This week-end was to be a productive one. I had places to go and people to do. Err... things to do. In particular, things around the house. I had a light bulb to change, a speaker to fix, a minivan to get running again,... The list of things in the job jar was growing. Included in that list was the chore of emptying my old computer. We got a new computer three years ago and we never transferred any of the movies/music/pictures/office documents/etc. over to our new system. In hindsight, this was good because we had a hard drive crash about a year ago that would have wiped it all out. But we wanted to set the old system up for the kids, so it was time to get started.
There were some early pictures of the girls, some pictures of a very pregnant Rhonda, some music that I forgot I had, and a few things that should have been cleaned up years ago. Once anything and everything of any value on the hard drive was transferred over I realized that my job wasn't done. I had about a dozen or so 3.5" Floppy diskettes (Yes, you read that right) with stuff on it that I had to get things off of. Since my old system was the last system that I would probably have with a disk drive in it, I thought it best to do it now and get it done. I seemed to remember saving goofy emails and funny things that I came across in my early years of web surfing. But I soon realized that I had found something more important that. It was my "virtual shoe box".
These diskettes contained memories of the period of my life between my two big relationships, with a little overlapping. What should have taken about 15 minutes to simply transfer took over an hour. Things that were erased from my memory suddenly came flooding back as I poured over the disks one by one. The first disc had pictures of a girl that I had met over the web years ago. Her name was Theresa. She lived in Ohio. She was married with two boys. I had forgotten how cute she was until the pictures surfaced. We never had an online affair or anything like that. We were company for each other. She used to tell me that she and her hubby didn't talk much. We used to chat for hours until one day she just stopped coming online. I never did find out what happened to her.
Then there was April, a full of life, hockey-loving Texas girl that had a huge crush on Boston Bruins forward Joe Thornton (now on San Jose). I found a few pictures of her on a different disc. She was fun to chat with. We lost touch years back and it had been a long time since I had thought of her. I tended to socialize online a lot then, perhaps more so than I do now. Between a full-time job and my MBA studies, I didn't get out much.
I found pictures of the waitresses at the local Hooters washing my car, as a couple of buddies and myself went for their annual charity car wash. My car looked worse after the wash than before it but it didn't matter. We all know it wasn't about the wash itself anyways. I found a picture of the team I played for in the Western Canadian Ball Hockey Championships, the first and only time I played in the tournament. We lost all three games, but fought hard in all of them. I found some of my old MBA coursework. I opened up some of it just to see if I could still follow what I did. Damn. It's been so long that I forgot how good I was. I used to be able to make Excel sing. I'm not sure I could do anyhting that intense now. I thought about some of the good people I had shared that experience with, most of which I've lost touch with years ago.
And I found pictures of Baba, my Mom's mom and the only Grand-parent I ever really knew. The pics were of her on her 90th birthday. She was already pretty blind and her memory was starting to fade, but she always had a smile for us. She had passed away before the girls were born. She had lived a good life. It had been a while since I had thought of her too.
I wasn't prepared for all of the feelings to come back. It caught me by surprise. I started to feel sad about all of the good people that I've lost touch with over the years, as that seemed to be the one common thread. If life is the sum of our relationships, then I think I'm a "C" student at best. I'm not even sure where I'm going with this, how I'm going to end it, or why I wrote it in the first place. I felt compelled, as if writing it might help me to sort things out. Maybe I was just always too busy to keep in touch. Maybe they were too. Maybe in the long run those fleeting relationships didn't mean that much to me. Or them. Maybe. I don't know. I need to think about this one.
