Liking this

     I am working away on a brief when a small box appears on my computer screen with this notification from Facebook:

Fred Mikkelsen To all the doubters and nay-Sayers -- Red Sox won! Julie Lefebvre and 5 others like this.

      How much I like that Julie likes Fred's post is hard for me to say.  These are people I went to school with from kindergarten all the way through high school, the way you do in a small town.

   Julie was Julie Houghton, a cute girl with nice clothes whom all of the boys fell in love with at one point or another, including Fred, a perpetually awkward kid who never stood a chance with girls like her.

   After high school Julie went off to the Bauder School of Fashion, or something like that, in Atlanta, where she quickly fell in with a sorority and acquired both a southern accent and an engineer from Georgia Tech, who soon married her and just as soon began hitting her, until Julie's dad went down to Atlanta to bring her home

   And then before too long she was Julie Lamb, having married a Brit -- the unfortunately named Graham Lamb -- and spent some time in England where she quickly acquired a British accent.  Julie and Graham had two children, now gone.  Graham, too.

   And now she is Julie Lefebvre, married to an older-looking, heavy-set, goateed coach for the San Francisco Giants baseball team.  Her Facebook page has photos of her in a Giants jersey, drinking beer, not so thin as she always used to be.

   I met the first two husbands, but not this Joe Lefebvre.  I wonder what he's like.  And what he thinks the odds are that this love of theirs will last.  Who knows, maybe the third time is a charm.  Or maybe Joe is husband three of four, or five, or six.

   The husbands may come and go.  But Julie and Fred, who met when they were five or six years old, in 1967 or '68, are friends on Facebook.

     Daryl likes this.