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I recently have been chatting with one of the boys in this picture, thanks to Facebook. I've heard
a vicious rumor that he is no longer a boy, but rather a forty year old man with a wife and child, but in my mind he will always be the teenage boy that I knew.
Talking with him has been Really Neat for me, and hopefully at least A Little Neat for him. It
made me think about a lot of things, so I dug out these pictures, which made me think about them even more.
My senior year in high school always felt like a single and isolated event, rather than being connected to the rest of my teenage years. My first year in high school was spent somewhere else -- Pittsburgh -- and then we moved. Strange as it may sound, I spent the next two years just struggling to adjust, and it wasn't until senior year that I had -- or had even met -- this group of friends.
In a way, that makes that time period and those friends more special, because it was so fleeting.
We had fun together for a year, then all went off our separate ways.
I look at these pictures and remember so much: The party at Maureen's house where we
watched The Sure Thing and all belted out Rod Stewart's "Infatuation." Stopping at Dunkin Donuts on our way to go take the AP English test, and laughing when we realized we had started to drive away with the box of Munchkins on top of our car. Watching Ferris Beuller's Day Off at Vicki's house and thinking it was the greatest movie ever. Feeling like the whole day was ruined when the boy I liked wasn't in Calculus class that day. Going to Six Flags with three of my girlfriends on the day of prom because none of us had dates.
I could go on and on.
I see these pictures and have an almost aching desire to jump inside them,
like the chalk drawings in Mary Poppins -- or the "skidoo" on Blue's Clues.
I look at them and remember how exuberant and carefree and silly and bubbling with excitement we all were.
I wish I could go back and visit them. Visit that.
I don't think I would say my life was better back then. It isn't that. But today I have a mortgage and endless amounts of laundry. My husband just got a pay cut and our health insurance premiums are about to go up -- again. I have watched one of my children be literally on the brink of death, unable to move, for almost three straight weeks. I've spent days myself in a bed in ICU, unable to even use the bathroom, while various other people took care of my children for me.
And yes, I wish I could go back, for just a few hours ... to the times when we laughed and shrieked continually about Nothing in Particular, when we decorated ourselves with long streams of toilet paper and danced outside in the dark at my birthday party, and when I spent the night at Adrienne's house and babbled endlessly over trying to decide who I liked more, Bryan or Scott.
I haven't seen, or even heard from, most of the people in these photos for well over a decade. I wish they could somehow read this post -- to know I'm thinking of them, to know all the nice memories I have about them 22 years later.
I guess I'd like to tell them Thank You.
