Hoops

Kimi told me a story about how she started calling one of her new friends Hoops. (Welcome Hoops.) It reminded me of a story that I wrote out to her (Kimi) in email. The story turned out to be interesting enough for me to instead post it here. If Reni-belle is still reading this thing, she's the reason I decided to post it:

Your "Hoops" story reminds me of a similar story of my own. Reni and I went to a party in College Park (very close to Evander Holyfield's house) back when we were maybe 18/19. I don't know how she got invited, but I think she only knew one person there. I didn't know anyone. We ended up being the only white people in the whole place - and it was a pretty big party. We met so many people and several of the guys were pretty cool. We ended up hanging out with this one set of guys for most of the night. I'm so bad with names when I first meet people. But this night I really made an effort to remember their names. One of them was named Mike and he was wearing a University of Miami t-shirt/sweatshirt. He became "Miami Mike." It's not like he was a huge fan of Miami or had ever lived there. But he was forever branded in my head as Miami Mike. About 4 years later, I ran into him at work. He'd started working in one of our warehouses. Even after working with him for a couple of years, I still thought of him as Miami Mike. Thankfully, I never called him that to his face. But to this day, I can't think of his last name. Just that stupid pneumonic device.

As a footnote to this story, I later went on to attend Pioneer School with the brother who threw that party. I think Reni and I got invited to a few more of his parties. I don't remember going to any others and eventually he had to stop throwing such huge parties. If you've ever been to a convention and heard one booming voice singing out louder and longer than anyone else in the arena ... that's the former party master himself. I heard him this summer at my convention (even though I knew it wasn't his scheduled convention). I didn't see him until the very end of the day. I just laughed and told him that I'd been looking for him since I'd heard him during the first song.