My long-time pen pal from Northside Park Pool

We met on a ski bus trip to Sault St. Marie, Canada. As unaccompanied women, we were seated as roommates and ended up cracking jokes about the loose women on the trip.

Later we met again at the Northside Park swimming pool in Fort Wayne, where I took a lunchtime break from my corporate communications job, and she started her day before working on second trick. A graduate of of the University of Michigan, she had a big job at the Kraft Plant in Kendallville. She knew a lot about the mini-marshmallows that were put in Lucky Charms cereal, among other facinating things.

And during those lunch times at the pool, while she religiously worked in her sets of laps, and I read and planned next to the pool, we bonded. We clicked.

She had been a competitive synchronized swimmer in college, and could still do all the moves. She liked that I was a dancer and a skier, and how I was brave around dogs. Growing up, she had spent a lot of time in bad parts of Detroit with her family's grocery business, and all the dogs around there were guard dogs. Not exactly friendly.

After school age, women sometimes have trouble connecting with each other as friends. It's like there is an unwritten rule that all other priorities are more important. Whatever it is, the rule didn't apply here. We weren't just alike, but we made a connection -one that has lasted some 22 years, over a great distance.

You see, Syncro, as I'm going to call her, got bored with her Kendallville job - It wasn't like working for Ben & Jerry's. So, she went back to school at the lovely Bloomington campus of Indiana University and became a doctor of Optometry. Then she enlisted in the Air Force, and has been all over the world, traveling and serving our country. She has worked on American Indian reservations in the United States, and was stationed in South Korea for a while.

It was from Korea she wrote me and sent me a series of stunning postcards, detailing her life and impressions of the area. I always wrote back, and we have now been pen pals for about 20 years. She moved back from Korea to Arizona, then to Washington State, and now San Antonio. She dated Top Gun pilots and servicemen, but never married. Still, she wrote, and I wrote back, and told her about my children when they were born, and our home and our life.

I will share some stories about Synchro in the next installment of the blog - observations she made about people in Korea, and her ideas about the risks to the freedoms of our country. But for now, just know how great it is to have an old-fashioned, snail-mail pen pal, and how thrilling it is to get that next card or letter in the mail. The image above is one side of an actual postcard from Korea. Tailwind out, until next time.