Charlene! Charlene! The Lamp of My Life!

Willamette St near 28th, Eugene OR

Description

I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow In a previous post, I shot an arrow into the Craigslist "Missed Connections" section with the hope that it might somehow find its way to the lovely Charlene. I had never done anything like that before and had doubts that my efforts would succeed. Charlene, briefly recapping things here, is a woman I first met by the Eugene library coffee shop. At that time, she was taking a math course at LCC. She appeared to be an adult who had returned to school at a later age. This happened quite a long while back. More recently, last month in May, I ran into her on the 24 Donald bus going south on Willamette Street. A friend of mine had a broken lamp and I was on my way to the True Value hardware store to pick up a repair part. After I told her that, she told me that she also had a broken lamp (or more specifically a "bent" one). "What an odd coincidence," I thought, "Man on his way to fix a lamp runs into someone else with a broken lamp." I offered to fix her lamp as well and gave her my phone number. But as I stepped off of the bus she called after me and said "It might be a while before I call you, I don't have a phone." As the bus pulled away, I thought "She doesn't have a phone? How can this happen??" I thought perhaps she was waiting to get a monthly check. The month of May passed without a call from her. June began with no call so I began answering "unknown caller" calls, hoping that one of them might be from her. None of the calls did come from her, but I now have a time share ski condo in Aspen. After my previous posting here, somewhat to my surprise, I got three responses. Two of them seemed to be random responses with no connection to the person I was looking for. But one of the responses - if I can believe it - seemed to indicate that while I may not have reached Charlene directly I had reached someone who was Charlene adjacent! The Charlene adjacent response (from "Shannon") said that she thought she knew EXACTLY who I was talking about! "Wow!" I thought, "That's amazing!" She asked me to describe what Charlene looked like and asked for a "ballpark number" on her age. Shannon also said "I'm very protective of my friend." "That's odd," I thought, "Charlene doesn't have phone, but she does have someone who protects her?" Nevertheless, I responded quickly giving the best answers I could ("sorta like Dyan Cannon?") and also described myself. I had mentioned Robert Redford in the posting, but that was, you know, kind of a hopeful exaggeration. I never got a response to that email or a subsequent follow up. Was it a different Charlene? If so, I would have thought Shannon kind enough to let me know that. Did Shannon ever even GET my emails? I've bought and sold things here on Craigslist so her email to me didn't go into my Spam folder and it did reach me. Sometimes, however, Craigslist emails do go straight into a Spam folder, never to be found. Is that what happened to my replies? If you should be the real Charlene (or Charlene adjacent), I would love to hear from you. The lamp fixing offer still stands, even if it just involves me picking it up at a bus stop and returning it to that same bus stop later with no further interaction necessary. I am a Mr. Fixit by nature, somewhat annoyed to be living in such a throwaway culture. Have you ever been to a trash dump landfill? I have. Shannon, are you reading this? Did you share my emails with Charlene? Hello, Charlene? Or someone Charlene adjacent?