friends we never meet

I've had a couple of my faithful blog-readers ask me, out of concern, for updates on how my brother Ronnie is doing. The short answer is, he's still in the hospital in Philadelphia and hanging in there mentally, his sense of humor intact. He's still pretty miserable, is in pain, has a hard time eating even the softest of food. The doctors are still encouraging, saying he will recover once they get his blood counts back to something reasonable and once they figure out what the chronic leukemia is doing. We sure hope so. I had a good phone chat with Ronnie on Sunday. His attitude is good, he's just understandably tired and bored being in that little hospital room of his.

But some of these people showing concern will never meet Ronnie and sometimes haven't even met me. How cool that is. That's one of the ways the Internet has changed some of us, I guess -- for instance, we now have our Facebook "friends" we've never met but with some new connection to our lives.

I have an Internet friend named Paige who lives in northwestern New Jersey. Our connection originally was that we both liked John Irving novels (I used to have a John Irving web site, you know, until it sort of blew up), and we have kept in touch through occasional emails and Facebook of course. Recently, she mailed me a book -- Boardwalk Memories: Tales of the Jersey Shore. She knows I like books and she knows I'm a fan of the Jersey Shore (the place, that is, not the MTV progam!). How thoughtful and considerate of her. There are so many sweet yet interesting people in the world. I'm glad I know some of them, even the ones I'll never see in person.