Looking Back

I'm currently house sitting for some friends. It's a small thing that I can do for them while they're at the beach. You know, get the mail, take the trash to the curb, water the garden. Little things to attempt to make up for the fact that they've given me a home for the last few weeks while I'm in between apartments.

By the way, being between apartments for the better part of a month is a real annoyance. It just occurred to me that this could make a pretty entertaining blog post for those of you who enjoy reading about my annoyances. I'll get to that later this week. Or maybe tomorrow.

Before the Creasy's left for the beach, I sat in their living room on Friday night. I really have no idea how we got on the subject of reminiscing. But we got on the subject of reminiscing. And then Jessica started pulling out yearbooks from our days at Woodrow Wilson Middle School. She found her yearbook from the first grade when we were at Raleigh Court Elementary. And I had no choice but to pull out her senior yearbook after she told me where to find it. The temptation was too great.

There are times in my adult years when I've felt nostalgic enough to look back at my own yearbooks. I look at the notes and signatures from people that I haven't spoken to or even seen in over a decade. In a lot of ways, it makes me feel a little better about the person I was as I was growing up. Sure, I have more than a few "Have a nice summers!" floating around in there. As we all know, that's the yearbook signing kiss of death. It means the signer had nothing better to say because they really didn't know you at all.

But I also have a lot of notes that kind of tell me that more people thought more of me than I knew. That, or they were just being nice and didn't want to just say "Have a nice summer!"

It was interesting to see how people signed Jessica's yearbooks. While we've been friends since that first day of school at Raleigh Court (a claim that I now question after seeing an X over my face in her 1st grade yearbook), we're very different personalities. I've always been quiet and reserved whenever confronted with new people and extremely social situations, like school. Whereas she was voted friendliest in our senior class.

So there are a couple of major differences in the way people saw her when signing her yearbook. For one, she was a girl. People approach signing a girl's yearbook much differently than they would a guy's. At least, I assume they would. The other difference was probably made clear in the previous paragraph. She was a much more visible person in school than I was. I shied away from people and the spotlight. She knew everyone.

Memory is a funny thing. Like I said, I can't remember what got us on the subject of our school days. I do remember laughing so hard that I thought I might pass out. More than once. But four days later, I have no idea why we were laughing. Probably had something to do with some of the notes and letters that Jessica had saved over the years. No offense, ladies, but you can pass some pretty ridiculous notes.

But seriously, why was there an X over my portrait in that first grade yearbook? Was I that offensive? I was one of two people with an X. Most of the other kids from our class had check marks on their pics. There were a few with nothing at all, which kind of denotes a certain indifference. I wasn't even good enough for indifference. I know I stuck my tongue out at Mrs. Atkinson once, but I got caught. I did my time. I don't think I totally deserved to have my portrait defaced for all time.

I need to cry this one out.