Looking For Old Girlfriends

This may be a little shocking, I know, but I never had that many girlfriends.

I do consider myself lucky, though, that of the girls I've dated -- and I say "girls" because none of them had achieved that murky milestone in life of "womanhood" any more than I had passed through the turnstile on "manhood" -- I remember them to be smart, funny, attractive and talented.

I learned and grew and changed during each relationship, and from time to time, I find myself wondering what has become of them. I think you might feel the same curiosity; it's what drives us to reunions, it's what motivates one of my friends to look through phone books whenever he's in a hotel room in a new town. And now, I think it drives people to type names into search engines, names from their past.

When it comes to searching the Web for old acquaintances, I have a few advantages. I use Web search engines a lot, and know better than most how they work. I also have a degree in journalism, and learned more than a little about how to find people. So when I look for an old friend online, I tend to find him or her. Of course, there's one other helping factor: many of my friends are Web developers or journalists, and it's a lot easier to find those people than to find, say, a theater major who last lived in Ottawa.

Well, there are two friends I've wondered about as years have passed. Out of the blue, one contacted me, and now I'm debating whether I should look harder for the other.

I dated Karen in high school. She had curly red hair (dyed) and brilliant green eyes (contact lenses) and if my life was a movie, it would have ended with me found by police holding a smoking gun over the body of a complete stranger while she escaped off the balcony with a black velvet bag of diamonds. Not that she was evil or mean or even impolite -- just that she was dangerous, exciting, and didn't live with her parents. True, she lived with her grandma, but that was still pretty "awesome" to me in the '80s.

Karen's a little different now. She's changed her name to something completely different, and she's researching Native American spirituality, having witnessed several Sun Dances. She working on a novel, and has fought battles with the Canadian legal system that I can only shake my head at.

But the point I'm trying to make is not who she is now or what she's been up to since we broke up and parted ways. It's not about how many cats she has now or what country she'll next live in (Guyana).

The point is, she _has_ been up to something and she _is_ different now. She's not a peach-colored teenager, I'm not in high school driving my first car, and California energy crisis aside, my biggest concern isn't finding gas money and getting home before curfew.

The difficulty in learning who Zen is now is that it murks up the memories of what we were then.

She wrote me an abstract of the years I'd missed, and added this: "ps- in real life i am not this intense, actually i am rather pleasant. do you remember what i was like when you knew me?"

I remember her better than I remember me at that age. I have had years of new 'me' that obscure the earlier Travis.

And so now I'm thinking -- do I really want to find, reminisce, catch up with that other old girlfriend of mine, Sarah Dickinson? I'm confident she'd be wired and dramatic, an successful actress, full of grand ideas and rebellion, now as she was then. But what if she isn't? Or what if she is?

Nostalgia's never as good as the box it came in.

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