Had the pleasure of meeting up with my friend Anthony from high school yesterday. It’d been almost 16 years since we’d last met… in other words we’re almost (and in fact he is) twice as old now as when we last saw each other. Understandably we had had a fair bit of catching up to do.

Neither of us reminisced much about the past; though I think it’s fair to say that although those years of our lives were mostly positive, we’d separately spent enough time reflecting upon them that we were content to not spend much more time rehashing our high school experience.

It’s tremendously comforting to see how our friends have grown, changed, and for the most part done reasonably well for themselves. It’s a somewhat stark reminder of the passage of time, the march of the years, but at least for me it’s a also a reminder of how far I’ve come over those years.

After high school Anthony and I were the ones in our class who set out furthest from the Saguenay Region where we’d grown up, and consequently the ones who had littlest contact with our former classmates. Since many of the latter have since moved to the Montreal area, and since I’ve returned there numerous times over the years, I suppose my own isolation is less excusable… Nevertheless, until Facebook came along I had only rare tidbits of news of my old friends’ lives, so now that I’m once again in touch with details of their daily lives it’s almost as if they’d long ago disappeared into obscurity and reemerged years later, wholly changed.

It was good to have a chance to fill in a bit of those intervening years, good to finally see how we got from there and then to here and now.