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Keeping Up

B has a very intense travel schedule and an active social life. Between the two, it is about impossible to meet her for coffee or lunch. Years may pass between meetings, but I have always been flexible to make these episodic meetings happen. A few days ago, I got a text from her that appeared to be a mass outreach to all folks like me in her life that she had ignored for a year or more. Almost a marketing campaign to signal that we were on her mind and were missed. I decided to respond with sure, sounds great. As expected there was no response back. This is more a brand awareness message I guess than something more transactional, were the touch is made in hope of some conversion event. 

Maybe there is a lesson for me to learn from B even though there is very little common between our lives. There are folks that I could do a better job of staying in touch with and perhaps this style of outreach maybe the way to go about it. Seems very low effort all around. I know of a few other folks you have this mass outreach style of staying in touch with people and keeping up with the news. I am about to get a call from one of them in the next couple of weeks because its been about three months since last check and R is great about keeping cadence. As I get older, I have to wonder if my social ineptitude grows as well. It is sad that there was a time over a decade ago when B and I were friends in the way I would know and understand that term. We met for lunch at the sushi place near my house and got dinner at a place she loved in the shopping mall halfway between her place and mine. 

A few days after the initial contact, B wrote that she wanted me to meet the new man in her life. Based on the description I have met this man last time I saw her when he was officially new but given the number of  people in her world and the sparse meetings, she had forgotten that the new was old news to me. If we do infact meet this year, chances are we will re-hash updates from the last couple of years until we part ways for that amount of time. Comes a time in our lives when that time interval is enough for one of the parties to have passed away.

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