Memories, sweet memories...

I am a member of a classmate network, two of them really, but the more recent one is becoming my primary classmate network.

When did that movement start? I don't know. The first one I joined existed around 2000-1, and I don't know when this one started, but I joined in October, when I was looking for a young person, because I had some bad news for him. Relationships are becoming complicated in our modern life, sometimes you have to travel far on the web to find someone who used to live 10 houses away.

Few 'old folk' were interested in joining classmate networks, and I gradually lost interest as most of the members were teenagers or young adults. Now the older ones are recovering ground. I recently became reunited with a long-lost friend, and I found her on this particular network.

So I joined, and entered all the primary and secondary schools I went to, and universities. Quite a long list as I rarely lived in one place for a long time. Geographical mobility must have been a concept invented by my parents.

Occasionally I receive the odd friend request from people I've never met before. I suppose they like my picture and they want to become connected. But I'm not very amenable, I must admit. I am very much involved with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, a window on the future, as far as I'm concerned, not on the past. But yesterday I received what I first felt to be an excessively friendly e-mail from someone who had lived in the same village. Still, I replied...

It appears that we were together in Grade 2! I lived in that little village in the West of France for 2 years only, and that was almost 50 years ago.

This man remembers my mother, who was our teacher, he remembered more or less where I lived in the village...

This was so weird. We exchanged a couple of e-mails after that, and he has posted group photos that I checked today. I thought I had forgotten everything from that period, except a fall I made in the snow one winter, I cut my eyebrow and still have the scar, how I got punished by one teacher (but I don't remember why), the poems we learned, the day my mother got a visit from the School Inspector, bonfires on Midsummer Night (has this tradition completely disappeared, I wonder?), or --the worst-- when the doctor came (I was at an age when shots were frequent) and sterilized his syringe in a saucepan filled with water that my mother boiled for him.

But I could have sworn I didn't remember anyone. I don't remember this boy specifically, but looking at the pictures, I realized why you come across someone in the street, and you think: 'I've seen this person before.'

It could very well be that you knew someone a long time ago, and have forgotten them, but they have made an imprint on your brain. I spent 2 full years of my life in the same classroom as a bunch of children, at the tender age of 6, and I had forgotten their every detail, even their names, and I looked at a picture and there they were before my eyes again.

This strange feeling hasn't left me since yesterday. Where are my memories?

What's on?

This may have something to do with suburban life, but I find it difficult to keep current with what is happening in my area. The town magazine (full-color, heavy paper) is published only once a month, so most of the news it contains relate to local events that happened some time ago.

I also use Google Alerts, and they often return pieces from a widely-distributed daily newspaper called Le Parisien, which has sections for each Department of the Paris area, and Paris.

Unfortunately, most often what gets reported in Le Parisien is bad news: car thefts, burglaries. Last week they reported on an incident that happened on the highway: a truck driver was stopped by a police car, uniformed men kidnapped him and stole all the goods (for a well-known electronic equipment store), then drove away and abandoned him on the other side of Paris. Not a very pleasant image of the area!

Google Alerts has another flaw: I set up an alert on the town (Orsay), but it returns a maximum of occurrences about either the Orsay Museum (in Paris) or Quai d'Orsay, where a lot of activity is going on: that is where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is located, near the Invalides.

Speaking of the Orsay Museum, the story goes, but I suspect that it is not entirely true, that the first few weeks after it opened, people would get off the train here and ask for the Museum. I can't really believe it happened.

So I tend to think that if so little is reported in the press about our little corner, it means that not much is happening.

Yet quite a few things are organized, on a certain level. Exhibitions, for instance. When I went the town hall the other day, I saw an exhibition of modern sculptures. But when you go to a place like that with something else on your mind, hearing the clock ticking for the parking meter, you do not really enjoy the Art. I should go back.

I could report more trivial things. How my young neighbor has forgotten to bring inside his 'Recyclables' bin (a tall container on wheels with a yellow lid) and it is slowly drifting along the street. It's in front of my house now. I wonder how long it's going to take him to realize that he is minus one yellow bin. How distracted can some people be? I rang his bell to tell him, but he was so slow answering that I left it at that.

I haven't seen my neighbors on the other side for a long time. Such is life in the suburbs.