Let me start with wishes for a happy Thanksgiving and a disclaimer: I’m not a huge fan of Facebook.

I’ll admit to being as curious about other people as the next guy. When I’m over at a friend’s house, I often find myself lingering in the kitchen, the better to study the photographs stuck to the refrigerator with clever little magnets.

There’s something comforting in all those unfamiliar faces. You get a sense of the world’s expansiveness, and at the same time, a kind of contact high from sheer anonymity, sort of like watching traffic on the highway from an airplane window. You think: all of those tiny people down there, and not one of them knows me!

Unfortunately, the way Facebook works, all of the people on your virtual refrigerator get to post comments and pictures, and so do all of their friends, which means that all of your people see what all of their people have to say, and vice versa. The more friends you have, the more pictures pop up on your refrigerator, until it gets to the point where people you barely know are having conversations you could care less about with people you’ve never even met.

In other words, you lose sovereignty over your own refrigerator. And we all know that that’s the first step towards anarchy…

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Facebook, chief among them being that the entire enterprise is a cynical mechanism for mining personal data from its users and then “monetizing” it; in other words, selling it to companies who want to exploit it commercially. Even worse, the exploitation is happening behind the scenes, under the guise of “fostering community” or some such malarkey.

But every once in a while, Facebook affords you a glimpse into a friend’s life that you might not have had any other way.

Take, for example, the portrait of a marriage challenged by military deployment.

I know a little bit about being separated from loved ones, having spent a year studying abroad while my wife stayed home to hold the fort. That was a very long year indeed, even though we saw each other during the winter break and over a couple of jet-lagged weekends.

But that was before we were parents, and the separation was by choice, not deployment. Oh, and no one was shooting at me or trying to blow me up.

Quietly, with the rapt attention of an Internet voyeur, over the last few years I’ve been watching our friends Matt and Mary use Facebook to help overcome the distance, tedium, fear, and loneliness of a military deployment. Of course, secrecy is the bread and butter of the armed forces, but it’s pretty clear that Matt has been in Afghanistan, among other battle zones. In fact, the carefully self-censored pictures he has posted on Facebook have supplied me with homegrown visuals of an all-but-invisible war.

I’ve watched as the long separation eventually led Mary and their three kids to relocate to Germany to be closer to Matt, despite the hardship of uprooting the children and acclimating to the customs of a foreign land.

Eventually, Mary and the kids moved back Stateside. Thanks to Facebook, I’ve had a ringside seat to Mary’s heroic effort to keep the children present to Matt. Talk about a refrigerator full of pictures! Album upon album of Halloween costumes; summertime frolics; craft projects gone wrong; hilarious playtime; toddler messes; teen dress-up; boisterous meals; stellar schoolwork; poignant letters to Dad. What a miracle it must have been for Matt to return home exhausted from a mission to find these palpable reminders of the life waiting for him, the life he was fighting to preserve.

And an equal miracle for Mary to feel connected to her gallant soldier, to know that in showing him their life, their home, their children, that she was making her family whole, if only for a fleeting moment at the end of a fearful day.

In previous generations, the pictures and letters that have formed the connection between Matt and Mary would have been private, and perhaps relegated to a steamer trunk in an attic. But thanks to Facebook, with all of the curses – and blessings – of a public forum, I’ve been privileged to watch two people, united by love and family, overcome a grave challenge.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to thank Matt for his service; Mary for making it possible; and both of them for their strength and bravery in sharing their joys and tribulations with their Facebook friends and family.

To Matt and Mary!

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 24 November 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com