Complete Strangers

Buffalo and his brother… Long story

Lately I have been going through old photos and scanning them in to my computer. Wow, how did we survive before digital? I swear!

Anyway I scanned in photos a couple weeks ago from my trip to Washington D.C. with FFA the summer before my junior year of high school. Now this story could be about all the complete strangers I met because I met a lot. We all left friends but this is about one stranger I met in particular.

My aunt and uncle live in southern Oklahoma and at the time had a set of twin boys that were working for them. My aunt had told the one brother about me and possibly even showed him a picture, I can’t remember. Anyway then she told me about him. She said he was cute and we were the same age.

When she found out he was attending the Washington Leadership Conference and so was I, she checked with each of us as to what week (there are multiple weeks). Turns out we were going the same week. My aunt told us that we should look each other up.

The week my FFA chapter went was the week all the Oklahoman’s came. I spent the whole next week trying to find him. Now Oklahoma rented a couple charter buses and drove out there all together so it was usually only one or two kids from each chapter. That meant that no one actually knew each other really and no one knew his name when I asked. I finally gave up hope and chalked it up to the fact that he was in the other hotel (WLC had 2 hotels per week).

The last day we were in Washington D.C. both hotels were taken to the National Mall and turned loose. We had T-shirts we had to wear and were told that we had to be able to see the tower. If we couldn’t we’d gone to far.

A group from our FFA Chapter wanted to go up in the tower but if you were under 18 you had to have a chaperone. One of our gals knew a gal who would take us up so there were 10 of us (including the chaperone) going up into the tower (all girls) when 2 boys walked up to our group and conned this lady into taking them up too. She agreed and razzed them asking who they were and where they were from.

I wasn’t really paying much attention but I heard this guy’s name (I can’t remember it anymore sadly) and that he was from Wayne, Oklahoma. I had my back to these two boys but I screamed. When I screamed all the girls from my FFA chapter looked at me like I had lost my mind and I started laughing.

At one point we had to cram into an elevator like sardines (I was standing on my tip toes pinned against the wall so I didn’t get stepped on…). My friend Taria was standing next to the boys and I kept elbowing her asking her to strike up a conversation with them to find out if I really had heard this boys name correctly or not. She wouldn’t do it.

So we finally get to the top of the tower and you walk around in a box (there was a box in the middle of the box you walked around if that makes sense). I’m with the 3 other girls from my chapter and we’re walking around pointing out all the different sights we could see when the 2 boys walked up and started chatting with us. (The other boy was from Wisconsin in case you were wondering).

The boys asked where we were from and between the 4 of us we all answered a little different and a little more specific. When the one boy heard our FFA Chapter he whipped his wallet out and asked if we knew a girl by my name. I smiled slyly and said yeah I do, that’s me.

And that’s how I intentionally met a complete stranger in Washington D.C.