Thirty-Six Years and One Yearbook

The last time I saw Deirdre in person, she was graduating from high school. That was 1990. I was a year behind her, and we played basketball together at our all-girls private school.

We never really lost track of each other. We have followed each other on Facebook practically since the beginning, so I watched from a distance as her life took off. She walked on to a Division I rowing team in college, became a physical therapist, worked with the rowing team at Cal, and has spent her career as a PT for the US rowing teams. That work has taken her around the globe and to many Olympics. A walk-on turned Olympic-level physical therapist, and I get to say I played ball with her.

This month I was in California for a couple of weeks, so I reached out to see if we could connect. Her responsiveness was awesome, and we got to see each other twice while I was here. One of those times was over dinner, with her old yearbook open on the table.

Some of what came out that night were the small things I'd just never known. Our school drew young women from all over Northern New Jersey, and Deirdre was bussed in from a town close to mine, though I'd always assumed she lived right near school. Her parents had come from Ireland, and she'd grown up doing Irish dance. Little details, thirty-six years overdue.

But what surprised me most wasn't the small stuff. It was how many parallels there were, not just in what we lived through as girls on that team, but in our adult lives too. Complexities. Mental health struggles in our own families that neither of us could have named or understood at seventeen. Two women who thought they knew each other, finding out thirty-six years later how much more there was.

The world is small, too. The moment we connected all those years ago on Facebook, I saw that we had a friend in common: one of my roommates from junior year at Brown. One degree of separation, all this time. It is a good reminder that social media, used well, can show us how connected we already are.

She had also read my book and has shared it with others. Having someone who knew me at sixteen read it, and find so much of her own life in it, means more than I can say. We share parallels that reach from our childhoods into our adult lives, and we found help and support in each other from over 2,500 miles apart.

In the book, I write that basketball was my first escape, and that it taught me how to read a room, sense momentum, and work with others. What I did not fully understand then is that it also gave me people. And people seem to show up so unexpectedly. One of the lessons I return to in the book is Let People Surprise You. Deirdre is one more reminder of it.

If there is someone from your team, your class, or your old street you have been following from a distance, send the message. Thirty-six years is a long time to just follow along.