Today was the first fiscal day of the new year, the new work year, the month, and I was granted an auspicious beginning to all three. It came in the form of an email message responding to a virtual note in a bottle cast into the sea we know as the Net.

Specifically, I have an old, dear friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. Last night, in a fit of nostalgia, I googled his name and last known location, and found an email address. I shot of a message, expecting a server error.

Instead, I got a real message back. And not just “yes, this is me” but, actual sentences with real information. Groovous! Typical for me, I snapped off a reply, replete with long sentences and self-interruptions (and you thought I only wrote this way in my blog. Hah!).

The response to my reply was a phone call. Alas, I was chatting with a friend on the other side of the planet, at the time, and chose not to answer the call waiting. (I think call waiting is rude, but I get a cheaper phone bill for including it among the various options on our phone line, so I just ignore it.)

After that call was over, though, I called back, and we chatted for far too long than is really acceptable over the phone, but it was a nice conversation, full of laughter and catching up.

He mentioned that he’d read my 100 Things post, and went down the line mentally checking off the things he knew. And the scary thing is, he’s one of the few people who actually knew those things before I posted them. Even the bits about cello, and my penchant for micro-point pens.

It’d be wrong to say that he doesn’t know me as well as Fuzzy does, because in some ways he knows me better. It’s more accurate to say that he knows me differently.

While I admit that I once (in high school) had a pretty serious crush on him, in retrospect, I’m really glad our relationship never went in that direction, because ultimately, our personalties would have clashed violently, and too often. And truly, I value him as a friend more than he knows.

Our friendship hasn’t always been perfect. There’ve been gaps of months or years when we have completely lost touch, even before this most recent one. He missed my wedding, and I missed his. (I wanted to go, really, but it was a bad month money-wise, and then other stuff happened). I once blew up at him for treating me like a consolation prize, though I learned soon after that such behavior was unintentional and inadvertant.

And now?

Now we’re people in vastly different places in life, who’ve known each other twenty years. I have a husband whom I love and cherish, and who understands me better than anyone could hope to (and, more importantly, puts up with my moods, plans, schemes, and ideas). He has a fabulously funny, seriously sweet, beautiful and intelligent wife (someone I wish I knew better), and they’re expecting a baby very, very soon.

I’m adding a resolution, a specific one, to the vague list I cloaked in one of my posts last week: I will not lose touch with him again.