Father's Daze

EDITOR’S NOTE: Father’s Daze columnist Emmitt B. Feldner is taking a week off, deserved or not, so we’re reprinting this past column.

I’m having something of a high school class reunion on Facebook.

Not to mention a family reunion and a college reunion, on a smaller scale, at least.

I jumped onto Facebook about eight months ago, which is probably about a year or more later than most with-it people did.

That’s my usual speed with new technology and cool things, so why should Facebook be any different.

I was, not surprisingly, about six months behind my wife in taking this latest leap into cyberspace, but then again, she’s always been much more of a social networker than me, so it’s to be expected.

Terry went to work almost as soon as she joined Facebook posting all kinds of pictures — something she’s got plenty of, trust me.

It might be that my motivation for joining Facebook was to monitor just what pictures she was posting out there in cyberspace for anyone to see.

I don’t think she’s got anything that’s particularly incriminating to me, but you never know, and I always figure it’s better to be safe than sorry — or infamous on the Internet.

I’m glad to say that, in the dozens or more photos Terry has posted on her Facebook page, there’s nothing that makes me look any worse than I do every day. Of course, it may be impossible to make me look worse than I do every day, but there’s always a chance.

I decided on a little bit of a pre-emptive strike when I set about building my Facebook page, posting some pictures of myself that it would be hard for Terry or anyone else to find worse.

For instance, there’s my fifth-grade class picture, which I labeled “Dork in Training.” Then there’s my college ID picture, from the height — or the depths, depending on your perspective — of the `70s.

Also from the unparalleled `70s was one of our wedding pictures, with me in the bright yellow tuxedo that I picked out for the wedding. That alone should have been warning enough for Terry, but apparently it wasn’t, since she went ahead and married me anyway.

There’s also my high school graduation picture. That’s the one where, if you added the right mustache, I’d look almost like Adolf Hitler.

I figured the sight of some of those pictures would scare off anyone who might be interested in contacting me through Facebook, including most of my family members, but surprisingly it didn’t work.

By this point, I’ve got 54 ‘friends’ on my Facebook page, which exceeds probably by at least 53 the number I would have guessed.

More than several dozen of them have been people I graduated from high school with, 1,000 miles away and nearly four decades ago.

More than a few of them I hadn’t seen or heard from since we all threw our caps up in the air after they handed us our diplomas back in the early days of the Nixon administration, well before anybody knew what a Watergate was.

I’ve heard from people who were cheerleaders, who were jocks, who were class clowns (I wasn’t the only one), who were hippies, and lots more.

I’ve got a wider circle of friends from high school now than I had back when I was in high school. Maybe it is true that time and distance tend to distort perceptions — either that, or they’ve all gone senile already and don’t remember what I was really like back in high school.

I’ve only been to one class reunion, our 20th, nearly two decades ago, and I think I’ve conversed with more former classmates on Facebook than I did at that event.

I’ve gone from coast-to-coast with classmates/Facebook friends, from Maine to California and from Florida to Ohio, and points in between.

Fortunately, I haven’t reconnected with any of my old high school flames on Facebook yet. But then, who am I kidding, that’s a connection that’s not there to make, except maybe in my imagination.

And it hasn’t been just high school classmates who have suddenly resurfaced. Terry and I found a mutual friend from college we hadn’t seen or talked to in more than 20 years, even though she stood up in our wedding. We managed to meet up with her and catch up on the intervening years during one of our trips last summer thanks to the Facebook connection.

It does keep me coming back to Facebook, to see who else might come back to the surface out of the dim, dark recesses of my past. Fortunately, the statute of limitations should be expired on any offenses I, or any of them, may have committed back then.