My Bio - Part 43

I sent a letter to Andy’s sister Marla since I couldn’t find his address, asking her to say hello to him for me. I admitted that moving away without telling him where I’d gone had been mean and that I missed him and was curious about what he was up to these days.

Shortly after, I received a message saying that the only way Andy would forgive me for dumping him was if I sent his old recorded phone message tapes to his sister.

I was stunned by how much he still sounded the same, though I was disappointed to hear he was also clearly stoned.

I thought back to when I would record his phone messages for him, as he didn’t have the means to do it himself. But I mailed that tape to him before we left Phoenix and wrote another letter to Marla letting her know this.

“Guess I’m not the only unforgiving person in the world,” I’d written in a journal entry of mine on Kiwibox before I left that site, which was later sold and changed entirely. A young woman in Maryland responded, making a good point: she said Andy should forgive me because he wanted to, not because of anything I could give him.

Damn right, I agreed silently, feeling a bit embarrassed to be learning from someone half my age.

One day, I was browsing a prison inmate locator site and, out of curiosity, started looking up people I’d known in jail. Mary had told me about Myra and Hope, who each got forty years for child abuse, but I wondered about some others.

I studied Hope’s booking photo—she looked exactly as I’d expected: depressed and anxious. Myra, though, wore a wide smile, looking happy as ever. What could be so exciting about a forty-year sentence? I wondered. But then, if someone could be sick enough to abuse children, perhaps they could also be crazy enough to smile about forty years behind bars.

Yeah, smile, Myra. You’ll be an old lady when you go home. :)

Over the years, I’d wondered about Rosa, regretting that we hadn’t kept in touch, though I’d assumed she was deported to Mexico.

But there she was! I recognized her picture immediately. I was glad to finally find out what had happened to her, even if the news wasn’t good; sadly, she was serving twenty-five years for second-degree murder.

In late September, my worst fears for Mary came true. I knew she wanted to be hopeful and trusting, so I tried not to express my fears that she wouldn’t be released in exchange for her testimony against the man who killed her child, as she’d been promised. If anyone knew that cops, lawyers, and judges could be dishonest, it was me. And sure enough, even though she’d signed a plea agreement stating she’d be free after testifying, the judge, who clearly had a preconceived opinion about her, ordered her to prison at the trial’s end. So, after a decade in jail, she now had to serve two years in prison, with her release date pushed to June 2011. Understandably, she was very depressed, and I haven’t heard from her much since the sentencing, as she’s much busier now. She described it as a “modern-day boot camp.”

In late September, Tom learned from a news article about a site that pays people to complete artificial intelligence tasks requiring human input, which has been a great supplement to our income!

If I thought finding Rosa, despite her grim circumstances, was thrilling, nothing could compare to the surprises I’d receive on October 3rd and again on Christmas!

One day, while taking a break, I found myself thinking of the kind woman from the camp I was in as a kid who had shown me such compassion. Who was she? Where was she now? What was her life like? Fourteen years earlier in Phoenix, I had tried to find her, but with no luck. But the internet has come a long way, I thought to myself as I logged onto Facebook. Searching for a group for that camp, I found one and messaged the group’s owner with my story. He said he loved helping reconnect old campers and counselors and would do his best to identify her.

At first, I’d thought I’d attended the camp at age 9, but on reflecting on one of my few memories, it hit me: I’d been about 11. I remembered a bunch of us kids trying to convince some of the counselors that we were “bionic.” But had The Bionic Woman even aired when I was 9? A quick internet search confirmed it hadn’t been released until 1976, so I must have been 11.

I let the group owner know, adding that she hadn’t been a regular counselor. He tracked down a list of names from 1976, and a few people in the group recalled a woman with a dog who matched my description. “It’s Eileen,” they said. “She had a dog named Sydney.”

Finally, a name! I messaged her and to my delight, she responded within hours, confirming that yes, she had been at Camp Naomi in 1976 and she even remembered me! Today, she has kids and grandkids and lives in eastern Massachusetts. We’ve kept in touch since I found her.

If finding Eileen was a surprise in itself, my next surprise truly floored me: reconnecting with Marie from Valleyhead. A couple of years ago, I’d set up an account on Classmates.com to enter a drawing. While there, I looked up Valleyhead, my old school. Despite its dark history—closed in the ’90s after an FBI investigation into abuse and embezzlement—I was curious about any familiar names, and I spotted Marie’s. Tall, dark, Italian, and very much my type, she looked fantastic.

While browsing the group page, I left a public message with my Facebook details, just in case anyone wanted to reach out. To my shock, Marie did! She remembered me, asked how I was, and shared that she was living in Trumansburg, New York with roommates and studying criminal justice. I was surprised by how excited she seemed to reconnect, even saying she’d love to chat.

As we talked about our Valleyhead days, I mentioned my crush on a staff member named Mary, which led to a surprising revelation: Marie had a crush on me! I couldn’t believe it. We’d rarely interacted and never shared a room or any classes.