RIVER CITY JOURNAL: HELLO THERE, STRANGER -- ARE YOU MY OLD FRIEND?

Both distance and time have separated me from the friends and relatives I grew up with, but I keep running into them anyway.

I have never attended a class reunion, high school or college. I went to one of my wife's high school reunions at the city park in Sweet Springs, Mo., many years ago. Aside from some of the best German potato salad I've ever tasted, there wasn't much to it.

I've kept up in a hit-and-miss sort of way with my favorite hometown through the weekly newspaper. But as the years have stretched into decades, the faces are growing less and less recognizable. A couple of weeks ago the Southeast Missourian had a big photograph of a man playing chess who turned out to be one of my mother's former students at a one-room school near my hometown. I looked at the photo for a long time searching for anything familiar -- eyes, scars, hair. Sorry, but I probably could have played chess with this fellow and never have made a connection, unless he told me his name.

There have been several instances of crossing paths with former schoolmates in recent weeks. It has been nearly 35 years since I left my hometown in the Ozark hills west of here. When I was a youngster, a trip to Cape Girardeau was a big deal, and you didn't get many big deals at one time in those days. Nowadays, folks in my hometown drive over to eat out or go shopping, and then they drive home like it was nothing at all.

I see one of my former high school classmates fairly regularly throughout the year at various newspaper meetings around the state. He is now the publisher of the hometown paper. At a social event last weekend I met a fellow with the same last name, and it turned out he was a relative of my high school classmate/publisher and also knew folks who were related to me in one way or another. We reminisced like a couple of long lost friends, even though we had only met one other time.

It turns out I have quite a few relatives in Cape Girardeau -- they are distant relatives, something like third cousins or first cousins twice removed, if you know how to figure that out. But I rarely visit with them, even though they are some of the friendliest and nicest people around.

The phone rang last week and a woman's voice asked me if I graduated from the high school in my hometown. It turned out she was also a classmate of mine, someone I haven't seen in more than 30 years. She lives right up the road at Fruitland. I've probably seen her in a store or a restaurant since coming to Cape Girardeau a couple of years ago and didn't even know it.

One of my best friends in high school lives and works here, but as far as I know I haven't seen or talked to him since I moved here. My mother told me recently that she had a brief visit with my old chum not too long ago, and he said he keeps intending to call me.

I was shopping for clothes just two or three weeks ago when a woman came into the store to pick up some things for her husband. She said hello and called me by name, and she could tell I didn't have a clue who she was. As it turned out, I also went to high school and church with her, even though she is younger. Her brother was in my class. After she told me her name, I started to say that she looked exactly like I remember her mother from 40 years ago at church. Then I thought better of it. Women aren't always flattered by such comparisons.

As the years go by, I find we all live in a world intermeshed with the lives and friendships of people we've only met. I continue to be amazed when I meet someone and find out they are either a relative or know the same people I do from another time or another place or both.

This may sound morbid, but I sometimes wonder if I died today who would come to the funeral. If you took all the friends you've had from childhood -- and it's obvious they're all around -- it would be quite a crowd. But the way we live our lives and move around and lose touch with old friends and make new ones means you never have a lot of friends at one time in one place.

My wife has made what she calls "heart friends" all over the country as we've moved about. Although she doesn't keep in active communication with many of them, they are the sort of friends you can call out of the blue and pick up a conversation pretty much where it was left off months or even years ago.

I have a few friends like that, but I don't know if they go in for funerals much.

Sometimes, after you've been out of touch with someone for a long time, you feel a little funny about re-establishing a connection. My plan is to track down some of the friends from my past and see if we can still laugh and carry on like we did when we were young. That's my plan.

Of course, if any of you want to call, feel free. Maybe you'd like someone at your funeral too.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.