The people you met

We bought a new land line phone system recently, and my wife has been transferring names and numbers from the old phones to the new ones. The next stage has her looking at our hard copy address books to be thorough. It's a work in progress.

Yesterday, I looked at our address books to see whether I needed to put any addresses into my cell phone. I found a few and entered them in about 15 minutes. What was noteworthy, however, were the names and addresses that I didn't add.

Some were deceased. Some we hadn't seen for years. Some were divorced.

What was particularly amazing was the number of contractors with whom we no longer work. We've gone through several of them over the last three decades that we've owned a home, parting often on terms where we're less than fully satisfied with the service, or parting in an angry way, feeling as if we were wronged or lied to. One we even sued in small claims court, and won.

As you grow older, you begin to notice the number of friends and acquaintances and associates and contacts you've had, and you realize that dozens of people walk in - and out - of your lives over the years.

How about all the parents of the kids your kids played sports with? Soccer, track and field, basketball. Heck, you used to travel together to soccer tournaments in Ohio, staying overnight in a hotel with your team family, and you had a ball. The games themselves were the point, but the fun and the socializing are more easily remembered than the scores of the games.

School-based associations are another example. Teachers, classmates, events - a whirlwind of activity for a dozen years, and it's gone. Off to college, and things change, forever.

I spent over 30 years walking the halls of a dozen different buildings in which I worked at Ford Motor Company. Given that I was in Finance in Product Development, I worked with hundreds of design and development engineers over the years, more than I could remember as I acquired more and more working relationships, and my memory was asked to stretch back and cover what began to seem like an unreasonably long period of time.

If I suddenly chanced upon a familiar face as I walked down a hallway, early on I would attempt a name as I said hello. But you don't have to make too many errors doing that with names before you learn not to use a name, and to simply say hello.

It's an odd phenomenon, one that you begin to realize as you grow older. Stuff not only happens, it changes over time. Good? Bad? Like O says with respect to his views and public policy on abortion, that's above my pay grade.