Author’s Note: I have changed some of the names and the details that wrote in my yearbook because I don’t want rehash all the trouble I caused in 1991.
“Hey, what are tangible men?”, asked my husband as he came up the stairs.
“What kind of non sequitur crap is that? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You wrote that you like tangible men,” he said.
“Oh, dear God. They found my high school yearbook,” I said to myself.
I responded, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Bring up her yearbook,” my husband yelled to my oldest son.
Oh the horror. The big hair. The dark make-up. Tons of jewelry. Silly candid photos of me twirling my baton. The picture that immortalizes me as the Most Gullible girl. A sappy dedication from my mother, and my dreadful entry in the section called Senior Directories: Information Concerning the 1991 graduates.
The concept behind the section is a good one: Give graduates a spot to provide contact information (no email in those days, just physical addresses); list school activities; and reflect on their likes and dislikes. If done correctly, this section could accurately reflect a moment in time. Show what was important to students and what trends were occurring? The well-written entries could reveal how you, your values, and what you value have changed or remained the same after graduation.
Or, you could do what I did and fill your space with a lot of inside jokes that were either so obscure no one knew what you were talking about at the time or so unimportant you can't remember the sentiment behind the words 18 years later.
Now that I got you curious. I'll take a huge leap of faith that embarrassment won’t kill me and share the entire cringe-worthy list with you:
Likes:
· family and friends (Wrote that because everyone else did.)
· “IN” (Not a preposition, but the boy that I had a crush on at the time.)
· 7-4-89 (The date of my first kiss with "IN." Sentimental Crap. Get a life!)
· Destiny in the rain (Also connected to the first kiss. So, pathetic.)
· Maryland construction workers (Guess it meant something to me at the time.)
· M.R.’s and lollipops (Exceptionally obscure inside joke that still makes me laugh.)
· Tangible men (Your guess is as good as mine.)
Dislikes:
· Jugglers (Huge mistake. IN’s girlfriend. This comment made all hell break loose.)
· Mashed potatoes (Truly astonishing that I did go on to earn a few degrees.)
· Highway breakdowns (Reasonable.)
· Intangible men (Other side of the indiscernible coin.)
· Calculus confusion (Captures the challenges of 12th grade math, not bad.)
The inclusion of my likes are not worthy of analysis but two of my omissions bother me: Prince and writing. If I would have included them, these would have reflected the things that I have held onto since my childhood. I can attribute the Prince omission to his release of Graffiti Bridge in 1991, which was the start of his commercial decline. So, my affection may have waned for a year and two. But, no excuse exists for not listing writing. Because I was trying to be so clever in the writing of my likes and dislikes, I simply forgot to mention it.
So after 18 years, my dislike for mashed potatoes and highway breakdowns still rings true.
Mashed potatoes. That is what I picked to emphasize. From what I remember and from what people tell me, I was a smart girl in my teens. I could have wrote that I disliked world hunger, war (Gulf War started in 1991), child abusers; skin-heads, censorship and people who don’t respect the First Amendment. Anything that would have indicated to my children almost twenty-years later that I had a brain then and I used it.
But between my clueless facial expressions and dumb comments, there is no evidence of the existence of my brain in high school. So when I look at the cover of the yearbook and it asks: Remember When?
I respond, “No, thank you. I rather not.”
