Found

S and I are in our mid-forties, which means that a lot of our friends started having sex in the late 70s and early 80s.

S and I have a lot of gay friends.

You can probably guess where this is going.

We lost our first friend to AIDS in the summer of 1982 (yes, we knew each other back then). We lost our most recent last month (if you count HIV-positive person with probably AIDS-related illness).

S has lived a lot of places and had a lot of friends, but he's not so good at keeping in touch. So one of the sad assumptions of our life is that a lot of our old friends are dead.

S also has a pretty ordinary name, so he's kind of hard to find, unless you think to google me, with my unusual name, which, luckily, a lot of his old friends do. In fact, though, I am the #1 hit for my name, but S is #3 for his, if you google the variation he uses. And it's pretty obvious that it's him, if you know anything about his last 20 years or so, plus there's a picture.

Yesterday, the dearest old friend whom we'd long assumed was dead--given his history, and his apparent absence from the Internet--walked into S's restaurant, thanks to google. I haven't seen him yet, but he's coming to dinner tonight. S says he's exactly the same. Which includes alive.

We are really really happy.