Seance

I was talking with friends about social media over lunch last week. Peter mentioned Séance, which was one I hadn't heard of before. He said he had a few invites left, and later that afternoon he emailed me one. I got on and set up a profile. The interface was clean and relatively slick; the site pushed all of my usual privacy-intrusion buttons, but no more so than any other offering; many of my friends were already on it. I decided I'd give it a try for a few days.

Séance was heavily weighted towards chat and messaging, with very clunky image and video sharing, but I didn't mind that so much. It was pretty easy to search for and friend most of the people I knew. Within a day I was visiting the site regularly.

Yesterday I checked email and found I had two new Séance friend requests. I pulled them up. One of them was a Catherine Turnbull. That wasn't anybody I was familiar with, but still the name rang a bell. I got into Séance and looked her up. Oh, ha ha. Catherine Turnbull was one of my family's earliest known ancestors; she came over on the Mayflower and was the originator of the Providence Turnbulls. Some wag in my family had set up an elaborate profile for her, complete with a black-and-white image of her in a bonnet and frock, her likes and dislikes, scriptural quotations that she found pithy, and so forth. I decided one of my cousins must have been responsible, but they had gone to so much work that it seemed a shame to let it all go to waste. I friended her and moved on to the next request.

It was for Lori Stein. Lori had been a close friend in high school. She and I had gone to junior prom together. We sat next to each other in homeroom and had three other classes together that year. Once we had stolen her dad's car and gone on a joyride that ended by crashing through the front window of a Denny's. I missed Lori terribly, in part because during our senior year she had gotten a brain tumor and died.

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