In passive, inadvertent search of lost time

It's finally happened. Someone put my kindergarten class's photo on Facebook. I learned, of course, when I'd been tagged. And that tagging couldn't have been so difficult - I'm nothing if not a 29-year-old version of my five-year-old self. I suppose I never went in for cosmetic reinvention, although I must say that virtually all the faces I recognized looked like little 5-years-old versions of the grown women, to the point that I couldn't even see this as a photo of children, but as one of tiny adults. Not much reinvention all around, then. Not what one might expect from an Upper East Side girls' school, but there you have it.

Note the collar. How Alexa Chung avant la lettre!

UPDATE: See! I'm not kidding!

The only potential downside to this photo's new prominence is the now wider knowledge a) of where those in the photo went to kindergarten, and b) of our age, this kindergarten photo coming, as it did, from 1989, and don't bother doing the math because you have my age higher up in the post. Unless I've forgotten how old I am (not impossible), it adds up.

But as trips-down-memory-lane go, this has nothing on the real story of the week. My brother-in-law was in town from Belgium, and my husband and I decided to show him our favorite Japanese restaurant - no, make that restaurant - in the area. It's a tiny place with a great many rules and incredible food. We found it soon after moving here a year ago September, and have been going maybe every two weeks, maybe every month, ever since. We are, in other words, regulars, although this is not a chummy sort of establishment where you walk in and they confidently announce, aha, it's the couple who always order [what we always order]. It's serious business, thus sushi-consumption.

Well! We learn that there will be a long-ish wait, and decide that the food is indeed good enough to wait for. We wait, we sit, and we hope that my brother-in-law will be able to stay awake, what with the jet-lag. And then just before we're shown the table, my brother-in-law is recognized by the place's waiter. And the recognition is mutual. Turns out they went to high school together. In the same class. In Belgium. In a small-ish town, at that. Not a place from which there's a particular diaspora. My husband and his brother are different-enough ages that they had never been classmates, and there had been no previous recognition on either end. But the connection made, there was all of a sudden a really exciting to-do, with the owner taking a picture of the two of them, and a boisterous Dutch-language reunion. And so all our previous small-world anecdotes were outdone, just like that.