Fires, flags and various other controversial assignments crossed local news desks in the last week, but their appeal all paled in comparison to the end-of-week gift about a Kelowna dentist who travelled across the globe to find his lady love match.
According to stories that ran in the Irish Sun, National Post and Huffington Post—strangely no local sources for this ditty—dentist Sandy Crocker has travelled to Ennistymon, Ireland to find his heart.
A year ago he left it there—cue the Tony Bennett song— after chatting to an enchanting 20-something about the weather and getting directions to a local landmark.
A couple of reporters crafted love stories from his tale, but one skipped the interview process and the world got to learn dentists are better with drills than sentimental prose.
One reporter dug up Crocker’s Plenty of Fish dating profile, where he’d previously shared his thoughts on his chance encounter in mushy keystrokes.
“My breath was taken away to the point of near suffocation…She was gentle, graceful, the kind of girl who would enter a shoe store and leave with brown boots, [whose] mother probably thought blue glass was pretty and still collectible,” Crocker wrote, under the name Travel-bug-4u.
It’s an unusual assessment, let alone cause to go globe trotting, but if this was 1980s, I’d bet money that women would be swooning in the wake of the story, and filing into the dentist’s office for the first available root canal.
These days, however, vague ramblings followed by the decision to stake out a woman’s location based on a brief meeting has become less than romantic.
Put simply by several people in my office, it reads less like a love story than it does the background for a pending court case.
Of course, we’re jaded and snarky. When you spend your day listening to a police scanner and lurking in courtrooms, it’s difficult to imagine that pursuing daydreams through extreme measures can have a positive resolution.
But, despite my doubts, part of me is rooting for the dentist.
Maybe he’s just quirky. After all, there can’t be many men who daydream themselves into an asthma attack with thoughts of women born to potential hoarders, who also like brown boots. That’s an unusual set of attributes to idealize.
There’s also, refreshingly, no mention of the usual Kelowna stereotypes of blonde haired, orange skin, giant breasts and overdone tribal tattoos. Another point working in his favour.
More than anything, however, I hope his imagined love affair and overwrought prose don’t come back to haunt him.
After all, first story out of Ireland was sweet, and Crocker came off as a dreamer.
The second story was much of the same.
But, the version that used Crocker’s own Internet musings was creepy.
Whether a romance blossoms remains to be seen, but it’s clearly a reminder on how to conduct yourself on the Internet.
When you hit publish, those dear diary words don’t always languish in obscurity. They linger, sometimes forever, so you should really be committed.
In this case, after all, a happily-ever-after may depend on it. I suppose her Irish eyes will have to decide.
