A long time ago

I know a lot of people look back on their younger lives and view them as the Glory Days.  I am not one of those people. My youth might be better described as an experiment in how much awkwardness a person can endure - an era characterized by awful 80's fashion, orthodontia, Ayn Rand, and a stint in the high school clarinet section.  I'm that girl.  I'd rather you believe that I'm a participant in the Witness Protection Program if you could just allow me that.  Recently, though, my parents announced that they are moving and that means all the crap I left at their house so I wouldn't have to go through and look at it after college now has to be gone through and sorted out and that also means that I had the opportunity to relive my not most glorious of days. All of the stops on this trip include photos of me trying on different identities and mostly missing the mark. Red hair? Yep. Hippie clothes for a bit? Sure.  Laura Ashley jumpers? Ugh. And each identity included a different matching, but ultimately ill-fitting, boyfriend.  I've done the work required to say that I am not the same person I was 20 years ago, but I'm still the girl who needs to do what her mama asks so I finally got by there this week.

I did not realize our walk was going to go all the way back to elementary school so, first, let me say that the thing where people keep every scrap from their first child and then kind of get busy and figure the second one will work it out is really a thing.  Whatever - just means my sister has more artwork to look through in the next few weeks. My second child issues are not even issues so that's not my focus here.

While I was going through my treasures from youth I found a lot of neat things. I found that my mom kept every single certificate for every single accomplishment in elementary, middle, high school and college. Turns out I was a champ at nailing the A-Average, a great speller, and I also uncovered a trend that in the 80's everybody got a certificate for something.  Those went in the trash - except for the diplomas of course. I found piano recital programs and band awards and a ton of photographic evidence that hairspray can accomplish more than your flat, blond-haired head ever dreamed.

I was happier with the Belmont University findings. For whatever reason, I kept a lot of class notes from college that I guess I figured would still matter to me one day. Obviously someone thought she was important. I found a handwritten note from my friend Brad (priceless since his death in July) passed to me during British Lit and some articles he'd written in the campus newspaper.  I found tickets and doodles and essays and quizzes. While I flipped through one of my notebooks I discovered that for a year or so I had written down quotes from things I'd read or heard.  I have no memory of doing this, but I am fascinated at how many of those quotes still resonate with me.  Maybe I'm not so changed after all.  Here's one I kept probably because I found it funny:

"When a woman has scholarly inclinations, there is usually something wrong with her sexuality." Friedrich Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil

Jerk.  But this one has stayed with me because I believe it's true:

"One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day." - Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.  

I remember this because I believe, conversely, one bad incident doesn't make a bad day, year or life. That's a quote that I've kept in mind all these years.

I found quotes from my dad - "If you have to be in an institution, marriage is as good as any"  and from Barney Fife - "Nip it in the bud!" and even Paul Simon -"Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."  There were tons from Walt Whitman - and I'd still quote him because there's no better missive from a person you've lost than, "Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you."

I was most delighted when I found this one from a class my friend Ginger taught.  Apparently one of the first class lectures was about Business Ethics and the obligations of corporations. Here's my instruction on that:

Guess a lot of folks missed that one and I think I could probably revisit this class.  I could get stuck on this one for a while.  Gosh, just imagine how different our headlines would be if we actually did that.

Glancing through all the college essays and papers and notes I can't believe how much I read and wrote during those few years.  I can see how hungry my mind was for direction and insight and it makes it easier to understand why I needed to try so many hats on to find the identity that's mine. I really believed that now that the braces were off I COULD MAKE MYSELF INTO ANYTHING (probably except an astronaut).  I see that I wrote with such confidence about the world during a time that I knew so little about it.  So in some ways things are different - now I readily admit that the world is way too big for me to pretend that I know too much about it and am so much more comfortable writing to you about what I don't know and also I am way more committed to good hair products.  But in other ways I'm so much the same - still moved by Whitman, still hungry to make sense of all the brilliant things other people have written, still charmed by the funny things they might say, and, very importantly, still a Super Speller!

So, as much as I still would rather you believe that I am in the Witness Protection Program and that no historical documentation or photograph about me exists before this very moment, I have to say sometimes it's not so bad to spend a little time visiting the older versions of ourselves.  I might have built up enough courage to tackle the yearbooks next.  Talk soon.