High School Reunion

My high school class is in the throes of planning its 30^th reunion.  To get us excited about the upcoming festivities, the planners periodically ask us questions on Facebook.  The current question is, “Where did you work in high school?”  This question instigated any number of fond memories.  But it dredged up awful memories too. 

One of my friends was living with her father and step-mother during high school and the father died a painful death of disease.  After her father died, she was shuffled between the remarried step-mother and her previously estranged mother for the duration of her high school years.  Another friend found her mother’s dead body after she had committed suicide.  Another friend watched his father try to murder his mother with a gun (luckily he missed).  My husband spent his high school years watching his younger sister become schizophrenic and dealing with all the family turmoil that caused.  I could go on and on with such stories.  If you don’t have them yourself, I’m sure you have friends who do.  To protect my family’s privacy (and my own sanity), I won’t go into the specifics of the misfortunes that my son and I perceived as tragedies during our high school years, although I will say that none involved suicide, attempted murder or guns. 

I read these cheerful reminisces and wonder, “Am I the only one who gets this filled with dolor when I remember those days?”  Even remembering my job brings water to my eyes because the lives of the people I worked with were so sad.  Acquaintances from high school remember how they felt about taking certain tests and I think, “Good grief.  Studying and tests were a relief for me.  If I ever worried about a test, I would consider myself extraordinarily lucky that I didn’t have other matters pressing my mind harder.” 

Misfortunes are such a slippery slope, it’s hard for me to even think much about them.  I may think being afraid of a high school test is silly, but the African mother in a refugee camp in a foreign country who has just seen her children beheaded and her village burned down would have a strong case for finding my problems trivial.  So, here’s a wild paradox:  all misfortunes are trivial AND all misfortunes are serious.  If someone tells us that sugar is the most evil substance on the planet, do we really have any choice but to believe that is true for her?

The difference between high school Julia and adult Julia is that, back then, I expended a great deal of  effort convincing myself and others that my private “tragedies”  didn’t matter.  Whereas now, when I think of the misfortunes of my life, I say to myself , “Yeah.  That was (is) bad.  What are you going to do about it today?”  The irony was that in high school, I was always looking for friends who were “real” about their lives, but I wasn’t “real” about mine.  Maybe I keep going to school reunions of all sorts in hopes of being awarded a do-over.  Sometimes that happens. 

The DVD case for the movie “Juno” says that she takes a “detour” into adulthood when she goes through pregnancy in high school.  Yesterday I was irritated by the superficial nature of so many childhood memories, but today I’m having fun taking a “detour” into high school, which I didn’t do much at the time, since I was pre-occupied with studying and hiding from my real life.  Maybe, instead of a do-over, I’ll stay on that detour and remember everything about high school as ideal.  We’ll see how I feel that week.  Maybe I finally figure out how to do both.

Are you going to your next class reunion?  Why or why not?

Strange Things

Yesterday, another strange thing happened.  We had to buy gas close to our house, were that low.  The Speedway station on the corner has gas for $3.79.9.  The Speedway station two miles away had gas for $3.55.9.  As we were pumping gas at the second Speedway, the price on the sign jumped to $379.9.  Twenty-four cents!  When my husband got back in the car, I said, “Check the receipt.  Gas is a lot more expensive now.”  It was the lower price – that was good.  But I’ve never seen gas prices jump like that before my eyes.  Good thing we bought gas before we went to church.

Religious Relief

Yesterday I saw something that you rarely see in real life.  In the back pew of the church I attended was a family with five boys, a father and a mother.  The boys were seated in a row in perfect height (and probably age) order.  They all had matching white dress shirts and fresh haircuts.  Except for the baby, all the boys adhered religiously to the choreography of Catholic mass.  Stand up.  Sit down.  Kneel.  Say this.  Cross yourself now.  That was ridiculed all the way back in 1965 when The Sound of Music was released.

I didn’t like all the chattering, hanging out in the aisles and running around in the sanctuary after mass, but I’ll admit that seeing a young-ish father dancing while his teenage daughter rolled her eyes felt a lot more alive and reverent to me than the family of five matching boys.  I’m all for tradition, but life is what really gives me hope for the Church.

Reading — to Write

It seems like every time I sit down to write, I end up reading.  That’s not to say that I never write, after all, I’m writing now; but writing, at least the writing I do, requires A LOT of reading.  If I make a resolution that I’ll enter at least one contest every month, I have to research every contest to determine which essay or story I’ve written is best suited for entry.  Researching contests means reading what has won in the past and, if the contest is connected with a journal, reading past issues of the journal — which often leads to the question, “Why not just submit?”, which means reading submission requirements and scouring web-sites for rights information.  And all that reading doesn’t even take into account the activities of looking for an agent and prospecting a new book; both of which open new cans of reading worms.  And fiction writers “should” be familiar with novels and writers, both classic and contemporary (I’ve never read anything by James Baldwin and the volumes of half-read books on my shelves is truly embarrassing).  And the experts tell us that our writing will be better if we stop reading and writing sometimes and do other things like exercise or get massages.  And our spouses want us to watch movies with them…

Honestly!  By most mainstream standards, I’m a voracious reader; yet every agent website I visit, every conversation I have with other writers, every contest that I enter, reminds me of how far behind I am in my reading.  How fondly I remember the old days – when I was only a reader.

