Connecting

My three-year-old son has decided that he absolutely will not sleep in his own bed - not even one hour at night while Michael and I get settled in. His list of reasons is quite long. His bed is too cold. Harper will wake him up. It's too dark, and he can't see his hands (the measure of darkness in all rooms). He doesn't like his bed. Fortunately, Michael brought back to our house with him a California king (since when is California associated with bigger? It should be a Texas king) sized bed, and we all sleep quite comfortably. I'm even dreaming again.

Monday night, I had a long dream about meeting up with a number of friends from high school, the last of whom I probably saw in 1995. I can't think of any thought or incident that contributed to this dream. A funny thing happened Tuesday. I was at a meeting with a friend, Scott Lowe, and while I was giving some information and dates to another friend, Amy Henson, Scott convinced me to sign up for a Facebook account. I was reluctant. I had ignored an invitation from Gillian to join, and I really don't need another website posting to keep up with. Scott showed me a friend's page who had over 600 friends listed on his page! Such pressure to have lots and lots of friends.

And then I did it, added my high school name and graduation year and BOOM! in five minutes found a page listing about fifteen of my high school classmates and within ten minutes I had made a friends with one of them.

This was a surprisingly exciting experience - to reconnect with and see pictures of long lost friends. It was exhilarating! I was laughing slightly hysterically as Scott drove back to my house. It was also a little scary. What if all the invitations I sent to old friends were rejected? Was my dream a premonition?

And so it is that I think about connections - our drive to connect to others, the fear of connecting, the fear of not connecting, the rejection when someone refuses a connection, the confusion when a connection is garbled - and about how people stayed connected before the Internet, the loss of connections when mail was delivered by horse and written with pen and paper and the importance of a central meeting place. I find my electronic connections and correspondences more interesting (perhaps less exhilarating - Facebook connections are like a quick high) than Facebook for they certainly have more depth. But Facebook provides an interesting international marketplace where we can run into old friends, even if it's just to give them a Facebook "poke," and connect friends from different reaches of the planet with each other.