I can now say that facebook has made a positive contribution to my life. I belong to an fb group of generally older people who grew up in my hometown – Pottstown – and use the group to reminisce. I made a post about where I was on November 22, 1963, (John Boyd’s sixth grade class) and quite a few folks joined in with their memories. A few days later I got a message from someone I didn’t know. When I looked at the message, she identified herself with her maiden name (strange concept that) and said her brother was in that class and the family lived behind us, across the alley, in my old neighborhood. She was right. I recognized her and her brother; then she sent a photo of a photo from her brother’s birthday party in March of 1964. She thought one person was me. Well, kind of, I thought, and I thanked her.
Then I opened the image in Photoshop, corrected some distortion and cropped it to just me. There I was. Unmistakable. It’s completely unposed. My school pictures seemed to stop with fifth grade and no one in my family took family pictures. This is the first I can remember seeing me at that age. And I’m looking straight at me.