Throughout my high school and college years, I worked at a summer camp. It was just the way working at a summer camp was supposed to be. There were girls, we had parties, swam in the pool after hours, and, oh, I guess we were supposed to take care of little kids too, but that was secondary.
I was never as cool as I was when I worked at summer camp.
1987 was particularly fun. For the first few weeks, one of the older women who worked there was hosting her sister and her sister's kids. The kids also came to camp, one as a young camper, the other as worker-bee, like me.
The worker-bee was a she... and she was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen at that point in my life. I'm not exaggerating. She was tall, blond, from California, a competitive swimmer, and she was so pretty I couldn't think straight when she was around.
She was only going to be in my city for two weeks.
I had to work fast.
I'll spare you the details and fast forward to her departure... She cried, told me she loved me and said she wished she never had to leave.
But leave she did, and as summer high school love goes... out of sight out of mind. We wrote for a bit, talked on the phone from time to time, but she soon forgot me and that was that.
I have recently started a project. All of my life I have loved taking pictures... and I have watched as my poorly protected snapshots from the pre-digital days have deteriorated. So I recently bought a scanner and am going box to box, picking out the pictures I want to save forever, and digitizing them.
Today I got to the summer of 1987 stack. In the pile were a single picture of my summer love and one of her little brother.
I had to "google" her, but there were a gazillion hits. Her name is kind of common. So I "googled" her brother and up came his myspace page.
He doesn't look anything like he did when he was a 4 year old, but he did have a picture of himself with his sister, and she looked exactly the same.
So I sent him an email saying he wouldn't remember me, but I just found old old pictures of him and his sister... that I'd be happy to email them to him if he thought he'd like to see them... and to say hi to her for me. That was it, nothing more.
But here's the thing, and this will lead to another post eventually. When I was in college I had a stalker. It was horrible, and she worms her way into my life from time to time, which is super-creepy.
As a result I'm sensitive to super-creepy, and as soon as I sent the little brother the email I worried that maybe I was super-creepy for taking the 5 minutes to google the little brother of a girl I knew 20 years ago.
So was it weird?
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2 comments:
Years ago (while I worked at a summer campe - go figure) my friend told me about a screenplay he wanted to write. It was the story of a guy who finds a picture taken years earlier on a vacation he took with a friend back in high school. In the background of the photo was this beautiful girl he'd never noticed before. So he and some of his friends go on a road trip to the south to find her.
Of the two options, I'd rather be emailed than doorbelled. That's just my opinion.
you mean i shouldn't show up on her doorstep?
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