“You’ve got to be kidding me,” is more or less what I told my husband when he proposed creating me an account on Facebook.

If you have even less experience than I with the now ubiquitous “social networking utility,” Facebook is a website where you can add brief diary entries, family and party pictures to your personal page, and keep up with the minute-by-minute activities of mutually-selected “friends.”

Friends are Facebook’s real draw: By inputting the name of your hometown, school, or work, you can discover the classmates you had in elementary school, or the high school friends who went to another college, or even the folks in your office. If they then approve your “friend request,” then you’re off on the task of full-tilt online social networking.

Facebook, I reasoned, was the province of the twentysomething colleagues at the nonprofit where I work part-time. At any random moment, I’d noticed, I could come around the corner of one of their cubicles to see the Facebook home page displayed on their PC screen, followed by their rapid, furtive mouse click to minimize the screen as quickly as possible so as not to be discovered.

I didn’t have the desire to share family photos or political propaganda, and didn’t need it as a forum to arrange a social life. I have a hard enough time writing these 800 word epistles every couple weeks, and I took an entire year to write all the thank-you notes after my wedding. (And I didn’t have a very big wedding.) I am not, in general, a fan of anybody’s effusive Christmas letters.

Facebook seemed to me therefore to be one of those technological innovations for which I was never, ever going to be an ideal candidate.

My husband, however, was not convinced. He’s only a couple of years younger than I, but because he’s a musician and an audio engineer, he moves fluidly in a realm beyond age, culture, or generation: he has had band mates who are 47 and still live with their parents, and work colleagues who are 24 and already have 4 children. Some have been to Yale, and some have been to jail. Whatever the day job is, it’s all about the music.

And because there are practices, gigs to advertise, and free sound files to promote the new CD, there is Facebook. (If you know who he is, feel free to “friend” him to sample a smorgasbord of all of these—he’s got some great projects going on right now.)

So, armed with my e-mail password that he already knew, he created a Facebook account and a “stem” page to get me started. “Come on,” he said. “You’ll like it once you get into it.

I only stuck a finger in at first, like a party guest confronted with caviar for the first time: “Caroline is _________.” I pondered the fill-in update form and wondered what to write. The only “friends” I had were ones my husband had pre-invited, which made me feel like an unpopular nerd.

That was before the friend requests started coming in.

The first striking one, seemingly out of the blue, was from a woman who had been in the eighth grade when I was a new sixth grade student at the private Christian academy (founded 1969) in my small Mississippi hometown, after my mother judged that public school desegregation had indeed failed. As a girl, she had long, wavy blond hair and was a junior-high cheerleader, though she was also a brainy one too, and both unaffected and kind.

On one crisp fall night, say 1980 or 1981 (not a good year), I was waiting to be picked up from a junior high football game and was hanging back in the shadows, when I saw this girl in her cheerleader uniform being escorted across the parking lot by her father, who had his arm around her and looked so proud.

Missing my own father who had died, I was both hit with a tear of jealousy and the most curious elation that someone could be loved—and protected—so much. I can recall today, just as vividly as the day it happened, the long shadows of the stadium light poles across the academy parking lot, and the high silver haze of the bulbs themselves like a corona of light over the town.

And she was the one who had remembered me.

There was the half-Mexican, half Puerto Rican guy from boarding school who had given me my first taste of cinnamony Abuelita hot chocolate during a February snowstorm, and described his mother’s house in L.A. as being shaped “like a wing.”

And there was the girl who had had lived upstairs from me in my college dorm. We’d hung out on some long conversational evenings on the quad, but I had ended up spending more time with a much more superficial group, and felt bad about it for years afterward.

I couldn’t search Facebook for her, because I had forgotten her name. But here she was.

How different all our lives have become, and yet how similar: Parenting, jobs, minutiae. That’s not the important part, and I continue to agree with all those pundits (probably some of them at Good Letters) who fault Facebook for fostering a public culture overly focused on the trivial.

But nonetheless, in all these encounters and a dozen others like them, what I’ve felt is that ineffable sense of being known, of the incidences of the moment rendered into the broader fabric of, well, eternity.

I’ve always been someone who’s both distrusted and felt enslaved to the narrative in my head, but Facebook, in so many ways, has turned the contents of my head inside out and showed me that, well: All those years, all those places that I left behind….

I was not alone.