An old photo album, a social media plea, and a significant amount of luck helped an Upper West Side woman reunite with a friend she hadn’t heard from in 30 years.
A few years ago, when Jennifer Carcano found a charming photo in her scrapbook of herself and an older girl growing up in the 1990s, she wondered what had happened to her childhood friend.
The older girl, Kimberly Mendez, played an integral role in Carcano’s childhood for two years when Carcano, now 36, was too young to go alone and her mother was too ill to attend the now-closed school. I took her to St. Gregory’s Catholic School. Please take her there.
The girls, both of whom lived several buildings away on West 90th Street, lost contact after Mendez graduated from the school, which at the time only operated through eighth grade, in 1995. Carcano was in the third grade of elementary school at the time.
“She treated me calmly,” Carcano recalled. “We just walked and talked and she dropped me off at my class and she went to hers.”
The discovery of the photo sparked a years-long search that seemed doomed to failure.
Carcano knew Mendez by his first name and only had one photo of him. She tried contacting her past teachers and posting other posts on her Facebook, but she was of no help. She couldn’t even ask her mother who passed away 10 years ago.
“I just wanted to know how she was doing,” Carcano said of her friend. “I wasn’t expecting much.”
Last month, she finally got answers after posting on the Upper West Side Together Facebook page.
“My name is Jennifer and the name of the young woman hugging me is Kimberly,” Carcano posted on February 23, according to local media. ilovetheupperwestside.comfirst reported this story.
“I’ve been looking for her for years, just to show my gratitude. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have been able to go to school every day because of my mother’s illness, and she’s such a lovely, beautiful young woman. So, does anyone know where I can find her?”
It took only a few hours for her to find the answer.
“Then someone said, ‘I know who it is and I want to make sure she feels comfortable coming forward with the information,'” Carcano said. “I didn’t have much hope again, but then Kim wrote me a letter on Facebook and said, ‘You found me. I felt so happy. ”
Mendez, 42, currently lives in Connecticut and is a working mother with two jobs.
“I started crying right away. It felt so good…someone remembered something you did that was so shocking to them,” said Carcano, who is looking for her. she told the Post about when she found out.
Mendez’s aunt was contacted by a friend about Carcano’s Facebook plea and passed the message on to her niece.
When Ms. Mendez responded to a post on the Upper West Side page, she wrote: You were a very kind young lady. ”
Mendez said she believed Carcano’s mother initially paid her $5 a week to help her daughter.
“But somewhere along the line, I just really loved doing it,” Mendes said, noting that Carcano was “like a little sister.”
The two spoke two weeks ago for the first time in nearly 30 years and had sent several texts about plans to meet up once the weather warmed up.
Carcano herself is now a mother and lives in the same apartment complex where she grew up, and Mendez’s aunt still lives on the same street.
“Our plan is to meet up for drinks or catch up,” Carcano said. “She would be happy to have an updated photo of just her and me…and she would be so happy to see her again.”
