I typed this grade school classmate's name into a search engine, and the first thing that came up was a REGISTERED FELON page. A picture, and a review of the personal information (date of birth, unusual name, state of residence, blah blah blah) confirmed that this was the same person I knew from grade school.

I have idyllic and happy memories of grade school. I think of those few years as the only truly happy times in my life, and I have long waited for a time of similar comfort and anticipation.

Knowing that one of the kids from that class is now trafficking in cocaine and carrying concealed weapons does not change my memory of that school. It surprises me that more people from my youth did not get into trouble.

I find sad happiness in tracing the connections that spread out over time among people randomly assembled for a common purpose.

I like those movies that end with synopses telling where the characters depicted in the film ended up after the time depicted in the film. "Jane is now employed by Wholesale Liquors." "Robert is an attorney specializing in corporate law." "Jane and Robert married and have 4 children." Even when presented as a joke I find something touching about the acknowledgement that human contact and shared experience rarely consume more than a moment in time and are never repeated or continued.

Friends and I explored the ditches and fences out on the edge of the grade school property. Behind one long, stucco fence stood a residential neighborhood of what we knew to be inexpensive houses.

In one ditch on school property I found 5 or 6 bottles of Budweiser, unopened and apparently tossed into the ditch by someone in one of the neighboring houses.

"Lookit this!," I said. "Who has a bottle opener?" Someone had a Swiss army knife, and the beer flowed freely back there in the ditch.

Everyone laughed and gawked at the beer. We were 7th grade and most of us only knew of beer for having seen it make our drunk father's chortle at Johnny Carson when he (Mr. Carson) was just barely funny.

These bottles were not warm. They were blazing hot from sitting in the Florida sun for who knew how long. But we opened them and drank like sailors -- inasmuch as 5 or 6 bottles of beer passed among 10 or 12 kids aged 12-13 could render any of us drunk.

We saved half of each bottle for the rest of the class, and I remember marching back to the baseball field like a conquerer, holding a bottle of beer in each hand yelling "BEEEEEEEER!!!" The other kids, the athletes who let the loser kids troll the ditches, all smiled in disbelief and took a swig. The cool kids asked me "Where'd you get this?"

Recess ended and we had to go back to class. Some of us worried that we were too drunk to walk. Most had consumed nothing more than a Dixie cup worth of the evil beverage, but we all knew what that stuff did to our parents so we knew it could happen to us that the steps would grow inarticulate, the snot would flow from our noses, the laughter would envelope our bodies and we would rush to the toilet 12 times an hour.

The class after recess was very, very quiet. No one stumbled or belched or staggered to the coatroom. No breathalizers. We pulled off the beer binge of our pre-adolescence without a hitch.

Words deleted from these sentences:

• indeterminate
• randomly
• bittersweet
• all
• something
• whatever