What happens when you read almost true stories*

and are, perhaps, a bit obsessive. And have the internet. God's own gift to obsessive fact and rumor gatherers. Has it ever occurred to you who the hell puts out scads and scads of information that people like me and perhaps you gather up like a squirrel storing nuts for winter? I mean, this has been going on a long time now! We used to play Stump the Google in its infancy, I think out of a few hundred entries we finally got about three and no, I don't remember what they were. However, thanks to Facebook, with which I have a love / hate relationship, I am now back in touch with one of the first geeks I met in this bizarre cyber world.

Oh how I scared his mother! And I'd apologize, but I've already done that and it's a zillion years later and she had no need to worry.. But I get it. Here was her lovely, albeit odd son, a young man with really great long hair almost down to his butt, and this older woman, a divorced older woman, with CHILDREN, and we seemed interested in each other. And we were! But not in any way they would understand because who could understand this? It had never happened before: a link up via cyber waves? What? It was crazy and while I understood, I was riding the wave...oldie though I might be.
Brain cravings were unleashed. Here was this young guy] funny, way too smart for his shoes and we were *talking* on this screen. It was pure. NOW WAIT, you jumping to conclusion sorts. We didn't know ages, we weren't 'hooking up'. This was pre-aol. hook 'em up stuff. This was...crazy and wonderful and fun and healing for me, who was coming out of a 'you are very stupid' sort of thinking life that had lasted a long time. Timid in the jungle, but ready, I was crawling faster.
This was pre-internet porn, pre www. anything. This was two people bouncing science/world stuff off of each other and saying oh WOW!!!!!

Hard, I know, very hard to imagine in the world that exists only, really, a snap in time later but actually, probably hmmm....over a decade and less than two ago. But so it was. And Bill, plus cohorts, helped me go into a world that brought me people who became friends from all over the world, some of whom I met, some of whom I could meet tomorrow and we'd just laugh...because we'd laughed online a thousand times already. I called myself a willing Luddite and was taught to feel the power of knowledge by geeks with a capital G that...Power was Fun!

Oh, where was I? Bill is now happily married to the lovely Colleen, has two children and is still writing games and more, quite successfully, and I'm so glad for him, even if I don't give a damn about the games. What I do care about is...the day we met at a Japanese restaurant (because we were both into many things Japanese: he turned me on to anime, which I wasn't wild about but also to a movie that was a life changing one for me...and I'll have to ask him to remind me of the full name but Heaven is in it...Bill? what is that one?) and the waitress comes up to us and asks our drink order and we say, "We'll have sake." and she says "That's rice wine, you know." And we say, with very tight lips, "Yes, thank you, sake" as she walks away as our laughter explodes in subdued dribbles. Still a code today for...shhhh....silly people. "And that is rice wine, you know." Bill, I still use it, do you?

I love you, Bill! Send pics, I want to see those babies and your hair!

Dedicated to the ones I love...my first Sysop (where is he now?), Jhon (who is really John, the dyslexic who taught me most things cyber as well as how to read the most wretched churning of the English language, not through his own choice but enabling me to read anything that came later) and Bill (who has made me laugh & research and engage, drawing me out when I was deep in the cave of self preservation hermitage)...thanks for letting a relatively old lady (in my 30's then, but that was old at the time) play for free because I WAS a woman tossing bread on the waters. And now, they can't shut me up, even when they seriously want to...go figure, darling.

*The almost true story is The Zookeepers Wife by Diane Ackerman. It deals with WWII from a very different perspective, first, that it is set in Poland and second, that it is set around the zookeeper and his wife. Churned my brain up, making this one of those parenthetical posts....tomorrow I'll be back to ... Culebra normal. I almost promise!