This World Expands and Contracts with the Bellows-Shaped Internet

I've been looking for my friend Ebere for the last twelve years. The last time I saw him was on the day I graduated from college. I talked to him through the driver's side window while his car was parked in front of my dormitory. I was carrying boxes out to my car. We were both hurried and I tried to give him quick directions to our wedding, which would be two weeks later and fifty miles away. We haven't seen each other since that moment, or had contact of any kind. I've missed him.

In the late nineties the search went electronic, and after running some white pages searches I called a couple of wrong numbers I'd thought might have some promise. About a year ago I put a "please contact if you have any information" notice in our college's alumni magazine, figuring someone we graduated with would know something. No replies of any kind. Every time I ran into someone we both had known, I'd ask if they knew anything about his whereabouts. Nothing.

A few weeks ago I punched in my quarterly google search and found my friend through a mention in a story written for his university. I called the story's writer to enlist his help and narrowed my internet search. Then, two nights later, while sitting at The Ground Round waiting for my hamburger after covering part of a meeting, my telephone rings. My friend's on the other end. He'd been thinking about me, too.

I've probably told a dozen friends and two or three family members that I (used to) write this weblog. I keep it low-key. I've maintained a rigorous no-writing-about-work policy (second only, apparently, to my no-writing-about-anything policy of late), but this is both not substantive and too interrelated not to mention. Two days after that aforementioned google search wiped out twelve and a half years of non-contact, I'm sitting in my boss's office, and we're conducting a telephone conference call with opposing counsel in a federal case. We're holding the informal conference required under Federal Rule 26 and the Local Rules to set forth a proposed pretrial discovery schedule. Neither my boss nor I has had any real contact with opposing counsel before. As we're discussing various deadlines, one of the three of us mentions the judge's court procedures set forth on his webpage, and then the voice on the other end of the line says, "You have a blog, don't you?" My boss, surprised, says "No, I don't." I say, "Yes, that's me."