Reunions are often awkward events perpetuated by either 1) academic tradition or 2) the one crazy aunt in the family who believes in fairies and forced family bonding (and yes, reunions are almost always planned by women). Such events may be fading as the notion of corralling physical bodies into a common room is being supplanted by the notion of corralling virtual people into a common network.

If you’re a Millennial (born since 1980), you will never know what it feels like to re-discover your past life during that first week of Facebook frenzy. I mean, when a fourteen year-old signs up for his first FB account, he’s flooded with the man-sized responsibility of choosing his network from among his already fixed social milieu; his friends haven’t changed much from yesterday’s “X-Men are the bomb!” status to today’s “Eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.” But when a Gen-Xer climbs into the saddle, he discovers that the Facebook trailhead is neither linear nor simple; rather, he finds all sorts of hidden trails leading to dark, shadowy places in his past—the high school stomachaches, the college apostates, the awkward career moves, the Ghosts of Churches Past.

Here's a sign that I'm getting older:  I love listening to National Public Radio (NPR).  My secret addictions are "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and "This American Life".  I download both podcasts each week and usually spend the first two days of my drive to and from work listening to them.  

 This week's episode of "This American Life" was rather interesting.  If you've never had the pleasure of listening to the show, each week the host, Mr. Ira Glass, sets up the theme for the show and then they tell a number of stories around that theme.  This week's theme was about Reuniting - and yes, it included a brief story about the hit Peaches & Herb song Reunited (And It Feels So Good).    Did you know there were multiple Peaches in that group's existence - and it was Peaches #3 that did the vocals on that particular hit song?  Go ahead and file that one away in your brain, I'm sure it will come in handy later.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, Reunited.  So this week's episode tells three stories about being Reunited - a farmer is reunited with his Brahman bull (through the magic of cloning), General Lafayette is reunited with...America, and a married Iranian couple are reunited with....each other.