The best compliment...

I had dinner with the Captain last night. He was in town for a quick overnight, and I met him after work. Juice was planning on joining us too, but the meeting she was in ran really long, so she ended up just going home.

The Captain and I started off sitting at the bar, since we were waiting for Juice, and as we were ogling the bartenders, a waitress at the other end of the bar caught my eye. Just something about her.

"Dude...you know who she looks like?" I asked the Captain. "You remember Shelly? That girl I dated before I moved down here? Looks just like her. Check it out." I pulled out my phone and pulled up Shelly's facebook account.

"That's amazing. That girl could be her twin."

"Yeah, I know. You know, I had this kid my first year of teaching - her name was Crystal - that looked just like her. It was weird, because here I was teaching 6th grade, but this kid in my class looked just like my ex girlfriend. It was crazy. I even brought in a picture of Shelly one day and showed it to one of Crystal's friends, and asked her who it looked like, and her friend even said it looked like Crystal."

Then my mind caught up with the conversation...we were a few beers in at this point.

"You know what...Crystal, let's see, that was in 1997, so she graduated from high school in 2004, which means she'd be about, what? Twenty-three or twenty-four now? That waitress is about the right age, huh?"

"Yeah man. Ask the bartender."

"Hey Erin," I called to the bartender who had been waiting on us. "What's the girl's name down there at the register?"

"Crystal."

The Captain and I exchanged a look of utter disbelief.

"Can you have her come down here?"

And wouldn't you know it...12 years after my first year of teaching, I ran into a student I had that first year. Crystal came down and gave me a big hug, told us that she had just gotten married and had been roommates with one of the other students I had that first year of teaching. I caught her up on what I was doing, and my family, etc. It was great to see her again after all of these years.

And guess what Crystal is going to school for?

She's going to be a teacher.

When we finished with dinner, I gave her my email address and told her if she ever needed any help, advice, anything with education, to drop me a line.