Airborne All the Way.

There was a peculiarity to being an Army brat in Army schools. Moving every year or so meant seeing new places, but not always new faces. The pool was wide, but the nature of Army life itself allowed you the opportunity to recross paths. A new pal in Barstow may have been lunch buddies with an old pal from Killeen. A desk in Fayetteville might sport the graffiti of that asshole bully from Stuttgardt. I once, to my everlasting frustration, played a game of international hide-and-seek with my best friend from Germany. As soon as she left a place, we would get stationed there. It was like being caught in a cruel temporal hiccup--we rode the same bikepaths, wrote on the same chalkboards, heard the same schoolbells--always ghosting over each other but never meeting again.

But we all kept our ears open. We all had our spies and childish methods of questioning. And you learned. That people look the same everywhere, but you never forget a face. That the popular kids are popular wherever they go and that officer's kids tend to act like their parents and sometimes need a fistful of attitude adjustments. And it became easier to adapt. As if all the nerds, jocks, and cool kids before you had forged paths--invisible, but indelible--and you knew where to go and who to find to make things seem more familiar. And sometimes you lucked out.

So perhaps I was unsurprised when yesterday a name I hadn't heard since 1986 popped up on my website email: "Did you go to B_____ Elementary in Ft. L____?" I suppose all of us are still hardwired to The Search and it was really just a matter of time.