Staying In Touch

When I was a teenager I was a letter writer. I kept in touch with friends as we all moved throughout life. They would write letters to me. I would write letters back to them. We kept up with each others crushes, schools, thoughts and dreams this way. This was all before the internet. Well before the internet.

Years ago, when I was a teenager in fact, I received a book of poetry from my dad. I would sit and sift through my book for hours at a time reading various poems. Some were poems my father introduced me to like The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service or The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Others I found on my own. One of my favorites is Around The Corner by Charles Hanson Towne.

Around The Corner
by Charles Hanson Towne

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end;
Yet days go by, and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone,
And I never see my old friend's face,
For Life is a swift and terrible race.
He knows I like him just as well
As in the days when I rang his bell
And he rang mine.
We were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men;
Tired with playing a foolish game,
Tired with trying to make a name.
"To-morrow," I say, "I will call on Jim,
Just to show that I'm thinknig of him."
But to-morrow comes- and to-morrow goes,
And the distance between us grows and grows.

Around the corner!- yet miles away...
"Here's a telegram, sir,"
"Jim dies to-day."

And that's what we get, and deserve in the end'
Around the corner, a vanished friend.

I no longer write letters. In college I was introduced to email. It seemed like a wonderfully efficient way to keep in touch. Instead of weeks of turn around time on letters, it would be daily! Marvelous! I could keep in touch with friends on an up-to-the-minute basis. Only we didn't. sure we'd dash off a quick email here and there. Or send some humorous email that was forwarded to us, but never anything of substance.

Along came cell phones and the ability to program an endless list of phone numbers. Perfect! I can call my friends from anywhere! I'd always have their numbers at my finger tips. No more losing numbers and keeping an address book. Technology is brilliant! Or it would be if I ever scrolled to that number and hit that little green button that makes the phone call that number. But I don't.

It's not that I don't think of them. Quite the contrary, I think of these friends often, but I still don't write. I still don't call. Just like the poem, it's always on the list for tomorrow. Only if I'm honest I know that that tomorrow won't be the day after today. Or the day after that one.

I keep up with the lives of people I've never met before, on their blogs or various message boards I post to, but I don't keep in touch with some of my childhood friends. Why is that? It's simple really, blogs or message boards are convenient. I'm already sitting at my computer doing other things. It takes no energy to read about someone else's life. I can read those at midnight or whatever other time is convenient. But writing an email of substance takes work (kind of like crafting this post!) and time and energy.

Will I turn over a new leaf? Probably not. Will I still think of them? Yep. Does the thought count in friendship over a distance? I sure as hell hope so.