Monday, 18 March 2002 | Eavesdrop

One by one, I typed their names into Google and scanned the summaries, looking for evidence of old friends I'd lost track of. In return, it gave me lists of familiar-sounding names, but it produced no true matches. It took me awhile to be sure, without pictures or recent information…is it possible Chris is the lead singer of a band? Maybe Kara has a married name now, and that's why I can't find her. It would be enough, I think, just to know what happened, as if the story of their lives were the conclusion to a movie I'd missed the last half of. So that's how it ended.

***

This evening I received a message that had been recorded on my voice mail sometime yesterday. Five minutes long, muffled voices of what sounded like an African-American family riding in a car, conversing with one another (rather than to any receiver), full of slang and excitement and laughter. I was laughing on my end, too, perplexed and amused by what I was hearing. It was as if I had been invited to eavesdrop on an unprepared slice of a conversation; I have no idea how that happened, and I assume they don't even know that it did.