My high school graduating class now has its own Facebook group. It was set up a short time ago as an act of sadness — one of our classmates died recently, an apparent victim of some unfortunate medical care (he fell off a ladder, went to the ER, had his broken shoulder and elbow patched up, but they didn’t look for the internal injury that killed him). Facebook was the best way to let everyone know what happened.

I loved my high school days but I’ve been a bad alumnus. I long ago lost track of almost everyone, and vice versa, as I hopped around the country in a classic vagabond journalism career. But while I haven’t kept up with my classmates, I haven’t forgotten them. I just took that road over there and probably should have paid a little more attention to this road over here. And now some of my former classmates are gone.

This is what Facebook has done for me above all else: It’s put me back in contact with people from the best days of my past. Although this virtual high school reunion is tinged with sorrow — the classmate who died was well-liked and well-known — there still is considerable warmth in hearing from these people again, and a certain shock in the fact that I still recognize most of them some 33 years after high school ended.

You read their words and it brings you back. You see the photos — not just of them, but of their spouses and families — and you smile. You remember the trouble (good and bad) you got into, the girls you were too shy to approach and the ones you weren’t, and the incredible awkwardness of it all. The passage of time makes it all feel sweet, or perhaps it really was that sweet.

There were about 180 of us in my high school senior class. At least nine have passed now. A lot of the rest of us still live in or near my home town, which I find reassuring. Others have scattered, as old high schoolers do. You’ll find classmates on both coasts now, doing all sorts of things.

My own post-high-school story is so improbable and weird that it reads like bad fiction. But I was that kid once, that high schooler who was trying to choose between a career in journalism or electronics, picking the former in part because I was so horrible at math. But don’t let me kid you. It was high school — more than college, more than the many lessons of my professional life — that made me who I am. It was these classmates who taught me about life. And I’m glad to see and hear from them again, even if only in snippets and snapshots.