I once dated a girl...

... named Amala Knight. Well, perhaps date is too strong a term. I once was acquainted with a girl named Amala Knight and we had a short social relationship one summer. This was about my sophomore year in high school; Amala lived in Fort Worth, but she visited her grandmother, who lived in Breckenridge. Her grandmother lived close to friends from church, and that's how I met Amala, as I recall.

Our social relationship consisted of sitting on her grandmother's porch and meeting a few times at Miller Park at the swimming pool. One Sunday afternoon, when I was in Fort Worth with my parents, I persuaded my father to let me take the car and drive to Amala's house on the west side of Fort Worth and I took her to a movie. Thinking back, I am amazed that my father actually let me do that. I think that they had to keep my mother wrapped in a wet sheet until I got back.

Oh, and we also corresponded. I've mentioned before that it used to be expensive to call long distance, and there was no Internet, texting, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc., etc. We wrote letters! Mother couldn't figure it out. She thought I was receiving mail from a motel chain named Alamo Nights.

And Amala honey, if you are still out there and wander by this blog, I'm sorry that I didn't write back after school started, but you know how busy it can get, yada, yada, yada. Or maybe it was you that stopped writing me, in which case I forgive you, but you really broke my heart. Just saying.

OK that's it. That's the whole story of my semi-dating Amala Knight. Not much of a blog post. In fact, Barb cautioned, "Don't expect many links to this post."

But wait. There's more.

Amala Knight came to my mind after all these years because I woke up in the middle of the night last night with the words "I ONCE DATED A GIRL NAMED AMALA KNIGHT" screaming in my mind! I do this sometimes. I wake up and I have an entire short story or blog or libretto running through my mind like a train!  There's no more sleep, so most often I get up and write down my story. I call it my "divine inspiration." Barb calls it indigestion. Once I "received" a fragment of an apocryphal book about Ruth of the Old Testament. I called it "Song of Ruth." I'll have to find that and post it; it provides a whole new dimension on the relationship between Ruth and Boaz. But I digress.

When I woke up last night I had the entire first part of this blog mapped out in my mind, just as it is written above. But I couldn't go back to sleep. So I got up and wondered if - with a name that unusual - could I find Amala Knight on the Internet? Yes, I could. And I did. I found an amazing amount of stuff - where she went to High School, where she lived after that, when her father died, that she and her husband are 5K runners, where she lives now, and much more. I even found her on Facebook. Her profile picture is of an attractive woman who married well - she's wearing a diamond as big as Dallas - and she's proudly (?) holding up her Medicare Insurance card - a rite of passage for those of us who have reached a certain age. She's not a big user of Facebook - only one message since she joined back in March.

Hey! I know! I could ask her to be my friend! Let's see, the message to her would be something like, "Amala, you probably don't remember me but we "dated" some in high school - FIFTY YEARS AGO - and I thought you were hot then but WOW your Facebook picture is smokin' and I found a bunch of stuff about you on the Internet and maybe we could like, you know, get together sometime, OR I COULD JUST STALK YOU ON THE INTERNET! Wanna' be my friend? heh-heh-heh." Ummm, no. No way.

So I should stop right here and tell you that Amala Knight is NOT really the name of the girl I knew. Her actual name is very distinctive (and does sound like a motel chain) but I made up an alias because I realized that all of this is just a little weird and a surprising number of hits on my blog come from Google searches on topics that I never would have imagined, and it sort of does sound like I'm stalking an old girlfriend. So just to be safe...

That's all I have to say about this now, except that I really, really do hope I sleep better tonight. And I suspect that you do too.