I have two girlfriends from high school and we've kept in touch with each other all these years (we graduated in 1968). I'm the only one who lives in the vicinity still although one of the othes' parents are still alive (in their 90s) and she is an only child so comes to see/help them occasionally and we try to get together.

Recently our high school did some sort of site and the three of us joined. It's something like $9.95 a year and you have to pay that to see any of the lists. Well, saw a list of all the kids in my class for the first time in 40 years and that was weird. Has their married and maiden names for women, etc. Blast from the past. I'm in an odd situation because I moved away in 4th grade and then back again in 11th but I had 2 kindergartens in the area too so there's like 3 "sets" of overlapping memories/kids I am "related" to. When I went to my 30th high school reunion (with one of the three friends, all three of us want to go together to next year's 40th :-) I took my class pictures from 1st and 3rd grade and my second "best friend" when I was 5-8 was there and able to help me label the people in the pictures (she was in them too :-) It got really bizarre when she dragged me around and started introducing me to people I'd known when I was 6, LOL.

What was the biggest boon was, after going home from the reunion, I got out my high school year books and started looking at the kids from the 1st and 3rd grade pictures and then from the high school yearbooks to see if I "knew" them from high school. I felt so alone in high school and have such miserable memories but other things started occuring to me during this process and my life took on more cohesion.

Long story short :-) Yes, candybear, the getting "back" in touch with people from one's childhood, etc. has been very beneficial to me. One of my hobbies is genealogy and I already have contacted boatloads (bad pun) of distant relatives through researching the same ancestors, etc. so know about making connections that way and now I'm mending connections with older relatives and childhood friends, etc. I have a first cousin who "disappears" for 10-20 years at a time and she resurfaced (for good "we" think) last year; but that sort of thing is happening more frequently to me nowadays.