Cute, Cheezy And Random

Ha ha, this could even be an add on Craigslist...

So I was recently thinking about a girl who I met many years ago during a trip to Orlando. Her name was Jaime Carter. My family was staying at a resort called Orange Lake Country Club (how posh) and there were always tonnes of kids running around the place so it was easy for the younger folks to meet new friends all the time. I can't remember how old I was exactly but I put the number perhaps around 16.

There was a group of girls from Wisconsin and a cool kid from Buffalo and we all hung out pretty much every night that we were there. The attention getter of the group was named Jean. (perhaps that's when the seed for the fondness of that name was planted but more on that in another post) The girl I liked to spend time with was Jaime. From what I remember, she was a year or gasp, even 2 older than me. She was rather pretty in her own right, but kinda more quiet and grounded than some of the other girls.

We hung out during the afternoons and I even remember spending an evening just chatting in her villa and then out under the stars while most of the rest of our group was busy making out with each other. Yeah, they made out, we talked... moving on. We ended up doing the pen pal thing through part of my senior year in high school. She sent me a few pictures which caught the eye of some of my house mates. No they weren't those kind of pictures. Though at that age, that would have been a nice ego booster. Wait we're men, that applies to any age.

Eventually we lost touch and familiarity become more of a warm and nice memory. I'd think about her now and again over the course of the last 10 years. Cripes, 10 years already... We never heard from each other though. Then tonight as I was packing my hockey bag for a game, I picked up an old journal and I found a couple of pictures within the pages which were facing each other. I pulled them out and apart and who should I see but the lovely Miss Carter in a cute skirt and the classic 90s girl's cut with the bangs and in the other a group shot of her family.

That brought a fun smile to my face as I remembered the first time that I got those photos. I wonder now though what happened to the one that got all the guys talking... Hmmmm. At any rate I used to have her address but I guess one of the reasons that I stopped writing her was because I lost it. I kept the letters somewhere, but she had her address on these little yellow bird stickers that she'd stick on the letters and somehow those all fell off or got lost over the years.

I recently read a post through a link from Megan's page. The post was by Dooce and it made mention of something called Sarah's Cringe Book. It made me think of some of the cheezy things I must have written to her as a love and awestruck mid-teen boy.

From that idea, I started looking for some of my old poetry and written thoughts which I made with such angst and emotion all that time ago. ; ) As I was going through a cabinet, I found a bag containing old cups and mugs which I used to dump loose change and stack pens in. I had always wondered where my beer glass from my 1993 championship hockey season had gone to and now I knew. Beyond finding busted pens and corroded batteries, I found a few souvenir coins from the Magic Kingdom. Again, that made me think of Jaime. As I'm sorting through those, a small piece of white paper, a bottom right corner to be exact, came loose.

I would have thought nothing of it, had I only seen the "Kwik Kopy Printing" tag on the back. Instead of that though, I saw the above with an un-familiar area code of 715. Curiosity got the cat and I almost locked mine in the cabinet as I closed it to check on my trusty MacBook to see where exactly the area code 715 was. Needless to say, I knew right away whose phone number I had found when the search came back.

So that's my story as of now. I still haven't decided what to do but I was thinking of maybe writing for old times' sake. For all I know she's married now, maybe even for the second time and has kids! : P Who knows. All I know is, it was fun, at least for tonight, to re-live those formative moments of the older girl with the great smile.

Any thoughts or suggestions are more than welcome on this one.