100th Post. Hooray.

Every so often, I look up old childhood friends on Facebook and Myspace, just to see what they're up to. Today I searched for one of my neighbors, one who I haven't seen in six or seven years now. She moved out when I was in third or fourth grade, but would come back to visit her grandparents fairly often. At some point in ninth or tenth grade, I know that she got pregnant, married, and moved to Texas. And she's my age...two kids (that got taken away because she was doing drugs), two marriages, and she is in PA now, with another baby on the way, trying to work her way towards getting her two daughters back. Her daughters are adorable--I remember meeting them back in high school when they were both just toddlers.

But I think the most powerful thing I got from seeing her profile was the memory of a conversation we had during her last visit before she went to jail. She said that just spending time with me again, being in a normal environment, allowed her to forget about all the bad things that had happened to her over the past eight years. She told me that she wished me the best of luck in life, and said that she would always be rooting for me to do big things...the type of things that she was never able and will never be able to do.

I'm not sure that there's a point or moral lesson in that story. But I hope somehow she knows that I'm thinking about her.