The idea was simple enough: She would try to track down her old college roommate, Lila Simson (a pseudonym), Class of 1968. They had lost touch shortly after graduation when they had moved to different parts of the country.
The first order of business was to sift through the layers of married life that would complicate even the most basic search. Lila had accumulated multiple last names ”“ five, to be exact.
But wisely, Jeannette had kept her old address books and could at least reconstruct where the family had lived in decades past. So she approached the task looking both forward and back, beginning with a call to the alumni office.
Not surprisingly, their college, too, had lost Lila amid the shifting nomenclature. They had stopped trying to woo her donations by the early ’80s, when she was then Lila Simson Brandt, of Chicago. The gravity of the challenge was becoming apparent: Even the fund-raising machine had given up the ghost many years before.
Jeannette then asked one of her younger, tech-savvy friends to search the Internet. The search led to several women around the country who might have been Lila, but weren’t. In the end, it was the old address books, leading back to the neighborhood of Lila’s youth, that completed the search. Jeannette called directory assistance for the Cleveland suburb where Lila grew up. There were five Simsons listed, three of whom she called. The final call led to a family member, at least, who knew of Lila’s whereabouts. Lila’s cousin took down Jeannette’s information and promised to pass it along. She would call Lila in Savannah, where she now lived, near her grandchildren, happily retired and chronically divorced. She assured Jeannette that Lila would be thrilled to hear from her.
The next morning, Jeannette’s phone rang.
“Jeannette, honey, is that really you?” Lila asked. “I can’t believe we’ve found each other again!”
And so began the string of calls and letters and photographs that would go back and forth over the next several months. In the nearly 50 years that had passed, there was a lot of catching up to do. But instead, Lila focused on the present, on the two of them today, as if half-a-century hadn’t intervened.
“I’m looking at various retirement communities in this lovely area,” she told Jeannette. “I think we should sell our houses and live together in our old age.”
This, in the second phone call.
By the fourth or fifth talk, Lila had shifted into overdrive.
“My last boyfriend left because he felt I was proselytizing,” she said. “I tried to share the Lord’s goodness and blessings with him, but he ran off in fear.”
Jeannette sympathized with the boyfriend, and even said so.
“Well, I can understand his feelings,” she said. “I wouldn’t appreciate being told what to think, myself.”
After the early flush of renewed contact, one problem was clear: Lila was more eager, more excited, more everything than Jeannette. Then came the turning point.
“I am very concerned about your eternal salvation,” Lila wrote. “I have been praying for your soul. Without God’s love and your acceptance of it, you will be forever lost to Satan.”
Jeannette responded with a note saying, in essence, “thanks, but no thanks.” She tried to cool the contact. And she found herself wondering about these old reunions. Were they trying to rekindle friendships from the past, or to strike up something new with a familiar tie? She wasn’t quite sure.
What was clear, however, is that five decades is a very long time. Fifty years later, you don’t know what you’ll find and, in any case, it may not be what you want. Except for the born-again factor, Lila hadn’t changed much; it was the same old Lila.
But at this stage in life, that was more than Jeannette had bargained for.
— Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays, and book reviews for numerous publications. This article originally appeared in The American Reporter.
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