Hooray! I found a lost friend. Well, I suppose that technically she wasn’t lost. I just lost contact with her. She was my roommate for a semester in college. Actually, we did a semester away from college … we came down to Washington, DC to study foreign policy at American University and roomed together. We didn’t have two sous in our combined pockets and had more fun than I think is legal. And the funny thing is that it was legal fun. She took me to my first reggae party (before reggae was popular) and I learned, for an evening, how to be in the minority.

I hadn’t thought about her in a long time. Then suddenly the other day I found myself telling one of our stories from that grand time we had together. And I found myself missing my friend, but didn’t have any way to go about finding her again.

Then yesterday the Alumni magazine from our college came in the mail. I don’t know why I continue to get that silly thing. I am NOT a good Alumna. I don’t give any money to my college. I will steadfastly refuse to send my children there because it is a bastion of conservative business. The only reason I went to this college is because I set my sights too high in the first place (the result of doting parents and grandparents and being the big frog in a small pond all my short life) and it was the only acceptance letter I received. ANYWAY … the magazine came and there was my friend’s e-mail address in her class’ notes!!! Now for the last -I won’t tell you how many- years there has never been any information about my friend in this magazine. And there it was. Just her e-mail address. POOF … like the e-mail fairy godmother had heard my wish.

I wrote to my friend. She wrote me back and she sounds just as glad to hear from me as I was to find her. We’ll see how this goes. Sometimes these old friendships work out again. They are hard tho. You know one another very well … and yet … you don’t. There are so many things that have happened -some little and some big; happiness and griefs- to each of you that you can’t even remember to tell the other and that makes it hard. So, I hope we’ll be able to make it past the memories of what we did and move on to do some other things together again. Because I have to say that alot of what makes me fun now, I learned from her back then.