You’d think on the surface that “friends” you hung with for months or years on end in your teens or 20s…you’d think they might be up for an old times’ sake text or an email once in a blue moon. But for the most part they’re not. Either they don’t want to go back there or they’re afraid you might want to, or something in that realm.

In the late ‘90s and early aughts I kept in touch with a high-school friend. We met for a midtown lunch two or three times. But that melted away in the late aughts. You put that stuff away.

I was good friends with a Wilton guy in high school. We kept it going during his 18-month stint as a Boston drug dealer (467 Commonwealth Ave.). After he was arrested and imprisoned I visited him twice in Walpole. After he did his time the guy moved to Fort Lauderdale, and within a year of this relocation I flew from Los Angeles to visit.

He grew up, mellowed, got into home furnishings as a profession, got married, etc. And when I reached out to say “hi” a decade ago, he ghosted me. Because, I’m presuming, I represented the drug-dealing past, and he didn’t want to go near that with a ten-foot pole. This is how people are.

The only friends and acquaintances from the past who might occasionally share a hale and hearty “how ya livin’?” (and I’m including myself) are professional colleagues from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. But forget college and high-school pals…they’re gone.

Wait…there’s an exception. I was friendly for decades with a Wilton pal whom I first knew in high school, but a year or two ago he turned “woke” (partly because he was showing loyalty to his three Millennial-aged daughters) and became Cotton Mather, at least as far as his judgmental shithead attitudes toward HE were concerned.