The email message came literally out of nowhere.

"Hi this is new to me is th5s how yuo do it/?"

The return address contained the first name of a friend I had not heard from in years. I'd heard he was married now and living in San Diego. Beyond that -- nothing.

Yet here he was again ... I think.

Wasn't he?

I admit I can be a little cynical. I sometimes feel like Jane Wagner, who said, "I'm getting more and more cynical all the time and I still can't keep up." Sometimes that seems like a reasonable response to the things our species does.

A cynic, however, is really a disappointed idealist. A realist, someone who takes life exactly as it is, on its own terms, fired at us at point blank range from the barrel of a gun, is never disappointed. What happens is just "what's so."

A cynic, on the other hand, is always hopeful but frequently disappointed. My head is a cynic but my heart is naive. My heart is always ready to believe in the highest possibilities. An attitude of forbearance, generosity of spirit, and hope for reconciliation may not always be supported by the evidence, but it does help us get some sleep.

What does that have to do with that email?

Hanging out with hackers who really know their stuff has given me a profound appreciation for the illusions of cyberspace. An email can be easily forged - email address, routing information, IP address, everything in the header. Web sites can be altered or simply appropriated, complete with a URL that brings unsuspecting email to your dummy site.

Cyberspace is full of Potemkin villages.

So ... without a context for that email, how did I know who had written it? How could I know? I wrote back, "Mike??? Is that really you?"

He wrote: "yes i am jst lrnig how to do this i cnt type"

Flashback to when I lived in England, a young man in a village in Surrey near London. I had made the acquaintance of an elderly woman named "Mrs. Frazier." I don't remember her first name.

Mrs. Frazier lived in a nursing home and from time to time, we invited her to our home for "high tea." She loved "getting out of prison," and from my point of view, the visits were always interesting.

Right in the middle of a sentence, as she lifted her teacup to her lips, Mrs. Frazier would suddenly pause and freeze, her eyes fixed, then set down the teacup and begin sputtering, shaking like a large wet dog coming out of a pond. Then she said, "That's all right, friend," to the air just behind her left ear, and to us: "He's here. He's with us."

That meant her "Indian guide" had manifested himself, and for the next while, she passed along tidbits of information about "life on the other side" and insights into our progress at our current "level of vibration."

Sometimes the guide brought messages from the dead. I never believed them, and I always wanted to believe them. They were always encouraging, but seldom specific. Once in a while I asked a test question that required knowledge of past events. The answer was always too vague to be evidential.

So we were left with Mrs. Frazier, a dear lonely woman who loved her outings and "specialness" so much she would let her imagination take over and for a few moments become the center of our attention.

I sent test questions to my email friend. One requested "the name of the mascot of the high school social athletic club that you belonged to, and where did it live."

Mike did better than Mrs. Frazier.

"It ws a chickn," he replied. He added the unprintable nickname we had given the hapless fowl. 'It lved on the roof of the apartment bildng you lvd in untl they found out and made us give it away because of livestock laws."

He passed the test. My old friend really was new to cyberspace and learning (like a ghost after it leaves its body) how to represent himself as a digital construct interfacing with other digital constructs.

He types better now. In one email, he mentioned a woman we both knew and asked where she was. To my astonishment, an email from her arrived -- out of nowhere -- that week."It is amazing," Mike wrote, "that you received an e-mail from her at the very time we were talking about her. Is it possible that e-mail is just a way of communicating with one's self? i.e. it doesn't get sent anywhere except into the brain of the sender?"

I think he's right, but the Self with which we communicate is the larger Self, the overSelf in which we all participate, the single organism constituted by all of our humanity. Of that Self the Internet is a collective representation, the echoes or reflections of our digital dreaming and thinking.

The Net is an imaginary garden with real toads in it. We create it together literally out of nothing, then forget that we made it up so we can play in it.

The eyes with which you read this message are one pair of the multi-faceted eyes of a single honeybee looking at a digital simulation of our hive mind.

This digital transmission can be faked or hijacked, text changed in transit, images scribbled over with graffiti, but I don't think that's the last word.

Connection is the last word, genuine connection, and the community that blooms when we socket.

Maybe that's what dear Mrs. Frazier was trying to say when she started shaking like a great wet dog. Who knows why we play in cyberspace? Maybe we too need some feedback or attention, maybe we need to hang out, get out of ourselves, and connect -- yet what we create together out of our mutual need is a magical realm where anything can happen. Lost friends magically appear. The long-dead walk and talk.

So who knows?

When the final delete key is tapped, maybe we still reside in long-term memory, and a good hacker can recapture that data and undelete us with a single keystroke. Fix whatever was broken or lost.

And still remember our first name.

May 31 1997