When I was a little girl, my sister and I had penpals.  Now if there are any younger folks reading this, penpals were kinda like online friends—except without computers, internet, etc.  You may wonder ‘then how in the world did you do that?!’ 

Imagine a life where you get snail mail every single day.  And if a day happens with no mail, you figure the mailman must have missed your house!  Now to explain what a mailman is…..sorry, I digress.  Oh, and EVERYone would read magazines!  People would pay for yearly subscriptions, even if it was quite expensive.  I’m sure I didn’t have any subscriptions unless it was a gift.  But at  around 12 years old, I LOVED the magazine called Sixteen.  It had THE cutest boys I had ever seen!  I had a huge crush on a boy I saw in a movie.  His name was Sajid Kahn.  I can’t recall the movie but I sure remember Sajid!

In the back of some of these teen magazines, kids could submit their name, age, and address to hopefully ‘meet’ someone with which to share letters. (I was going to say ‘to share letters with’ but I might offend an English teacher—or a theme park writer. 😃)  My sister found a penpal from England, and probably Liverpool since she was a huge Beatles fan.  Well I made friends with Dawn, who lived in exotic New York!  Being from small town Texas, I just thought she must be on the other side of the earth and SO sophisticated!!!  I don’t remember exactly how old we were when we started writing, but we continued throughout our teen years.  And we couldn’t call each other—in those ancient days, we paid by the minute for long distance calls.  Monday through Friday, 8-5, was the most expensive at around 35¢ a minute and the weekends were the cheapest at maybe 10¢ a minute.  (I may be off a bit on those prices but I bet not by much.) Anyway, needless to say, my day was SO much brighter when I got home from school and there was a letter from Dawn in the mailbox!  I don’t remember what all we talked about (probably boys) but I remember writing to her a few times after I got married at 18.  

Over the years, I would occasionally think about her, especially during the years I lived in New Jersey.  I always thought it would have been so cool to meet her in person!  But I knew her last name had  probably changed and I really didn’t think I could ever find her.

Last week, I couldn’t sleep and started thinking about Dawn.  I decided to google her.  And while she didn’t have a really common last name, several people came up with that name, living all over the country.  I decided to google her name again with New York added, even though she could have moved away. (I haven’t lived in Texas since I was 21, but I still call Texas home.  I even have a tee shirt that says ‘Just a Texas girl in a Tennessee world’.) I still didn’t get a hit…except….I noticed an obituary of an older gentleman with the same last name in the list.  When I read it, it said he was survived by his daughter Dawn and her husband.  And of course, they had a different last name.  I decided to look and see if she was on Facebook and there she was!  I had no idea if it was MY Dawn but I decided to write her on Messenger and ask.  And hopefully, not sound too crazy when I told her it was over 50 years ago that we were friends.  

A day or two later, I got a reply.  YES!!!!!  That beautiful, Facebook woman is my Dawn!!!!  She still lives in exotic New York and I hope we stay in touch forever!