the park, where Jon would meet us after cutting through the woods to fool the homeless guys into believing he was still at the camp.

And every day, we would get up and get breakfast done, then dodge the homeless guys and drive to the border.  We’d park on the Texas side and walk over into Acuna, hang out, window-shop, have a Dos Equis in a bar, have lunch, and then come back.  On the way we’d pick up a suitcase of beer, and then rebuild the campfire while we still had light, hang out and read, and then cook dinner and start drinking around dark.  It was a goddamn blast, I can’t even tell you why, it just was.

On our first day, the first time we went into Mexico, we wandered down Acuna’s main/only street and found the cleanest looking bar that had come along.  We went in, and the bored bartender served us Coronas, and we used the relatively clean bathrooms, and then we left before the guy in the corner unholstered his Casio for the night’s entertainment.

After we’d exhausted about 5 days in Del Rio, we headed back to Denton via a weekend stop in Austin, where Jon had some friends.  In fact, Jon’s bandmates from Dallas were down for the weekend, so there was a shitload of us in this one friend’s apartment.  There was this tiny little film festival going on that weekend – you might have heard of it, it’s called South By Southwest? – and since we didn’t have anything to do and also had no money, we went to a cheap film screening at the movie theater at the Dobie dorm at the University of Texas.  It was this little cheap-ass indie film made by a local UT filmmaker.  You probably haven’t heard of it – it was called El Mariachi, by Robert Rodriguez.

And that would be enough for a good story.  We wandered into El Mariachi and saw it before anyone else did, and before Rodriguez met Tarantino, and before Antonio Banderas had anything to do with it.  Awesome.

Only:  in one of the first scenes of the movie, El Mariachi goes into a bar with a sleepy bartender before the sleepy musical entertainment with a Casio keyboard gets his ass shot into Swiss cheese.

Yeah, most of that film was shot in Acuna, and the first shoot-up was shot in our little sleepy bar on the main street.

How awesome is that?  I’ve been telling that story for years.

So, there I am, sitting at Table 3 (of 3) at my husband’s company party.  The table has declared itself the Rowdy Table already, and I figure I’m sitting in the right place, and then I glance up at the head of the table.

“Hey,” I say to B, “did you say that guy’s name is Jonathan Green?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Oh,” I say.  And then, “You have to find out where he went to college.”

My husband is no spy.  If he wants a piece of information, he asks for it.  He asked the guy sitting next to Jonathan Green, and then passes the word back to me:  my university, graduated in 1994.

“I…” I say, “think I went camping with him.”  I look at him for a few seconds.  “Yes, I’m pretty sure I did.”

“Hey, Jonathan,” B says, “you went camping with my wife!”

It got real quiet at the table for several long seconds, while Jonathan and I look at each other.  And then I pushed back from the table and met him halfway for a big hug (a hug that completely confounded Table 1).  We had the requisite catch-up conversation (which involved the phrase “and then the internet happened” on both sides), and I am still reeling from it, and from the fact that it’s really taken this long to stumble across someone I knew Back In The Day.

My 20th high school reunion is in a year and a half, so I suspect this is far from over yet.

In: Stuff | | #