What happened to your high school friends?

Lost track with most of my friends, then through the power of Facebook made contact with a few of them, as well as some folk I only sorta knew.

Best friend is a real estate lawyer. We've run into each other at Starbucks a couple of times. Not the best time in world history to be a real estate anything, but he's hanging in there. Dude I knew since first grade is a trucker. Couple of housewives, a business professional or two. Most interesting is someone who I had a love/hate relationship with who now is the director of player operations for a women's basketball team in the SEC. Didn't see that coming, but good for her.

I think I found the girl on whom I had the hardcore crush lasting all of my high school days. But I haven't had the nerve to ask to be her Facebook friend. Hey, this sounds familiar! But she doesn't have any mutual friends with me, so I don't think she's wanting to be found.

 

I have stayed in pretty close touch with about a dozen of my high school classmates over the years. We graduated in 1961 so it has been a lot of years.

Three of us get together every summer for a "baseball trip" where we go to see a bunch of MLB and minor league games over a long weekend somewhere.

Another friend - - from the second grade - - and I are in touch via e-mail at least three times a week.

On a real "downer" note, the girl - - now woman - - that I took to my high school senior prom and with whom I have stayed in touch all these years because we really were "best friends" is currently in hospice care with pancreatic cancer. I know what the odds are but I still cling to the hope that I will get to send her one more birthday card seven months from now...

 

One on death row. Couple others in and out of the pokey on meth/oxycontin charges.

Bunch of teachers and coaches -- a couple of successful coaches/ballplayers.

A couple of us in the Army, though I'm the only officer.

One runs a fantasy store. Not sexual fantasies, mind you. More like Dungeons and Dragons.

 

I don't see anyone I went to HS with. I am friends on FB with a few people, but I was not all that fond of HS and have no real desire to relive it. There are a few people I would like to catch up with, but all of them seem to have been very stagnant, they live in the same town and have very little motivation to branch out.

 

I hated high school.

(Two are in the Air Force, one is a lawyer, another is still in a shitty local rock band)

 

If I may threadjack for one moments...

If it were you, which would be more embarrassing -- telling people you sold dildos, or 16-sided dice? Because I'm thinking the dildos may have more dignity attached.

Back to high school... there are a hell of a lot of attorneys from my old high school. One of my best friends was a dot com bigwig back when those still existed; he now apparently owns a couple of fondue restaurants, though I haven't heard from the guy in 20+ years. Another is a former assistant SID who now does budget analysis at the university in our hometown. Another did mapping for the Forest Service last I heard; most brilliant person I've ever known, and at this point he may well be halfway to becoming the Unabomber. I haven't seen his in 20 years, and his family would lose touch with him for months or years at a time.

I am spectacularly bad at keeping in touch with people. Thank God for Facebook.

 

until the last half of the third sentence, we were exactly the same. They all live back near home, I don't. And I don't go home much. And they don't travel halfway across the country. Nothing wrong with any of it.

 

I've lost contact with the overwhelming majority of my high school friends.

However, a couple of them are on my Facebook friends list, including one I've written about previously.

The interesting thing is that I've reconnected with someone I knew in middle school. We weren't great friends back then, but we've become good friends now. She's married and has a couple of kids. She also does a day care business.

 

Timely thread for me.

I'm taking my family home for the first time in more than five years later this month. Most of my friends and family have never seen my three year old, or my six year old since she was months old.
I have contacted two of my childhood friends and they're coming out to visit at the cottage we're renting.
My best friend, however, hasn't replied to an e-mail I sent three weeks ago inviting him out. We haven't spoken since he acted like a complete dink as best man at my wedding. He groped my wife's (female) boss and in front of my new in-laws (who already thought their daughter was marrying 'down') tried to fight both my older and very large brothers, whom he's known all his life and who would have destroyed him if they had not declined. No one told me prior to the wedding that he had become an alcoholic and prescription drug abuser. (I hadn't seen him in a couple of years).
He's never apologized. If he doesn't remember the evening my brother to whom he's also close would have undoubtedly told him what happened. It was that brother who saw my friends' hands in action that night and tried discreetly to get him into a taxi before he could do more damage.
Since that time I've become father to two little girls and my wife went through breast cancer. I never heard from him in relation to any of those matters. His lovely wife sent my wife a card and later a Christmas letter in which she tried politely to find out what happened to our friendship. She had already gone back to the hotel with their four little boys the night of the reception and never saw a thing. Obviously no one has ever told her what he did.
In truth, I don't really want to see him because the guy I last saw was an asshole. I don't want my kids to be around him. I don't either.
Yes, life's too short to hold a grudge. But I've only got a week there and don't want to waste a moment with someone I really don't want to see.
That's my story about a high school friend.

 

Not a fucking clue. I've scoured Facebook and found one girl that was in my graduating class. Followed her friends six ways to Kevin Bacon, and they go back to a few others who were in different graduating classes at my school but nobody else in my class.

I'd probably be the second in my class on Facebook if I'd just get off my duff and register.

I did find (without help from Facebook) that one friend of mine from school is in Lafayette, La. and another is driving dirt race cars here and there across the Mid-South. Another is in Hawaii.

 

One guy is in the NFL. Another raises money for Obama. A couple of guys are bouncing around, scratching out a living and coaching high school football. One guy is a scientist at Duke, and another is in advertising in NYC.
I'd be interested to know what happened with the majority of my high school class. We were the first group to go all the way through a magnet high school that had a lot of funding (600 computers in 1997) and attracted a lot of the elite minds in the county. We had something like eight or nine people get into Duke, and I graduated 169th or something like that in my class with a 3.6 GPA. An enterprising education writer at the semi-metro could probably write a nice story on how that class is doing, eight years later. Alas, they've probably gotten rid of all the education writers and resorted to running kids' drawings to fill space.

 

I guess the most famous of my high school friends is Charlie Casserly, former GM of Skins and Texans.

A whole bunch are lawyers, all still in the area where we grew up. In fact, according to a friend of mine who is a lawyer and now partner with a guy I went to school with " You guys (alums of my HS) run the whole County."