I had a chance encounter New Year’s Eve that has kickstarted me into writing and posting again. After spending a day at work, and the late afternoon with my eldest son, we stopped at the local grocery store to pick up a couple of last minute items for the evening. While pondering my choices in the juice and cereal aisle, I noticed someone approaching me, giving me a good look-over.

Now, I’m no tall-dark-and-handsome type (I am tall, but fall short after that), so I was a little weirded out. And as he got closer, he said, “Edd? Edd Fear?” (obviously not my real name, but the sake of this cheesy little blog let’s say it is). I gave him a good looking over, and there was some spark of recognition, but I’ve never been one to keep names and faces together for very long.

“It’s Calvin! Calvin Hobbes!” (also not his real name, because I’m weird about calling people out in my blog, and also because I like to see how creative I can be with names here).

Now, Calvin was a kid that me and my best friend Glenn hired back in about 1995 when we worked in the comic book industry. The three of us raised hell back then, trying to see how much we could get away with at work, going on business trips together, and having a lot of long lunches (when there wasn’t much work to be done).

Calvin went with us to Vegas (on business) when he was only 19, drank more than the two of us, and managed to win more money at Blackjack than the two of us combined. He also discovered at what dollar amount they check ID when you cash out — he was $50 UNDER the limit and so managed to keep his winnings that night. But after that night he did have one of us “older guys” cash out his chips, just in case.

When our company closed its doors in LA, I stayed in touch for about a year, and then lost him. This was back before Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the social media that binds us all together nowadays. I’ve tried to track him down from time to time (his name may not be “Calvin Hobbes,” but it is a pretty uncommon name. But it was like he’d fallen off the face of the earth.

So here he was, right in front of me, on New Year’s Eve, at my local grocery store. Turns out he bought a house at the bottom of the hill from me, less than two miles away, and he and his wife have a ten-week-old daughter.

This chance meeting just pushed me to thinking about all the people I’ve met and lost contact with over the years. How many of them remember me? How many of them have any desire to reconnect, now that (assumedly) we’re all grown up with wives and kids and mortgages and minivans (sigh, yes, it’s true)?

I’ve started reaching out to people. I’ve started trying to get together. But 2013 is the year that my family will be social, that we will host old friends, and friends of friends, and reach out to people we knew, people we currently know but don’t give enough time to, and those who we (my wife and I) say we’d like to get to know, but we’ve let something block that introduction.

This is the year of introductions. This is the year of getting out of our shell. This is the year to let people know we’re here.

And then, come 2014, we can decide to retreat back into our shells if that seems to work out better for us. Should be fun, at least!