There is a piece written by Brian A. “Drew” Chalker that begins, “People always come into your life for a reason, a season and a lifetime.” Awfully poetic stuff when referring to the people that end up on a catchall list in our phones and computers titled “Contacts.”
Contacts. The synonym for contact is touch. It is sort of sweet, when you think about it, that each and every one of us has a list of people who have touched us.
On occasion, during a long wait in a doctor’s office or caught in a boring meeting (oh, you know who you are and what you’ve made me sit through), I’ve gotten sucked into looking through my Contacts, just scrolling through screen after screen of names. Names of people I speak to constantly, others I haven’t had any connection to for years and some I met briefly and now find myself wondering who in the heck they were/are and why I haven’t removed them from my list of People-I’ve-Come-Into-Contact-With. There are couples still listed who are no longer together and probably don’t even have contact with each other anymore, but I find I can’t bring myself to digitally tear them asunder. Even more heartbreaking are the names I can’t bear to delete, even though they’ve long since passed away years (some of them, decades) ago.
Honestly, as one who has a thing about employing every single one of her senses as often as possible, I don’t much care for the way technology is slowly desensitizing each of the overactive five that I have (yeah, still working on that Seeing Dead People one). Some days, I miss flipping through the pages of an actual address book. Yeah, I’m one of those who prefer the old school, analog Little Black Book of yore. For that reason (and power outages) I’ve kept all of my old address books: the squishy, padded one from my teenage years that has a drawing of a kitten on the front with area codes that no longer exist; the business ones (Dayplanner and Rolodex!) from my twenties and thirties filled with television production crews and companies that have since folded; and the Mothers Unlimited, Inc. lists from my maternal years of playdates, carpools and PTA parents.
Scrapbooking people have their photos to comfort them, which I have great awe and respect for, thinking of all the time and love they put into those. But, me? I have my memories all wrapped up in the list of names of People-I’ve-Come-Into-Contact-With for whatever the reasons or seasons. They are mine for a lifetime, my Contacts.
“Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people.” – Mark Twain