Just Damn

Way back in the Pleistocene Era, when I was maybe 5 years old, we had just moved into the house that my parents built and were busy learning abut all the new neighbors.  Behind us lived a middle aged woman and her husband, the Janitor at our elementary school.    

Their grandchildren came to visit one day and there were a couple of kids my age, a girl about my sister's age and a toddler in diapers.  I remember wondering how anyone could be smaller than my sister but here she was.  

The lady divorced her husband and her grandkids' parents also split up so we didn't see them again for years until the lady and her 4th husband moved into a retirement community and rented the house to her son.  As part of the deal, the toddler got to stay in a little apartment on the back of the house.  Of course, by then, she was a beautiful seventeen year old girl. This picture posted by  Irish  a while back bears an amazing resemblance to her back then.

The resemblance is so striking that I almost wrote a comment to his post.  She even had a crochet bikini (a red one) and a benefits package every bit as impressive as the girl in the picture.

We became friends and it could have gotten serious (she frequently told me she had a crush on me - wink, wink)  but she was always fighting with her various boyfriends.  I mean yelling and throwing things at them.   I wasn't about to get into something like that so I kept my distance.

Eventually she got married and went her own way  and I never heard from her again.

So yesterday I am about to go inspect a house owned by a guy whose last name is the same as her first name.  Its a distinctive, fairly unusual name (its a place name out of the Bible, not anything like "Shaquandra") and I got to wondering how she might be getting along after all these years.

Goolge produced an old obituary for her father and listed her, with a new  last name, as one of the survivors.  Cool!   I Googled her with the new last name and got a bunch of hits.

The first one was a mug shot.   Ok, so she married a loser and whacked him with a frying pan or something.  Can't see how that would be out of character so I clicked on the link and up came a mug shot of what looked like a crack addict.  I could not even tell whether it was her.

There were about forty other mug shots and arrest records in three counties so I picked one of the same person from 2009 and, yes, it was her.

Some of the arrests were for shoplifting, one for parole violation and giving a false name to an LEO but most were for possession and distribution of meth.

I still can't believe that the beautiful, sweet, teenage girl that had the crush on me all those years ago turned out that way.

Why in the hell do people try that stuff?