{"id":676,"date":"2011-11-18T23:03:29","date_gmt":"2011-11-19T03:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/?p=676"},"modified":"2011-12-04T12:53:36","modified_gmt":"2011-12-04T16:53:36","slug":"lennie-i-the-story-of-us-chapter-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/?p=676","title":{"rendered":"LENNIE & I – THE STORY OF US – Chapter 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We met on the Internet in\u00a0one serendipitous moment in time.\u00a0 It was Valentine’s Day 2009.\u00a0 What does any single woman do on Valentine’s Day?\u00a0\u00a0 We stay home and read, watch television or peruse the Internet.\u00a0 I was looking for a book.\u00a0 I could not remember the author’s last name or the title, so I was sitting at the computer Googling in variables.\u00a0 Up popped an assortment of websites with some of the words that I had used and one had a photo accompanying it.\u00a0 This was the photo that first grabbed my attention.\u00a0 Suddenly, as we are wont to do on the Internet, I was distracted from my present search and got sidetracked to the photo in front of me.\u00a0 It was a photo of a man, relaxed and smiling and standing in front of a mission.\u00a0 There was one word that accompanied the photo:\u00a0 “Haloha”.\u00a0 I was later to find out that was his greeting – a combination of ‘hello’ and ‘aloha’.\u00a0 The Hawai’ian reference peeked my interest since I had been telling my family since the age of 5 that I would go to Hawai’i some day.\u00a0 My mom use to say to friends that she didn’t even think that I knew what Hawai’i was, yet I constantly talked about it.\u00a0 In later years I started to collect some Hawai’ian items like a shirt that I slept in and it was a sunset of Hawai’i that was my first commissioned painting in my late teens.<\/p>\n

It seemed innocent enough just to address before I would be directed to the site.\u00a0 This seemed easy and harmless and from there I was redirected to his personal page on an Internet dating site.\u00a0 I read his profile and realized that this man did live in Hawai’i.\u00a0 This was\u00a0like something out of a romance novel and while the\u00a0other two\u00a0photos of him tugged at my heartstrings with his dark, handsome good looks, I knew that this was just fantasy.\u00a0 I went back to the job at hand and found the book that I was looking for.\u00a0 I\u00a0turned off my computer and went to bed.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next morning, turning back on the computer and getting into my e-mail, I was shocked to see a message from\u00a0a website\u00a0that I did not know.\u00a0\u00a0It started with the word, “Haloha”.\u00a0 The e-mail had come via a website and stated that I could not correspond with this person unless I was a paid member.\u00a0 Another Internet scam.\u00a0 I knew it.\u00a0 They probably used fake photos just to lure you in.\u00a0 Well, not this little black duck, as Daffy Duck would say.\u00a0 So, instead of signing up – which I had no intention of doing – I politely sent a reply to this fictitious photo saying, “Thank you for writing to me, but since I have no intention of signing up to any dating site you will probably not even receive this e-mail.”\u00a0 There.\u00a0 It was done and I wouldn’t be clicking on any more men’s photos again.\u00a0 I pulled on my boots and parka and went out into the cold February air with my dog Chaucer.<\/p>\n

We walked a fair distance through the neighborhood and I found myself close to my friend’s house.\u00a0 We went over there to see if she and her dog wanted to join us, but first I needed to warm up a bit.\u00a0 We sat there in her kitchen with some tea and I told her about what had happened the night before on the Internet and that this guy (fake or not) had actually been able to contact me.\u00a0 How does this happen when you only give your e-mail to a company?\u00a0 We went over to her computer so that I could show her my one and only e-mail from this stranger in Hawai’i.\u00a0 When I opened up my e-mail I was shocked to see that there was another e-mail from ‘him’.\u00a0 This one was asking me if I was planning on coming to Hawai’i as he could see that I lived in Canada.\u00a0 All I could think was “How did he get my e-mail address?”.<\/p>\n

After finishing our walk I got back on the computer and had to know how he had ‘found’ me.\u00a0 I typed back thanking him for writing to me, but that this was not a part of my life and while one day I would like to visit Hawai’i this was not the time and HOW did he get my e-mail address?\u00a0 Now it is important to mention here that I had not even listed my real e-mail address.\u00a0 I had made up another name and e-mail address since I am the most cautious person that exists.\u00a0 Anyone that knows me would say that I am the very last person that would ever go onto an Internet dating site.<\/p>\n

He must have been on-line as the answer came back in just a few minutes.\u00a0 He knew the owner of the site.\u00a0 Let this be a caution to anyone out there for either themselves or their children, that you are exposing more than you think when you are on the Internet and for some people it is very easy to find you.<\/p>\n

He told me his name was Lennie and he gave me his cell phone number and some other pertinent information.\u00a0 He said that he liked my photo and would be happy to get to know me.\u00a0 Would I like to come to Hawai’i?\u00a0 Would I be that brave?\u00a0 Would I take a chance on finding happiness with someone over 5,000 miles away?\u00a0 Well, I didn’t call him, but started a sort of pen pal camaraderie with him that had all the overtones of new love.\u00a0 He told me that he was just thinking about ending a relationship with a woman.\u00a0 The final blow had come on Valentine’s Day when he had made the romantic gesture of ordering flowers at the florist where she worked.\u00a0 The owner had this woman make a beautiful arrangement of roses and then when she had finished, the owner of the shop told her that she had just made them for herself and that they were from Lennie.\u00a0 Well she didn’t like that.\u00a0 She had called up Lennie and had ripped into him that flowers were not a ‘good enough’ gift for her.\u00a0 Lennie, deflated, had turned to the Internet.\u00a0 He said that he did something on Valentine’s Day that he had only done about 3 times:\u00a0 he looked at the ‘who has viewed me’ list.\u00a0 He had said that he never cared who had looked at him if they didn’t bother to write.\u00a0 And there I was.\u00a0 One serendipitous moment in time that had started our beautiful love affair that was yet to come.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

The photo of Lennie that\u00a0 captured my heart – still my favorite photo of him.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kathryn<\/em><\/p>\n

www.kathrynsmith.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We met on the Internet in\u00a0one serendipitous moment in time.\u00a0 It was Valentine’s Day 2009.\u00a0 What does any single woman do on Valentine’s Day?\u00a0\u00a0 We stay home and read, watch television or peruse the Internet.\u00a0 I was looking for a book.\u00a0 I could not remember the author’s last name or the title, so I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lennie-and-kathryn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":699,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}