A friendly voice from the past: Georgia on my mind

Recently, I got an email from Georgia D., a classmate I haven’t seen since the 1970s.  (Okay, it’s been 41 years… wow.)  She wrote to ask why I left Facebook, and said she enjoyed reading my posts there.  She hoped I was doing okay.

To be honest, I was a bit surprised she reached out to me.  I knew Georgia was on Facebook, but she very rarely posted anything.  All I seemed to know was she was married to an oil exec (I think), had a son & daughter, and lived in Texas… or Egypt? 

She got around.  But that was pretty much all I knew.

I responded, thanked her for the message and told her I left Facebook almost 2 years ago, I’d been spending too much time there.  I hoped she was good, thanks for writing.

I sat here thinking about Georgia, wondering if she shared the same memories I did.  In our senior year of high school, strangely enough, we’d become pretty good friends. 

To be completely honest, we shouldn’t have been.  Georgia was very pretty, very popular and really had her act together.  She was a majorette, a cheerleader and dated a fellow classmate who was a varsity everything and handsome as he was athletic. 

(I wasn’t exactly a nerd, but I sure wasn’t part of their set.)

But our senior year, Georgia and I were both on the Yearbook staff and began hanging out a lot together.  We had the same sense of humor.  I always found it kind of special that she was the only one in school that called me Douglas.  I don’t know why, but I liked that.

Georgia today, looking better than ever 

Georgia & I had afterschool jobs in Waynesburg (a 15 minute drive from our high school), where she worked in a small boutique while I slopped dishes at the Olde Southern Pancake & Steakhouse. 

She had a car, I didn’t.  I’d sometimes ride to work with her from school (or get a lift home), but it was never just a ride—we would sit in her car and have long conversations about school, our hopes, the future.  Those personal talks meant a lot to me. 

Our friendship gave me a feeling of real confidence, that maybe I wasn’t as big a dork as I thought I was.

I sat down to write her a letter in earnest, then stopped and asked myself:  Were we really as close as I liked to remember?  Or was I seeing those dusty memories through a pair of ‘70’s rose-tinted glasses?

And that’s when I got a follow-up email from Georgia, with the attachment below.  It’s a note I passed her in class, a hundred years ago.  I can’t believe she kept it after all these years.

Georgia wrote “Here y’go, Douglas—we used to be good friends!”

We sure were.