Q. What's a great nickname for someone you haven't met yet?
A. R.G.
(For Lent, I've decided to write 40 posts about people I love / made me who I am / thankful to know / appreciate)
There were these girls that lived, I think on the 4th or 8th floor, in McCormick Hall my freshman year at Marquette University. They were from a suburb about 20 minutes west of Milwaukee. Some of these girls were cute, it's probably why we were talking to them. We might have watched Dawson's Creek with these women.
One day, they mentioned that a friend of theirs from High School lived on our floor too - and that we should hang out with him because he is a nice guy. Before I met "R***" he was known as "Nice Guy R***" For the record, I was not the one who assigned this nickname.
It remains one of the better, and more accurate, nicknames anybody ever assigned to someone before they were met. Over ten years later, he's still living up to the rather high bar placed for him by those randomly cute girls that I probably won't even recognize today if they passed me on the street.
R has one of the nicer last names for more nickname generation. And once we actually got to know him, "Nice Guy R" evaporated because I think we just assumed and started to take his "nice guy" appeal for granted. That, and his last name was flexible enough to allow us to mold into a "****sie" or "****s".
We really didn't talk much after I graduated from MU. He had an extra two years to complete his 6 year master's program. But in the last two years we've reconnected, sparked from obligations to go to a bachelor party and his wedding. It made me realize that he still is a Nice Guy, and that more of an effort should be made to spend time together. I'm also thankful that his wife has enjoyed meeting friends from "before her time" and helps plan nights around the fact that she can cook and we can not.
And now he's back to being a good friend: going to concerts and basketball games and the like.
Special note: I think "Nice Guy R" is one of my sister's favorite nicknames she's heard from me, but she only first met R a few weeks ago for the first time.
