Sifting through the pages of Bink's senior yearbook created a nostalgic feeling for those final years of childhood.

While my high school experience was filled with a tentative anxiety for all things: dances, cliques, girls, and people I didn't know - which was almost everybody.

So, while it's just 4 years of your life, and mine was more uneventful than most, the scribblings on the pages of the yearbook still create a nostalgic remembrance for this small snapshot of a long life.

When opening the weathered pages of my old Buena High School class of '91 yearbook, or any of the others from 6th grade on, I'm greeted with a cornucopia of emotions.

Sometimes, I can't read the scribbles.  Sometimes, it's a sarcastic message from an old, trusted friend...

Sometimes it's a short message of goodwill from a face in a few distant memories.

And sometimes it's a message that spawns bigger, blurry memories of times gone by.

Those last and precious few years of youth.

Most people enter your life for a short while, and leave, never to be seen or heard from again.  When I think about it, it's sad.  In these cases, you never know the beautiful or sad lives old acquaintances are living.

Ever.

It's as if the are off the face of the earth.

Life is so rich with both pleasure and pain, and I'll never know how it turns out for the people writing the scribbles in my old year books, along with their faded pictures from long ago.

Most relationships end.  Most people are never to be seen again.

What would it have been like?  What could have been?

This was the second time we did this.  The first was 2 years ago.  I checked our old text thread and was shocked it had been that long.

Pretty standard these days to be blown away by the passage of time.

The trick is to slow it down.  

I'm working on that. :)

Anyway, it's funny how you never really know someone when you're 19.  On the other hand, there really isn't much to know about one another at that age... so maybe we knew each other better than I think we did.

To be acquaintances with someone at such a young age, then never see them...go through life, and then reconnect 30+ years later is a bit of a trip.

I know you.  But I don't.

I rarely if ever thought about you while I was living my life.  College.  First job.  Job changes.  Adventures and misadventures of life.  Marriage.  Kids. Experience.

And now, we pop back into each other's lives.

From the same town.  With a shared experience 3 decades ago.

It's just a trip sitting down and going back and forth and revisiting all that has happened in the last few decades.  

Why are we so surprised and shocked by it all?

Or at least, I was.

What do I expect, the guy went into a sort of "stasis" and held steady until seeing me again? 

Course not.

Human brains are weird, at least mine is. :)

Anyway, he was legitimately interested in the path my life took, especially the stories about the fishing light, and the bootstrap online entrepreneur I became.

You know, sometimes it's good for the sole and the psyche to relive the past to someone who is interested.

Take stock, once again, of where you've been, and where you have yet to go.  Even though that last part is unknown.

There's a sort of comfort it laying it all out for someone.

Even talked about all the brewing changes about to hit.  And the possibilities of what to do next.

Good guy.  I'll see him again I'm sure.