I found a close childhood friend on the internet recently. I didn't contact him, just looked him up. As a child he was outdoorsy, active, squared away (for a child), whereas I was bookish, lazy and daydreamy. We grew apart in our early teens, & I only heard news of him sporadically after that. He became a Third World traveller, practicing total immersion in other cultures, a practice that I admired but never quite had the nerve to attempt. In the meantime, I plodded on with a by-comparison (it seemed to me at the time) under-achieving career in a humble profession.
Time did its thing. I rose in the ranks. I married & started a family. At middle age, I can sleep at night and feel that I can look everyone I've had dealings with in the face, with only minor pleadings of immaturity or passing @#!*% . With every passing year I linger more over my blessings, which are numerous and precious.
He, OTOH, is now a natural health quack. There's a video on YouTube, of him pitching his services. It's full of the upbeat flummery and soothing lies typical of that ilk. Apparently he and his wife--who is in the same business--once had a website but in these hard times it expired and they went with a Blogspot site instead, which just screams "fly by night". (No offense to my hosts!) I could never live such a lie. I don't expect I will ever contact him, nor allow him near me and my family in the unlikely event he ever contact me. I feel superior to him in every respect that I previously felt him to be superior to me. Idle, unnecessary thoughts, to be sure. But, it's a funny old world, sometimes.
