(2023-03-14) Weinberger Meeting An Old Friend For The First Time

David Weinberger: Meeting an Old Friend for the First Time. The techies back at the office had carefully packed everything into a sturdy blue box—everything except a mouse pad. A mere detail, except that it was 1988 and the system’s fancy new optical mouse needed that pad in order to work. So I ended up doing a long, detailed demo by pointing at a frozen screen and asking the editor I’d come to see, Jon Udell, to imagine that he was witnessing a nearly magical set of transformations of the invisible page in front of him.

Whenever we run into each other, we fall into a conversation I couldn’t have with anyone else because of the odd intersection of our interests. Plus, we are both shy but willing to talk about the sort of personal matters that conference buddies rarely get around to.

I ran into him a couple of weeks ago at a conference and had multiple conversations, a few of them quite extended. When it was time to leave the conference, one of us said to the other that our intermittent friendship is long, deep, and important to us. The other agreed with his whole heart

At age 72 I have discovered a type of friendship that I did not know existed. It's a friendship that does not correlate with the amount of time we have spent together, the frequency of the meetings, how well we’ve “kept up” with the other, or the significance

here we are: Intermittent friends bound together intimately.