Lunch with Richmond

This noon I got together and had lunch with Richmond, of One for the Road. I've been reading her blog for ages, and she's been reading my blog for ages, and when she read that I was on vacation over in this neck of the woods, she said, "Hey, why don't we get together for lunch while you're over here on vacation?"

So we shot plans back and forth by email, and this forenoon I took off for somewhere in the environs of East Towne— only had to stop once, at a convenience store, to buy a Madison city street map!— and lo and behold, we met at the restaurant at half past noon, and ate and visited together for over an hour and a half.

And Richmond turned out to be every bit as delightful and funny and crazy in person as she is on her blog. It really was a privilege to meet her at last!

We visited. And we talked. Till long after the usual lunch crowd had finished up and cleared out. We talked about riding horses— Richmond and her family had been horse riding that morning. Horses, and life amidst the bluffs and hollows of northeastern Iowa, and the joys and challenges of the house that Richmond and WxMan and their girls Sporta and Computa are moving into— this led to my life history of moving 25 times in my first 25 years out of high school, followed by eight years now in my present locale. And on to antique hunting, and slide rules, and books, and Foxfire 5 which is the only one of the Foxfire books I'm missing now. And St. John's Church Council and Mt. Hope Session and Episcopal Vestry, and Richmond being editor of her church's newsletter and also now being on the search committee for a new priest. And doings in our respective families. And the craziness of city driving. And politics, and the dullness of the current presidential race, and the polarization of the country. And Karl Rove's resignation. And the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. And the space shuttle. And Japanese Chess otherwise known as Shogi, and how I latched onto that board. And how Richmond will be catering for two events coming up this weekend. And how amazing the blogosphere is in the way it brings people together in defiance of the ordinary barriers of space and time.

Yeah. That really is one thing that impresses me more and more about the blogosphere, and the Internet in general, the longer I hang around. The ways people can network nowadays, in defiance of space and time, like nobody would ever have imagined 40, 30, even 20 years ago.

Thus two bloggers who have long read each other in the cyber-environs of the blogosphere can end up meeting for lunch. To quote a line from my favorite Japanese anime series, "So, Shinji Ikari, we meet at last!"