Tweet, Tweet

A long time ago (which is to say until about February of this year), I firmly believed that social media were, at best, tools of the devil; a cyber-playground for what a former colleague used to call the "chronologically challenged" whose frontal lobes, through no fault of their own, simply weren't sufficiently developed to make good judgments about the long-term consequences of living an uncensored and public life. (I – like most Baby Boomers – am forever grateful that there exists no online record of my own pre-lobal years, or at least none that I'm aware of.)

But a couple hundred Facebook BFFs later – with a Twitter account and a blog on top – I’m hooked. Big time.

Over the past 10 months, these networks have allowed me to reconnect with family members I hadn’t seen in more than a decade – some of whom are now grown with families of their own. I’ve reestablished ties with about two dozen seminary friends from the early 1980s and have discovered – or been discovered by – high school classmates from Saint Michael Academy’s Class of 1972. An eclectic online community cheered our daughter Angela when she received her Ph.D. last spring; prayed for our daughter Victoria when she was hospitalized at the beginning of the fall semester; rejoiced in the birth of our granddaughter Charlotte in October; sent healing thoughts when Philip broke his wrist and arm last month; and expressed immeasurable love and support when my father passed away last week.

But until today, the ever-widening circle has been comprised of people with whom I’ve had at least a tangential connection. Now, the circle has expanded.

This evening, Yoani asked to follow me on Twitter.

Yoani María Sánchez is a 34-year old, award-winning, bloguera cubana who writes from inside Cuba. Her blog, Generación Y – named by Time magazine as one of the 25 best of 2009 – has sparked controversy on both sides of the political divide and offers a fascinating, rare – and forbidden – look at la vida cotidiana en Cuba.

Tonight, for some reason, I became the 125^th person that Yoani – a  newcomer to the world of tweets – has asked to follow.

I’m sure it wasn’t my witty 140-characters-or-less updates (“Watching Glee!”... “Got a 10-minute manicure at the Cincinnati airport while waiting for a delayed connecting flight. Fly-through mani-how cool is that?”) that piqued Yoani’s curiosity, especially in comparison to the gravitas of her own messages (“Twitter is a means of chasing away that fear, of believing that you belong to a supra-national community foreign to accusation& punishment.”… “I have a dream: one day in this country no one will be discriminated for thinking differently. There will be space for everyone.”). If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that: a) I already followed her, and b) my Twitter moniker, CubanMatriarch, borders on clever. Or not.

But perhaps it’s just that storytellers seek one another out. And her story, played out in the here and now, in a place so close but about which we know so little, cries out to be heard just as much as those of the ancestors who inspired this blog. And these forums allow us, in ways never before possible, to be connected to one another and to honor even the stories of friends we have yet to meet.

So, Yoani – ¡bienvenida a Twitter! I’ll help share tu historia. Y un día, in a not-too-distant future, we'll sit down together and share una tazita de café and our stories, face-to-face, as friends, on that island we both call home.