The long awaited return of EPI...

This last week thanks to a tip from an old friend and a productive Google search I was able to track down an old friend who I lost contact with about 7 or 8 years ago. You see the last time we really talked was when I was the best man at his wedding. Sure we exchanged a couple of emails in the late 90's but all in all I felt like quite the bum for loosing track of him and his family.

All this to say that when I did find is email address and picture cleanly displayed on the web site of his current employer I couldn't just send him an email and say, "Hey what's up? Sorry I haven't talked to you in 8 years." For some people, my wife included, that would have been the obvious choice but you see that's just not how we used to roll so I had to come up with something different... more true to our friendship.

Then it occurred to me that the best way to avoid that awkward, "Hey, I remember you." moment was to dig up an old story from our shared past before re-initiating contact.

You see back in High School we had a mascot in our Physics class that we had named Epi. Well maybe 'mascot' is a little too much credit to give to a gummy bear stuck to the book shelf at the back of class where we sat and tried to make our physics teacher fall off of his chair. We had good imaginations. And the name, where did that come from? If I recall correctly it was from a random Friday or Saturday night when I scribbled the letters E-P-I on the top of my friends car and we proceeded to scream, "Epi!" at random moments throughout the evening. That next week a legend was born. Simple huh... that is until the incident.

One day we strolled in to physics class to find that Epi had disappeared. Some thought that Epi was dead, others reasoned that Epi had run away with Elvis. Either way the mystery, like the premature death or a rock star, only made the legend of Epi grow even larger. We even managed to hold up a sign to Epi in our senior class picture. Poetically enough the picture that made it into the yearbook showed us holding the sign upside But his post isn't about High School memories it's about connecting to your past so we'll move on.

To initiate contact with my former partner in legend making I sent an inquiry asking about the whereabouts of Epi to the customer service email on his web site. Noting that rumors had been circulating that Epi had been seen in the forest around my friends current home town with a certain Jack the Gnome, another one of our illustrious creations. Several replies later we had concluded that Epi was in fact dead but not before Epi had conquered a small island in Vanuatu and given the island the name Epi. At that point I finally responded with the, "Hey what's up? Sorry I haven't talked to you in 8 years." line and we began catching up on the lost time without any awkward moments.

So maybe I a little weird, I'll give you that, but what I think is great about this whole exchange is how quickly the connection between the two of us was rebuilt after so many years. You see I'm not really a people person and usually I take some time to warm up to somebody after so many years without seeing them. In this situation the connection to our shared past recreated the brotherhood that existed so many years ago. Even though today we are both different than we were and separated by thousands of miles I feel like I've just rediscovered a long lost brother.

What's even better is that my friend and his wife are still married after all these years and expecting their second child in October. Sadly so many of the couples that I saw married 7 or 8 years ago are no longer together. Perhaps it's because somewhere during these past years they forgot about their past and begin living out of the situation and resources of the present. I don't mean to suggest that we should live in our past but I am suggesting that we should use the relationships and bonds in our past to remind us and regrow those things that we've forgotten in the tyranny of the present.

Connecting to the past and discovering that old forgotten friends aren't really old or forgotten... just another way to break out of our box.