Old friends, many years, new links

Anyone who has lived in 12 towns in the 37 years -- that's my record since I've been married -- is used to the assumptions drawn by others:

Running from the law.

Can't hold a job.

How many divorces?

I'm pleased to report that all of those characterizations in my case would be wrong.

The last ticket I got from a highway patrolman was in 1984 when I was stopped on Interstate 35 north of St. Joseph, Mo., for driving a company car with expired tags.

I was employed by one newspaper company for 22 years in five towns, which accounts for nearly half of the moves.

And my first wife still puts up with all my habits, good and bad, and manages to keep her wits about her.

My wife and I celebrated a milestone this year. Our 8 1/2 years in Cape Girardeau sets a new record for the longest we've lived anywhere. The previous record was 8 years in Maryville, Mo.

As you can imagine, living in so many places over so many years has brought us together with an awful lot of people. What surprises us the most is the way we lose touch with good friends and then, in the most unpredictable ways, connect again.

Two of the friends we've made over the years are city managers. Every year when city managers have their big wingding, I get reports from Cape Girardeau folks who have run across our friends while conventioneering.

From time to time I see news stories about people we once knew, which prompts me to make an effort to re-establish contact. In only one case has such an attempt backfired. A gruff city editor I worked under in my first real newspaper job at the Kansas City Star retired several years ago to a small Oklahoma town where a good friend was the newspaper publisher. I called the former city editor just to say hello. When I got him on the line, his first words were "Why are you calling?" That conversation, obviously, didn't last long.

With the advent of the Internet, tracking down old friends and former acquaintances has become a fairly easy thing to do. Here's my most recent example:

On our way home from last month's vacation on the Oregon coast, we drove through Corvallis, Ore. We spotted a good-sized billboard for a political candidate with the same last name as a family we knew 30 years ago during our two-year stay in Idaho. As we drove toward Portland, we wondered if there was a connection.

Last week I went on the Internet and started looking for connections, knowing the family had left Idaho several years ago. Sure enough, I found the family in Eugene, Ore. -- which is just a whoop and a holler from where we've been vacationing on the coast since those Idaho days.

So I sent an e-mail, complete with a brief update on our family, including younger son who was born after we moved back to Missouri. Soon a response came into my computer, which was both delightful and sad. We learned that their daughter, who was just a tyke when we were in Oregon, had died a couple of years ago following a series of surgeries at several hospitals, including Brigham and Women's Hospital in Cambridge, Mass.

Here's the amazing coincidence: Our older son, who moved to Idaho with us all those years ago, has been involved in medical research projects at Brigham and Women's for several years -- including the time our friends' daughter was having her surgery.

For years, it turns out, we've been near our friends many times in many ways, either while on vacation or while our children were at the same hospital. Now those friends are near to us in our thoughts and prayers too.

I'm hoping that, on our next trip to the Oregon coast, we can all get together for another visit. As I said in my most recent e-mail to our friends, I'll bet none of us has changed a bit.

In may ways, of course, we have changed so much. But in other ways, we're all just the same.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.