Hometown via the Web

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Have you found a bunch of people from your high school lately? Folks you never thought you'd ever hear from again? 

Being from Flint, Michigan, I've learned to say goodbye to many things. Koegel hot dogs with Angelo's coney sauce. Halo Burgers and the heavenly Vernor's ice cream floats we called Boston Coolers for no clear reason. Central High School. Massive layoffs, (wait, I take that back). My grandparent's farm in Swartz Creek. The myriad cousins and relatives I grew up with and only see every other year. 

Same with old work friends and school buds. But social sites like LinkedIn, MSN network, Facebook (gawd, I love Facebook) and Twitter have replaced the phone call, even e-mail for me. 

Let me give you an idea: In the span of one week, I connected with my entire block of friends from the East Village and Court areas by finding one person. From that one person, I found a web of friends who spanned the globe from Slovenia to Atlanta, Seattle to Singapore, Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids, Naples to Key West. And of course, Flint. Now we play online games together, share pics of family, crack each other up, reminisce and decide again if we want to be friends all over. Some people drift off, those who stay in touch would have likely been my cadre of friends if we'd all stayed in one place, had kids like our parents and grew old living our parallel lives blocks away from each other. But the point is, many of us didn't stay in our hometown. We moved on.

We have a new set of friends we've cultivated from our 13-plus years here. This place is home. My kids have that favorite road to grandma and grandpa's house. They associate the familiar "sounds of summer" with Seattle -- no crickets, no cicada hum and no fireflies (not that they made noise, they were just so frickin' cool). And in the winter, we don't hear the steel of snowplow blades hitting the pavement. Snowplows can't make it up these hills. We just hear, nothing. Snow fall and occasional wind.