Despite my frequent “way back when” or “back in the days” reminiscing, I’m not one to dwell in the past.
I like to think I’m a forward-looking person, although more often than not I seem to get stuck in the current moment. However, a funny twist of events occurred to me last week that precipitate another “way back when” story.
Whether we like it or not, many of us have identities, or at least personally know of people, who are now forever trapped somewhere in the billion bytes of data floating endless throughout the Internet. There’s no way to erase it, so you either live with it or you ignore it.
I love the randomness of following a stray thought to see where it goes, so whenever the name of an old classmate flits through my memory and I have the time, I’ll type their name into Google to see where it goes.
Often it goes nowhere: either my old friends share the same name as a billion other of the world’s inhabitants, or they’ve never gone online or be involved in anything that was even recorded online.
However, last week I was looking for one name and found a website dedicated to our old high school band’s reunion back in August.
Many of us have some good high school memories, but our band was family! We practiced before classes started, we practiced during school and we practiced some more after school. And we were expected to practice at home. And yes, our teacher was a slave driver and we all loved him.
We met many challenges together and overcame our stage fright to perform concerts on many occasions and in many locations.
Thanks to the Internet, I have reconnected with people I haven’t spoken to in 35 years. And been reminded of things I haven’t thought about in just as long.
Being reminded of those days felt like a bit of a holiday - a break from the present, even if it was into the past.
It never hurts to remember how far you’ve come.
Wendy Coomber is editor of the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal