Finding old friends and family

So far through Facebook, I have hooked with some dude from high school, some of my relatives on my mother's side that I rarely, if ever, communicate with (not because I don't care), and one relative in Barbados that frankly I did not know existed.

I also got a surprise communication from the woman who lived with our family for a year as an exchange student. Both my sister Sarah and I had left the family homestead by that time (and were living together in Pontiac, between Flint and Detroit), but we all became good friends with Veronique.

She was a little more "fast" than the other students at our younger sister's high school, and the photos of her on a topless beach in France raised a few eyebrows ... but now I look back and think how parochial we must all have seemed to her.

She also gained about 20 pounds in the year she lived in the U.S. She lost it all after she returned to France.

I spent a day with Vero when I went from England to Paris for a day (a surprisingly hassle-free expedition), and my sister Sarah and I stayed with her in France a couple of years later.

After that, there were a few letters, a couple of birth announcements and then nada.

I still remember standing in Detroit's Metropolitan Airport and tearing up as Vero's plane took off to take her home to France.

Glad to be back in touch.