Peggy, the Tingling Feeling

Have you ever been overwhelmed by warmth that starts at your mouth, because your smile is so glad and true that it just spreads to the top of your head, from looking at a picture of someone? This someone is so special, yet I don’t know the first thing about her. Yes, Jennifer Aniston and I are in love.

No, no. Her name is not Jennifer, it is Peggy. She and I were friends from when I was three years old. I am not sure how much we were actually friends because she is five years older than me, so when I was still managing bowel movements, she was already learning about really big kid things, like the word carbohydrates (I had that one on a third grade vocabulary pop quiz - it horrified me). Regardless, we were buddies, and in fact, I thought of her as my sister. After a few years of my incessant nagging and playing of the house, she and her family moved to Taiwan, and I did not see or hear from her for the rest of my childhood. Those were lonely years.

Well I mention all this now because over the past few years, Peggy and I have chatted once or twice, and it is always a flood of utter delight to talk to her - to remember how happy I always was to see her when we were little knee-highs. It was a very genuine and innocent feeling, and the best part is, when I talk to her now, I feel that again. We chatted this past week because her family has forgiven the United States of America and is visiting for a week, with a trip to New York on the agenda. Very unfortunately, I will not be here that weekend, but I promised to visit her at her current residence. She lives in the very progressive state of Texas, as an associate professor of psychology at a very large university. Hence, we exchanged pictures via email, which lead me to the tingling feeling that I described above, and felt compelled to create a posting about it here so I never forget.