A few years back, from 2002 – 2006, I maintained a modest website called SantaBearCam.  It was a novelty website premised on a silly gimmick: on a daily basis, I would post a new picture of my stuffed animal, Santa Bear.  Don’t ask me why, but my friends considered this project more amusing than disturbing, and they offered me support instead of derision.  It’s not every day that you meet a man in his mid-twenties who fixates so shamelessly on his childhood teddy bear.  It’s also not just any friend who would embrace that kind of lunacy and celebrate it without cynicism.

SB was a huge hit.  He was invited to every party and to almost every outing. There’s something oddly liberating about hugging a teddy bear in public, and I think my friends understood that.  So I dragged my stuffed bear to places where he never expected to go, and my friends enthusiastically posed for pictures with SB — stuffing drinks in his face, making goofy faces, and dreaming up preposterous poses, all for the benefit of SantaBearCam.

And just like that, I became the de facto historian for my circle of friends.  In the days before the popularity of Flickr, Photobucket, and convenient photo sharing through those social networking sites, I was documenting the happiest times of our shared experiences and logging the chronology with Santa Bear’s galleries.

Time went on, as it does, and the landscape began to change.  Some of us moved away to cities barely within driving distance of the rest of us.  Some of us left the state entirely.  Some of us ended our relationships on bad terms.  Some of us bickered and ended long-standing friendships over trivialities.  So it goes.  There are some things in life that not even the unifying force of Santa Bear’s grin can change.

Quietly and unceremoniously, SantaBearCam faded away.  I have all of the site’s data stored locally on my computer hard drive, and I click through it on occasion with great fondness.  Santa Bear may have been the focal point of the project, but I had always seen the website as a celebration of friendship.  I look back at the countless smiles, the echoes of laughter, the couples who once were, the friends who had yet to part ways, and my heart aches to think of the possibilities that gave way to stubborn improbabilities.

My circle of friends still remains.  Our ranks have thinned and replenished over time, and the air feels different now, which actually isn’t such a bad thing.  Even so, sometimes I feel myself longing for the days when friendship seemed like a much simpler thing.