Lost and Found

You know that lost weekend in your past? I just found mine 

My son always says I have no recollection of my youth. That when he visited my old college campus with me I remembered living for two years in what turned out to be the administration building. And yes, almost all of what happened almost half a century ago long fell from my brain and was carted away with the trash. But not everything. 

I have been dealing with another lawyer for almost two years on a transaction. His name sounded vaguely familiar, but having lived almost 65 years not much doesn't sound vaguely familiar. But he never asked if I was the same person he had gone to college with and I think everyone I meet along the way lived for two years in the administration building with me. 

Today we met face to face for the first time on our deal. At least he met my face. As for me it was all a blank. 

"Are you the....." I was. And with that he rattled off a series of questions about my former roommate, one of my friends who did not even attend our school and whether I married my old college girlfriend. Who was this guy and why did he know so much about me? 

Like I do in so many situations, I pretended.  I didn't lie, I just sort of made it seem he had made a more lasting impression on me than the "who the hell is he" response that was circulating around my mostly empty cranium. 

We finished up our conference, I promised we would get together soon along with my old roommate, and then I made my way outside. 

It was not until about half an hour later that the dim lightbulb in my head suddenly began to flash, in all neon. 

I picked up my cell phone. "Were we together that weekend on that road trip when we went to visit my friend (the name he had mentioned to me earlier)?" He WAS. 

That was during my single period, when my girlfriend had graduated and I was participating in some activities that were not for PG audiences. And that weekend, that road trip, well I can't really tell you much about it. Not because I don't remember but because I now do.

I would venture that youthful indiscretions are something many of us look back upon in later years with a mixture of embarrassment and delight, simultaneously slightly repulsed at our misdeeds and in equal measure wistful for those unforgettable times. Only I mostly forgot them, at least this one, until now.

Am I the rule or is he? Are a lifetime of events, important, innocuous, innocent or otherwise, stored and ready for retrieval in your head? How could people so central to such tales disappear? Where did they go? One of us carried in stark detail in his back pocket that time of life when we were young and more than a little wild. And then there was me. But with help, a flood of long dormant brain cells had stirred to life.

My suddenly new old friend and I laughed over memories rejoined. Our past now simultaneously recollected, our present but excuse for this strange, wonderful coincidence that filled both of us with such warm, warped thoughts of a very naughty weekend I retrieved from the lost and found.