Long time New Yorker readers will recognize that opener as one that used to grace the Talk of the Town section on a regular basis. It was the magazine’s way of including dispatches from such far flung locations as Madison, Wisconsin or Marin County and disguised the fact that the friend in question could be some famous writer or just someone off the map (the New Yorker map that is) who had a good tale and a way with words. (Now the pieces in Talk are all signed and half of them seem to be the by-product of some press release, as if Sidney Falco were now editing the section.)

I always liked the anyomous nature of the setup — whose friend wrote? It implied that Talk’s friend was your friend, which I found oddly comforting. So I was moved to open an email from a name I did not recognize with the subject line “Hello old friend.” (I’ve been feeling in need of a friend lately.)

It was spam. Damned clever spam, I guess (I don’t remember what penny stock it was hawking) but I felt preyed upon. Maybe it’s the loneliness of my middle-aged, internet connected existence but it made me think I’m not that far removed from those grannies who sign their savings over to some con artist selling South African coins just because he was nice to them on the phone.

I was determined not to be had again and almost deleted another email I got just 24 hours later from another address I did not recognize. “Just catching up with you” this one said — right! How many times have you fell for that? But I opened it anyway and this one turned out to actually be from and old friend (okay, an old girlfriend but I’ll take what I can get) who had found me on the internet. And I found that oddly comforting, too. I grew up with the sense that everything had to be taken away from you, eventually — home, family, especially friends — and it’s nice to think that we can all come boomeranging back out of the wild blue yonder.

But you won’t believe what the former president of Nigeria is going to do for me…