I am clearly feeling much better. I have folded laundry but perhaps in a subconscious desire to avoid the dreaded sorting of socks, I have moved on to packing a few more things, namely my scrapbooks. I looked at my high school scrapbook. It is certainly not as polished as what I do now but I was smiling as I read what I wrote back in 1989 (I frowned at the browning of the scotch tape and the loose pages and began to plan how I could fix it...sigh...another project). I think I was particularly interested in the high school book because I just talked to one of my best friends from high school last week.
We were a motley bunch of kids. We didn't fit into any particular group (like the jocks/cheerleaders, the brainiacs, the party crowd, the super popular crowd) so we sort of made our own, the normal kids. I think we became friends because we started eating lunch together. We bonded over processed chicken patties, shredded lettuce with watered down ranch dressing and mixed into that assortment of fine cuisine was woven a lot of laughter and good memories.
In my scrapbook, I found an article I wrote for the school paper about the speech team that I was on. I had forgotten that I had even written it. One of my "lunch bunch" friends is a very talented artist and cartoonist with a penchant for satire and he did some cartoons that I saved as well as his satirical article about how perhaps the tray tokens we used in order to insure that we returned our trays, instead of leaving them on the tables, could possibly be the mark of the beast. I also clipped the principal's reply. He was less than pleased about my friend's article. I however, was very amused, and a little proud. My friend who called the other day and the friend who was the satirical cartoonist have been married now for 13 years.
I found ticket stubs to basketball games and movies that I went to. I am glad that I wrote down who I went with because that did trigger memories associated with the ticket even if I can't remember a thing about the game or the movie. I also saved funny cards my friends gave me or notes that were passed to me. I even saved some roses a boy gave to me that were half dead when he gave them to me because he left them in his car and they froze. That relationship lasted less than a week. Ahh high school.
Next summer will be my 20th class reunion. That should be interesting. That was something my friend and I were discussing. Was I going? I told her I went to the 5 year and stayed an hour because it was the same old garbage from high school, same cliques, and nothing really had changed, except me (and maybe the girl who lost 100 lbs and went from being a sweet person to being obnoxious and rude). I had been married for a year. I had just graduated from college (what I now refer to as College: Round 1). I felt like I was moving forward and that reunion felt like I was being sucked backwards.
So, when a drunk guy I didn't know told my husband to take me out on the floor to dance and pulled my chair out (and my husband did not rise to defend my honor BTW), I just said, "Let's just go." I didn't look back. And I skipped the 10 year reunion. I figure that by the 20 year reunion, life will have kicked everyone around enough to have evened things out and it should be more interesting to go to.
When I finished strolling through high school memories, I found my baby scrapbook. I always laugh when I open it because right in the front cover is the birth announcement for another baby. He was the son of my parents college friends and he was born a few months before me. Ironically, when I was in 8th grade, we moved next door to these college friends and he became one of my friends. It's a small world sometimes.
It was fun to see what my Mom wrote about me and all the cards with the funky 70's flair and colors. What struck me the most today was reading a letter my Grandmother wrote to me on my first birthday. She talked about how special my mom is to her because she is her first born daughter and then how I am her first born daughter and then how I special to her because I am her first grandchild. There was something in there too about how she was praying for me that I would grow up to be as good a mommy as my mom is. I'm so glad my mom saved that letter for me. It really touched me to know that 36 years ago, my grandmother was praying for me and for the children I would one day have. It is kind of messing with my head in a way. In a good way. It's just kind of freaky. In sticking with the 80's theme, it feels a bit like "Back to the Future" but without Michael J. Fox or that cool car.
As I looked over these pages that my mom put together for me, I realized just how precious this is to me now. It is a good reminder to me of how much I am loved by my parents. I laughed when I read how my Dad stood outside the base exchange handing out cigars and bragging about his new daughter. And then I remembered how proudly he carried my infant daughter in the crook of his arms to show his colleagues when I brought her to his work one day. My Dad doesn't say he loves me out loud very often but he tells me in his actions.
So, I am going to keep on scrapbooking. I am going to keep on journaling all those silly little things my kids do that make me laugh because some day, they are going to sit down and flip through those books and smile and laugh and know that their mom loved them so very much.
No comments:
Post a Comment