Google Can Change The Past
I had a bit of a shock last night, thanks to Google. I was working on my NaNoWriMo novella, and my protagonist was about to do some late-night webstalking. For verisimilitude, I decided to see what it was like, to pay attention to the process. I typed in the name of my closest friend from when I lived in Santa Rosa, a boy I was friends with from kindergarten through third grade, when we moved to Montana.
The first mention of the name was in an article from UC Berkeley's newspaper in 2000, talking about the star of a game, whose friend, the same name as my friend, had died the previous September of heart failure. I kept looking, and I found a mention in a Santa Rosa City Council meeting from 1999 of a closed session in honor of someone by the same name, a former Teen Council member who attended high school in Santa Rosa in the same time frame I was attending high school in Montana.
I kept looking, found obituary records listed from Sonoma County, but I wouldn't be able to see the details without paying money to various sites. I'm not going to write his name, because I didn't keep in touch with him or his family after moving away, so I feel that it would be wrong to write his name here. Let's just say that his name and his nickname were unique enough that I'm pretty sure this was him.
I'm not going in to the details of my emotions, because I'm still not quite sure what to think. It's weird, and sad, to think that if this is indeed my friend, that during all these years that I've occasionally thought about him and remembered the last time I saw him--a summer visit to Santa Rosa when we met to watch 3 Ninjas at the theater and wondered what he was up to--well. I even glanced down the street where he used to live a few months ago when Marina and I drove past my old school in Santa Rosa.
It's strange. I hadn't tried to contact him in all these years. I have no reason to think that his parents would remember me. For some reason, his name came to mind last night when my protagonist was searching to see if his dad--supposedly dead of cancer--was really dead. And what Google gave me instantly altered my perception of the last twenty years. It didn't alter it in an earth-shattering way. Obviously when it has been twenty years since we've talked, it wasn't going to have the same impact as it would have if I had been in contact with him all along. But still . . .
Marina asked me about him, and I told her about the games we played when we were kids: Karate Kids, Bazooka Boys--neither of which were video games, just roleplaying games we made up like Calvinball--games with Micro Machines. I remember sleepovers at his house and watching him swim for the local swim team. It brought back a rich fold of memories, like when we would sit in the car on the way to school in the morning and sing songs from Today's Special, an old Public Television show in the 80s about a department store mannequin who would come to life. I remember the Peanuts collection he bought me when I moved away.
Maybe this is a sort of immortality bestowed on us by the Internet, and Google, for better or for worse. It was just a couple of snippets that I found, here and there, but it added up to something of fundamental impact. I don't know if it means that I should have tried harder to stay in contact with him. Sometimes people just grow apart. But it's strange, and weird, and it seems to argue that it is more than just cliche that you should keep your friends close.
Will it change my life? I doubt it, although I now kind of want to go to Santa Rosa, to see if I can find some record or copy of an obituary, some more detailed encapsulation of what happened. I was tempted to email the high school that he was linked to in the City Council report, to see if I could figure out if it was indeed him. So it probably won't change my life, but I'm sad.
It's a cliche, and maybe trite, to say goodbye to someone I didn't really know anymore. Nevertheless, good-bye, N.
The first mention of the name was in an article from UC Berkeley's newspaper in 2000, talking about the star of a game, whose friend, the same name as my friend, had died the previous September of heart failure. I kept looking, and I found a mention in a Santa Rosa City Council meeting from 1999 of a closed session in honor of someone by the same name, a former Teen Council member who attended high school in Santa Rosa in the same time frame I was attending high school in Montana.
I kept looking, found obituary records listed from Sonoma County, but I wouldn't be able to see the details without paying money to various sites. I'm not going to write his name, because I didn't keep in touch with him or his family after moving away, so I feel that it would be wrong to write his name here. Let's just say that his name and his nickname were unique enough that I'm pretty sure this was him.
I'm not going in to the details of my emotions, because I'm still not quite sure what to think. It's weird, and sad, to think that if this is indeed my friend, that during all these years that I've occasionally thought about him and remembered the last time I saw him--a summer visit to Santa Rosa when we met to watch 3 Ninjas at the theater and wondered what he was up to--well. I even glanced down the street where he used to live a few months ago when Marina and I drove past my old school in Santa Rosa.
It's strange. I hadn't tried to contact him in all these years. I have no reason to think that his parents would remember me. For some reason, his name came to mind last night when my protagonist was searching to see if his dad--supposedly dead of cancer--was really dead. And what Google gave me instantly altered my perception of the last twenty years. It didn't alter it in an earth-shattering way. Obviously when it has been twenty years since we've talked, it wasn't going to have the same impact as it would have if I had been in contact with him all along. But still . . .
Marina asked me about him, and I told her about the games we played when we were kids: Karate Kids, Bazooka Boys--neither of which were video games, just roleplaying games we made up like Calvinball--games with Micro Machines. I remember sleepovers at his house and watching him swim for the local swim team. It brought back a rich fold of memories, like when we would sit in the car on the way to school in the morning and sing songs from Today's Special, an old Public Television show in the 80s about a department store mannequin who would come to life. I remember the Peanuts collection he bought me when I moved away.
Maybe this is a sort of immortality bestowed on us by the Internet, and Google, for better or for worse. It was just a couple of snippets that I found, here and there, but it added up to something of fundamental impact. I don't know if it means that I should have tried harder to stay in contact with him. Sometimes people just grow apart. But it's strange, and weird, and it seems to argue that it is more than just cliche that you should keep your friends close.
Will it change my life? I doubt it, although I now kind of want to go to Santa Rosa, to see if I can find some record or copy of an obituary, some more detailed encapsulation of what happened. I was tempted to email the high school that he was linked to in the City Council report, to see if I could figure out if it was indeed him. So it probably won't change my life, but I'm sad.
It's a cliche, and maybe trite, to say goodbye to someone I didn't really know anymore. Nevertheless, good-bye, N.
Labels: Google, lost friends, the past
posted by Devin at 10:05 PM
1 Comments:
this just breaks our hearts, Devin.
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