The only way I can much remember things is to kind of “hack in” to my memories. I can’t go directly there. I have to have something to “jog” the hacking process. I have to put in a query and wait for the old “hard drive” gray matter to eventually bubble it up to the surface. This process could take minutes, or sometimes days.
I ran across my old 1968 High School annual yesterday as I was putting up some photo albums and I flipped through the pages. I looked at some of the pictures and some of the things which people wrote in my book. I flipped past the page showing the “class favorites” and I paused a moment and reflected. As I remember, I always wanted to be “something” when I was in High School, but as it turns out I was pretty innocously anonymous. In the annals of mediocrity, I stood amongst the crowd lost in middle.
It mattered a lot to me then, but I really didn’t know how to be popular. I for sure wasn’t the smartest, the handsomest, the best dresser, the most atheletic, the most likely to succeed, the wittiest, or anything resembling any of those traits. I didn’t even vote for myself for any of these…to be honest, I don’t even know if it was a voting process. Can’t remember.
I think today about what matters from back then, and it seems to me that the memories of those days are the most important. I certainly have a lot of those, and if that’s the measurement, then I’m not doing to badly.
I remember a lot of things. Perhaps one of these days I can find the time to write them all down.
In hindsight, I don’t guess I would do much differently. I don’t think I could. I was what I was, and that’s all that I was. Age hasn’t changed me, except to ripen my flavor like an old crabapple which has dropped on the ground and lays there waiting for someone to pick it up.
Writing for Sanity's Sake 