Memory Lane

One of the things that we discovered when we arrived here in the 'dale is that my mom left a bunch of my stuff in the house, things she'd been keeping for me since I moved out to go to college. I spent a few hours looking through old yearbooks and old schoolwork and old literary magazines (complete with poem by Sara entitled My Hands!), through the basket of letters I received during the summer after my freshman year in college, and reading through all of the old school newspapers I'd saved for some bizarre reason. I found a VHS tape of my High School Video Yearbook that may be some time before I get to watch, since I don't know if I know anyone with a functional VHS player. And I found this stuff.



"Carlitos" was an exercise I had to do in one of my Spanish classes, though why it has someone else's name on it (on the top of the page, above the photo), I have no idea. In case you can't see what I wrote in each of the bubbles, I'll provide both the Spanish and the English translation.

Panel 2: "¿Por favor, tengo quiero usar el baño?" (Please, I have to want to use the bathroom?) (It should have been, "Por favor, ¿puedo usar el baño?", or Please, can I use the bathroom?)
Panel 3: "¡Pero es muy importante! ¡Necesito ir al baño AHORA!" (But it's very important! I have to go to the bathroom NOW!)
Panel 4: "¡Ay Caramba! Es demasiado tarde." (Oh noes! It's too late.)





Me at a dance with High School Boyfriend at his school. Perhaps Valentine's Day? I'm wearing a dress of my mom's circa 1970, a silver peace sign necklace I got at the Renaissance Faire, and awesome white low-heeled pumps! It's a photo of a photo, so not exactly the most accurate representation, but you get the idea.



From top left: Handmade doll with embroidered face, yarn hair, etc. I named Rose; Snoopy doll I got for having my birthday party at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, the ice rink owned/operated by Charles Schultz and family; stuffed lamb sans one eye; small stuffed raccoon; baby doll that used to have a matching bonnet. I forget her name.



I could write an entire blog post on this alone, but I'll try to make a long story short. When I was first babysitting, I pretty much saved all of the money I made and used it to pay for camp in the summer. Eventually, I had made enough that I had a bit left over, and I decided to buy my very first pair of shoes myself. I was probably 13 or 14 years old, and up until that point, my parents had bought all of my clothes/shoes for me. I'd wanted a pair of Birkenstocks for a long time, and I finally had enough money to buy them for myself. So I did.

As you can see, I wore these shoes all the time. I wore them with socks when it was cold and without when it was warm, and I love love loved them, as they were the most comfortable shoes ever (and to me, paying $80 for a pair of shoes felt totally obscene, so I was determined to get my money's worth out of them). When I bought them, they were a pretty slate blue, but as the years went by they faded to a dull grayish color. I didn't care, though; I still wore them all the time. I wore down the soles and wore out the toe and the heel, and eventually they started looking pretty ratty, but I couldn't imagine giving them up.

The summer after high school graduation, my family went on our very first ever (and, it would turn out, only) family camping vacation. Our first stop was a campground someplace in the Western Sierras, and when we had the tent set up my sisters and I went for a walk down to the river, a tributary that would feed the American. Wearing my Birks, I climbed out onto a big rock to sit only to catch my right shoe on something. It fell off my foot and into the fast-moving snow melt runoff river.

I was so sad. I felt like I'd lost my best friend, something that had been with me for so much of my teenage years, something that had cost me EIGHTY DOLLARS and I just couldn't bring myself to through the unlost shoe away.

Something tells me that it has been long enough now. This is not moving with us to our next domicile.




I DID write an entire blog post about this one. Here's the sole Piers Anthony newsletter I ever received, where I responded to the pen pal request for a certain Kent B Golden of Hamden, CT. Who knew that 16 years later I'd be attending his wedding?