What the heck were they thinking?

Today is my "little sister's" 18th birthday. Shani and Kristen are the daughter of my very good friends Deb and Michael Walker. Deb was my high school yearbook advisor when we lived in Arkansas when I was in 10th grade.

We moved to Arkansas when I turned 15 and was entering the 10th grade. The first class that I went to was Yearbook which was taught by Mrs. Walker. Some of my closest friends that I made in high school were in that class or the class period immediately before it which was Newspaper. At the end of the year my friends Sheri and Andrea and I went over to Mrs. Walker's house to work on the end-of-year slideshow. Sheri and Andrea were the co-editors of the yearbook and Andrea and I were putting together the slideshow. That was the night I first met Shani and Kristen who would have been 2 and 1 years old, respectively, at the time.

Following my sophomore year of high school Deb and the girls moved to Massachusetts where her husband Michael had already moved for his job. In October of my junior year of high school Andrea, who was a senior, found a "buy one, get one free" airfare deal and we decided that we would fly up to Boston to visit Mrs. Walker. We called her and found out they'd be around that weekend and, with the permission of our parents, bought the tickets and flew up to Boston for a 4-day weekend.

Here's where it gets a little crazy. It seemed normal to me at the time but as a parent now I think my parents must have been smoking crack.

I was 16 years....barely! I was flying with a girl who was only a year older than me to visit a huge East Coast city that they had never been to and didn't know anything about much less anyone who lived there. And we were visiting a teacher that I'm thinking they had probably only met at Open House and her husband who they had never met. What the hell? I am so, so, so glad they allowed me to go on that trip because it was one of the best experiences of my life and a huge reason why I moved to Boston after college but seriously, what were they thinking?

I lost touch with Mrs. Walker not long after that but I remembered that the last time I had talked to her she told me they had moved out of their apartment in Marlborough and to a town that was equal distance between Boston's Logan Airport and Providence's T.F. Green Airport....a distinctly important thing since flying out of Logan back then meant dealing with the Big Dig and was to be avoided whenever possible. Unfortunately I forgot the name of the town.

When I was a senior in college I didn't know what I was going to do after graduation. My parents had moved to Milwaukee between my sophomore and junior years of college. My sisters lived in Seattle. At the time I had no desire to move to Minneapolis but Milwaukee wasn't really home and Seattle never really did it for me as a city. I decided I would move to Boston and give it a try for a few years.

So what did I do? I got on the Internet and looked up all the Michael and/or Deb Walkers to be found in Massachusetts, got out a map, and used pins to mark all the cities where they lived. I then found the one that was equal distance between Boston and Providence and called them up out of the blue. The conversation went something like this:

Deb: Hello.

Me: Hi. Is this Mrs. Walker?

Deb: Yes.

Me: Deborah Walker?

Deb: Yes.

Me: The Deborah Walker that taught at Jacksonville High School?

Deb: Yes. (At this point she was starting to draw out the "yes" and I could tell she was wondering who the crazy person was on the phone.)

Me: Hi! It's Diane Lentz.

Deb: Oh my...hi!!!! How are you doing?

And so it began. I flew out for Spring Break that year to look for a place to live and ended up moving into their basement for two months while waiting to move into a condo that I had found in the same town.

And that is how their daughters became my little sisters and they became my other parents and the reason I met Lincoln and got married and had Jake and Hannah.

But seriously, what the hell were my parents thinking?