Awhile back, wifemotherme wrote a great Story of Us, about how she met and married her husband, and said she would like to read others� stories. So I wrote down my Story of Us , and then on Christmas eve, the day before what would have been my parents� 58th anniversary, I wrote theirs . But this one is the best.I�ve already written a little about my Sister and her poor track record at picking husbands. Her first, Satan J, was one of her high school not-to-serious boyfriends. He was handsome and rich. He looked better on paper than any high school boy ever could. He drove a convertible, he was going to inherit a lucrative family business. Of course, he turned out to be evil incarnate, and although he did help to create three absolutely wonderful children, he had nothing to do with raising them and we hate him. Her second, The Scumbag,was a bad bad man, and I am probably more proud of her for being able to lose him than I am for anything else. A victim of emotional abuse needs a tremendous amount of strength to break free, and she did.
She was on her own, J1 in college in California, and J2 and J3 just starting college in Boston. She sold her house in the town where we had always lived (where I still live) and bought a smaller house in the next town over, where our parents had just gotten an apartment in a senior citizens building. Sibs had never lived alone before. She had split custody of the two dogs with The Scumbag, so she had a gentle old Golden Retriever keeping her company. Her life was different and new and she was okay with it. She�d begun to date a very nice man who also taught in her school, but not seriously. In the spring, she would be 50 years old.
She wanted to get herself a special present for 50, so she got a computer. I�m the techno-wiz in the family; she can cook and clean. I had to pick it out, set it up, show her how to work it. I helped her start an AOL account, and showed her how to email her kids and read email from them.
A few weeks later, she said she�d seen something on TV about how people were using computers to find old classmates, other people they�d lost touch with. Was this true, and how could she do it? I told her it was true, and how some of the search engines worked, and for a couple of weeks, she happily looked up everyone she had ever heard of. Then she ran out of names. She remembered another high school boyfriend, a serious one, that she�d gone with for about two years and lost touch with 30 years ago. She hadn�t been able to find him, since he had such a common name. (Imagine that his name is something like John Smith, or Michael Miller. It�s a name like that.) So she wondered if there was any way she could narrow it down. For her, this was still a game, a way of learning how the computer worked.
Like the rest of us, he had gone to the same high school, the one I still work in. Where I am the librarian now, which makes me the local historian, which makes me the keeper of all the alumni records. I said I would see if I had anything on him. I did. I had the name of the university in New England where he was working as a professor. That was her clue. She went to the university�s web site, searched the faculty listings, and found him. So she did what she had done with her college roommate and sorority sisters: she emailed him.
