My first friend to die
The Internet is a strange place, full of everything and nothing, like an image of the tombstone of my first friend to die:
Aislinn was a friend of mine from high school. She was brilliant but never applied herself, not seeing the value of high school. She was insanely smart, articulate, funny, but would sabotage herself by coming to school high and so on. She never even took the SATs, as I recall.
When I was in college, she sort of snapped herself out of it — everyone else going off to college has that effect on a lot of folks — and proudly told me in the fall of 1989 that she was attending community college classes at Northern Virginia Community College and was planning on transfering to James Madison University for the next school year.
A week or two before Virginia Tech’s 1990 spring break, she collapsed in her parents’ kitchen, spilling milk all over the floor. It turned out she had a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball. She kept up a good attitude, and rediscovered her Catholicism in a big way.
She died that fall. Because I was always moving to a new place each year (sometimes each semester), and it was in the days before cell phones and e-mail addresses, our mutual friends couldn’t find me and tell me, I didn’t hear she had died until the spring of 1991. I remember breaking down in a movie theater when Macaulay Culkin got stung to death by bees; I hadn’t had any real release prior to then, and became a basket case in the theater. (The film was no great loss, as I recall. Slim pickings in Blacksburg back then.)
When Aislinn turned 18 following our high school graduation, I brought her multiple grocery store flower bouquets merged into one as my gift. The normally tough Aislinn sort of freaked out at this: Somehow, she had managed to go 18 years without flowers.
I like to think that, if she was alive today, Aislinn would be Queen of the World by now.
And in a completely different mode, here’s a picture of a friend of mine from high school/college, Wendy Wickham, holding up a fish:
Everything and nothing, see?
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If I hadn’t seen proof of the connective nature of Web 2.0 – this is it.
Saw this odd site on Google Analytics, checked it out and discovered it was you.
LONG time no hear from….happy to hear you are still doing well and SHOCKED that you managed to find that picture :’ )
And you are so right….the web is full of everything and nothing. Both are equally important.
Comment by Wendy — February 19, 2007 @ 13:48