“Is that her?!”, Erica exclaimed. “Is it Grace or is that her daughter?”, I hyper-replied.

There we were in one of three living rooms in this grand little house known as The Old Bakery on The Green in a remote olde English village south of Cambridge in Merry 2015 England doing what I had sworn I wouldn’t do ..on this vacation. We were on Facebook. Or as Erica, ever adorable, would call it: “we were on “THE” Facebook”. She had no experience whatsoever with THE Facebook….or even how to refer to it by THE name. And here I was, as evil as THE addiction itself, teaching her and signing her up on THE Facebook. Just call me Satan.

Funny how things in life…across decades can somehow connect by dots through happenstance, serendipity, pure planning and sheer luck.

I had so proudly on the flight over written the previous blog chapter about giving up easy access to Facebook from my phone devices. How quickly I crumbled..like a British bread pudding. Well kinda. Sorta. Not really. It’s just with wi-fi and a laptop…and curiosity…um…well…never mind.

We had been looking on THE Facebook for the woman who somehow originally connected us some 30 years earlier…a fellow Marist alum named Grace Gallagher. But her Facebook name would be her married name. We knocked off a good two hours exploring and looking and peeking into many lives….many with no sense of privacy settings.

In the strangest of ironies…Erica and Grace are friends I lost touch with through the years as old phone books jumped to a smartphone era…smart computer like devices that were not so smart at remembering people you were close to BEFORE you got a smartphone. MIND THE GAP we sure didn’t.

They had lost me and I had lost them. Nobody’s fault but of course I blame the phones. It certainly didn’t help that in the 90’s I switched network jobs, moved to California and began a rather curried-hurried two decades criss crossing America and the Atlantic Ocean — years of producing TV News and in 1999 joining the morning wars epic era of television. Ironically, something called Linked In reunited Erica, her husband Richard and I. By the way, Linked In is even more invasive privacy-wise than Facebook. Im about to quit Linked In altogether.

But back to what really matters. Erica had found me on Linked In and we together had found long lost Grace on THE Facebook. “Will she accept me as a Friend on THE Facebook,” was another exclamai-query from Erica who had now spent a good part of an hour reading through her daughter Lara’s Newsfeed….which had zero privacy settings.

“Yes, Mummy,” I said..though I thought something else: I’ve created a monster?!

Erica Littlewood (Webber) is a very special girl in the map of Brian O’Keefe’s journey to himself in many ways. Long before there was A Face Book, by overseas introduction of Marist Red Fox and Marist Abroad Alum Grace Gallagher Triolo, Erica was one of the angels who early on offered me a place to stay in London, should I get an internship there while I was studying in Leeds. Well, famously I did at the very last minute (( as you have no doubt already read in previous blogpost referring to Miranda in Malaga….whose attachment place I took as understudy at the BBC Six O’Clock News at Television Centre, Shepard’s Bush a lovely and INCREDIBLY EXCITING April day in the mid-to-late 1980’s.))

That keystone toehold, thanks to Erica and roomies, was the very beginning of where my Inner Mary Claude, with daydream visions of becoming an “international journalist”, took flight, right there in White City at the Beeb.

For several weeks, I stayed in a Cromwell Tower flat at the Barbican Centre in London’s City district that Erica shared with a few other flatmates ((who I also became friends with and now live all over the world.)) A Duran Duran Someone lived above us; I had a monthly Tube pass and slept on the couch in exchange for washing up the dishes.

We lost touch in the early 90’s after I attended Richard and Erica’s gorgeous Essex Summer wedding in 1989. We had almost no contact for those 17 years or so. Sadly I missed her kids growing up as my busy life and mileage clocking career pulled me from some of these far flung friends as phone numbers got lost when Blackberry Contacts from one server on West 57th Street never really meshed with all my future smartphones nor my antique handwritten phone books, buried still in a Moishe’s moving box….…:(

Rather than lament the loss of time, this weekend we joyously caught up in a whirlwind day and night visit in her beautiful fairytale life, and Erica still snuggling and caressing you like you’re a coddled infant in her care. I didn’t see her two kids, Lara Rabbit and Ollie Rabbit ..as I remember last calling them. Both beautiful: Lara now on a Gap year traveling overseas and Ollie at University…no doubt a future solicitor…with an Ironclad Facebook History.

Mummy Rabbit Erica really is that rare burst of love on two feet. I detected that she still uses the word Rabbit referring to any of her nuclear foursome—-at random times. Her dog Lilly is “Lilly Dog” at all mention. Erica talks nonstop telling you what she’s thinking, or has just thought …and explaining why…which is probably why I love her so: she reminds me of ME!

Richard, also quite garrulous, ever so effortlessly imparts nuggets of history and story as we traversed the University city of Cambridge, and its Hertfordshire exurbs, correcting my even barbaric pronouncers on some of the College names. Magdalen is an all time surprise…pronounced “Maudlin” with a soft almost Terry Wogan purr…with no hint whatsoever of condescencion..like so much of Richard’s encyclopedic but comforting conversation. Like a warm cup of cocoa.

This extra-long weekend getaway to London etcetera has me writing this entry also on a plane….the plane ride home. (An A380, BA, First Class, Eh- so-so. B minus, in case you were wondering)… Over a few days in London, I walked and biked all over…..The blah-Brown Barbican Towers now are lost in an incredibly GORGEOUS NEW Modern Shiny, Shard-y Millenial Skyscape…pointy and sparkly….from the air or even from earth at one of my all time fave spots dead middle of what used to be The Hungerford Bridge …mid-Thames behind Charing Cross station, now millenialized and spiffy with fewer homeless people….and basically an on-ramp to the Ferris Wheel “Eye”.

A beautiful journey for me, my very first return to me, myself and my foreign passport filled past—after a rough and tumble detour in my life; I think I walked almost twenty miles in the last few days….and a year for each one. Mindfully grateful for every minute: past, present and future.