Validation of life

Last night was one of the most wonderful yet strange nights of my life.  While waiting for Wayne to get home to eat the birthday dinner I did not prepare...story for another blog...I was just wandering around aimlessly on facebook and started typing in names from my past.  All of the sudden, I found Jamie Carmell...she had been one of my best friends when I was a little girl...pre-kindergarten through 5th grade.  I sent her a message to confirm it was really her and it was!  Then I found Laura Beck...another close friend...and from there it snow balled and I found websites for several of my childhood friends and the town I lived in, Glencoe Illinois....it was amazing.  It was so exciting to find them.  But what was most interesting to me was the feelings that overcame me and the absolute flood of memories that bombarded my head.  I saw Sandy Simon and immediately, I was back at her house at a birthday party that we wore costumes to for some reason.  I had gone as Oliver Twist and we were dancing to "Dizzy" in her living room...like it happened yesterday.  I saw Karen Haas and I was at her house looking at her caged Monkey...smelling so terrible listening to "Lucy in the Skies With Diamonds".  I saw Elizabeth Edwards and I went back to her house to a birthday party where her mother told me I looked just like an Afghan dog.  I was spending the night at Jamie's house playing super model with her fancy phones....cuz she was really rich! and eating bagels with cream cheese and jelly.  I was at Stephi Shaffer's house trying on each other's training bras and feeling like we were such women.  I was at Laurie Beck's house looking at the shrimp that they grew in a nasty tank in the kitchen and playing the Game of Life with her brother Bobby who was stuck in a body cast and listening to the radio with him.  I was just overcome with memories and feelings and I found myself smiling and giggling.  It was ridiculous.  Wayne and I sat up half the night looking at pictures.  I know he was bored.  Tough.  It was amazing for me.  It was like a second life that I lead had become real.  Like finding out that what you thought was a dream was reality.  I felt validated, like what I always remembered really did happen and was not just my imagination.  All of these people are a part of my life that NOBODY who I currently associate with know anything about at all so they didn't seem real to me either.  It was an awakening that I can't get enough of.  I have now wasted half of this day searching and reading and waiting for my application to be accepted so that I can be a part of the Glencoe Illinois Central School Class of 73 profile so I can really connect with the past.  Then, the fear sets in.  What if these people don't remember me.  I am sure that as I read names, there are people I should know and their names on the paper mean nothing to me.  What if I am that person....meaning nothing to anyone.  Scary, but worth the risk.  If they don't know me, I will look at their pictures and laugh at them anyway.  Bring on the past...I am ready for it.  .  I know how the past ends...it ends in now...The future is a whole different story...who knows how the future ends?