One of life’s more embarrassing moments.

When I was around 19 years of age I was hanging out with my friend Jeff quite a bit, as we were both going to the same college and had been close in high school. He worked at the now defunct Montgomery Wards retail chain as did some of our other mutual friends, with some of whom I’m still close to this day. It was an odd social hangout, especially since I would spend a good amount of time there during business hours. There were some odd connections to some of the employees to some other people I knew and one of those in particular was to a girl named Missy who was (unbeknownst to me at the time) the niece of one of the managers of the restaurant I was working at. Missy was cute, and at the time I remember having a bit of a crush. Now here’s the embarrassing part.

Winter snowfalls in the Chicagoland area have a tendency to leave your car covered in a very thick blanket if left unattended for some time; the particular kind of blanket that is perfect for leaving messages written in the snow on the car’s windows. As we’d all hung out together socially, I was familiar with which car was Missy’s. It was a huge station wagon and not all that hard to detect in a huge snowstorm. Alone in the parking lot with nothing but my imagination, my teenage brain reverted to that special form of communication reserved for crushes of the kindergarten variety. You guessed it, taunting.

As much as I’d like to consider myself an intelligent man, there have been occasions that I’m reminded that I am infallibly human. This particular attempt at taunting poor Missy came in the form of the phrase “Hi Stupid!” written on the ginormous back window of her station wagon. Oh yeah, the embarrassing part: I misspelled “stupid” by leaving out the t. It’s been a running joke ever since between Jeff and I and I don’t remember hanging out with Missy again after that.