Yesterday, as a suitable activity for the stretch of nonexistence between Christmas and New Year’s, I spent an hour or so deleting the contacts in my Gmail account. I had no reason for doing it, but I didn’t need a reason and it passed the time.

I don’t use the email much and never have. It’s basically a backup for a couple of other things, for photo backup and for accessing other people’s Google Docs when they’re shared.

You’d think I wouldn’t have a lot of contacts. You’d be wrong. There were a few thousand emails associated with the account, between people I had actually corresponded with and the “other” category associated with ccs, mass emails, and groups.

Though it should have been possible to bulk delete, I couldn’t find the option, so I would select twenty or so at a time, and then click “delete.”

That meant I scanned as I went, and in the process I encountered a lot of familiar names. Many years’ worth of student email accounts were in my Contacts, because for a long time I worked collaboratively with them on their writing. I haven’t been in that school for ten years, since I retired, but as I clicked on each one, a face appeared briefly in my mind, usually the face of a rather sweet 11-year-old.

Sometimes I searched online to see how they are doing. One was the CEO of a company, others were attorneys, one was a gynecologist like his dad, and one’s LinkedIn said he had “studied at” his college, meaning he didn’t finish. I did that myself, so I empathize. (I did eventually finish college and have a master’s degree and a Ph.D. now, though neither is all that relevant any more.)

There were other emails that presented faces to me; a friend who worked at Trader Joe was obsessing about applying to doctoral programs and asked me for advice; he is now a professor and edited an academic journal for a while. My dissertation chair, who is my age, is emeritus and no longer accepting doctoral students. A whole series of technology coordinators marched past, making me realize that they tended to get fed up and leave. A lot of people I knew from fencing were on that list, because for some reason my Gmail (as a secondary backup) got added to a master list somewhere, and it kept getting shared. I fenced for thirty years, so there were a lot of those, as well.

It is very odd to me how many different lives I have had, and that I’m not still living those lives today.

I deleted all the names, one by one, without much compunction, because after all it’s just an extra Gmail account I never use. If any of those people wants me, they can find me, but mostly they don’t.