ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 TAG: 9611120061
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
He makes twice my salary.
He tries out a new recipe every Monday night with his fiancee, Bonnie, an actress.
He no longer has the strawberry blond beard that was his signature in college. And after 11 years of not laying eyes on him, he looks even younger, clean-shaven, than I remember.
I am picking up all this information from my old friend, Greg, who is sitting across the table from me at a downtown Roanoke restaurant. We are talking fast, fluidly, like best friends who run into each other at Harris Teeter.
We are talking so breathlessly that the waitress, after checking on us every five minutes for a half-hour, finally prevails on us to shut up and look at the menu.
We are seeing each other again, after a series of logistical coincidences launched by an e-mail address search on the World Wide Web - a service that had previously been as useful to me as television was to Bob Dole.
My last address-book entry for Greg was in 1988. I can't make out what street he lived on in Long Beach, Calif. - a recent juice cup spill in the bottom of my purse wiped out nearly everyone between Armer and Lipski. I remember inviting him to our wedding in 1990, but it was too far away - and too expensive on his reporter's salary - for him to come.
Eventually, as with so many other old friends, the moves outpaced the address-book entries. The connection became tenuous and then, through sheer inertia, was severed.
They are the friends we leave behind. The ones we write to only at Christmas and, after awhile, not at all. The ones we replace - we have to replace - with newer friends from work, from the neighborhood, from the same area code.
I put Greg in a class with my college roommates' parents, with my old buddies from my first newspaper job, with the newly wedded couple who lived below me in my first apartment and never complained when I did high-impact aerobics on their ceiling - during the dinner hour. I thought about them fondly, but Real Life always got in the way of bridging the miles.
Until one morning a few weeks ago. For some reason, I woke up with Greg on my mind. I remembered how I'd admired his writing, how easy he was to talk to, how he could eat 6-for-$1 boxes of macaroni-and-cheese mixed with Hormel chili and Tabasco for weeks on end.
Then, I did more than moan about letting a cheerful part of my past slip away. I turned on the computer, got on the Internet, found a national directory of e-mail addresses and typed in Greg's name.
Three seconds later, I was staring at a set of letters and characters that, in an instant, would tap my old friend on the shoulder - from 3,000 miles away. My initial approach was tentative: Are you the Greg I went to college with? Write back, if so....
Within an hour, the reconnection was confirmed by a page-long letter of here's-what-I've-been-doing-for-the-last-10-years. After all my griping and moaning about how the Information Superhighway does nothing more than detour us from connecting with real people, here it was, restoring the gift of friendship.
The first day's notes were followed by a few more exchanges, followed by the announcement of a business trip Greg was taking the next week to Raleigh, followed by this note:
``Hey, Virginia's next to North Carolina!''
Greg never did excel in geography.
But he found his way to Roanoke, 10 days after my first e-mail message. And somehow, one afternoon at a downtown Roanoke restaurant more than made up for all the missed Christmas cards and phone calls I meant to make but didn't.
So chalk one up for the Web, as much as I hate to say it. I still believe it's dangerous to spend too much time browsing it at the expense of the real-live relationships in our lives.
But I think it's ironic - and very cool - that all this complex technology actually brought two friends together again in a way that probably never would have happened otherwise. Did people feel the same way about the Pony Express?
Before he left for his airplane back to San Francisco, Greg wrote down his new home address, which I promptly recorded in my brand new, juice-proof address book.
This Christmas I'll send both a card and an e-mail. Of course, it won't be as good as a visit or even a gabfest on the phone. But it will be enough to sustain a restored friendship of the non-virtual variety - one that will endure, I hope, far longer than the most state-of-the-art Web site.
Have you made new friends or reconnected with long-lost pals via the Internet? What about it do you find the most useful in your personal lives? If you have an interesting story to share, e-mail it to me at bmacyxc2roanoke.infi.net and please include your daytime telephone number in case I have questions.
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