Interesting (Non-sequitur) Wedding Facts

Wedding Cake:  The bride and groom create a special bond when they share the abundance of the union by feeding each other cake.  The bridegroom traditionally puts his hand on top of the bride’s when she is cutting the first piece of cake to symbolize that he will always protect her.  The wheat used to bake the cake is symbolic of fertility (help!  four boys is plenty!), while the cake’s sweetness is thought to bring sweetness to all areas of the couple’s new life. Traditionally, the top layer of the wedding cake is frozen and eaten by the bride and groom on their first wedding anniversary.  If the cake lasts, so too will the marriage; if the cake doesn’t last, the freezer is broken.

We decided to make our wedding cake round for sure when we found out that food in a round shape is good luck for New Year’s Day.  We decided not to put our guests at risk by burying coins in the cake.

Wedding date and colors:  Wednesday is the luckiest wedding day.  Saturday, the most popular day in America (and the day of our wedding), has no luck associated with it at all.  June is the luckiest month to marry.  January is very good too.  May is the worst.  Rain on a wedding day is inconvenient, but lucky.  White and pink are the best colors for the bride to wear.  Black (the color of my shoes and accessories) is the worst.  I didn’t find anything about plum (the color of my dress), but Joe called me, “a delicious piece of fruit,” so I think plum turned out to be an OK color for me.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue: Something old signifies the bride’s link with her past life.  Something new represents a new future.  Something borrowed should be something from a happily married friend or relative.  And blue symbolizes purity and love. 

Wedding Ring Placement:  The left hand is generally used less often than the right and the third finger is the only one that cannot be moved in isolation from the other fingers.  These two factors give extra protection to the ring.

Obscure Information

This past week, in the midst of wedding-related tasks, we came upon a bit of knowledge that would have saved us quite a bit of time and money if we had known it a few weeks ago.  On a wide finger, the taper of a wedding band makes a big difference in how the ring appears on the hand.  Too flat and a size 13.5 ring, no matter how beautiful, looks like a pipe fitting. 

So what do we do now?  Since he won’t wear any jewelry besides a wedding band, I don’t expect we’ll ever buy him another ring.  Every single person I know with fingers that large is already married.  Oh well. 

Have you ever had a piece of information that was so good and helpful that you HAD to tell someone, but you couldn’t think of any situation in which it would be useful?

Terrible Times

This can be a really tough time of year.  We’d like to be, but few of us are, exempt from bouts of feeling awful unless we gloss over our lives for the month of December, which is encouraged by the season.  Surrounded by joyousness, we try our best to remember all that is good in our lives, but soon we descend into thoughts of all the things that are wrong: with our families, with our finances, with ourselves.  Charlie Brown encapsulates exactly how I feel when he says, “I should be happy, but I’m not.”  I wonder, why “should”?  Is it such a terrible social sin to feel lousy now and then?

Discarding

Writing is extraordinarily wasteful.  So many brilliant things we write never see the light of day.  It’s easy to fall into the habit of believing this is my own personal tragedy.  But I recently attended a writing conference where discarding beloved writing was a major topic of interest, which reminded me that this sadness is ubiquitous.  During a question and answer session with several published authors, the question was asked, “How do you do it?”  (“It” being discarding perfectly good writing.)  The authors answered the question with helpful insights, such as switching your thinking from what you need to write to what your reader needs to read.  However, none of the authors was crass enough to answer the question with what I think is the real answer.  Eventually, the rent is due and if someone is willing to give you money for your work if you eliminate X, Y, Z passage, you begin to see the roof over your head and groceries in the refrigerator with more fondness than you have for your lovely prose.

Death Garden

Once we lived in a house that was on a well-trafficked corner in a well-groomed suburb.  Since we had no backyard, I made my big vegetable and herb garden in the front yard.  For the first few years of this garden, I made a point of keeping it as tidy as the surrounding suburb.  I planted my rosemary, basil and parsley in rows.  I planted precise circles of marigolds around the tomato vines.  The chives created a lovely lavender stripe down the middle of my garden and the whole plot had a sweet scent because the sidewalk edges were trimmed with creeping thyme for passers-by to accidently stumble on and release its perfume.  I weeded that garden several times a week.

 One summer, however, I didn’t tend my garden.  By July, that corner patch was pretty ragged.  Jokingly, I mounted a lime green laminated sign on the street side of the garden, with the words “Death Garden” printed in the scariest type I could find.  One of my proudest moments that summer was when I overheard one young girl on her bike shout to another, “Meet me at Death Garden in five minutes!”

 We humans and our insane need for recognition!

Thought Attacks

I am in the midst of planning my own wedding.  The complaint I’ve always had about weddings is that everyone gets so caught up in planning the details of the event they forget to focus on the major life change that is about to happen.  I was SURE that if I ever had a wedding, that wouldn’t happen to me.  If I ever had a wedding, it would be so simple that the focus transfer couldn’t possibly occur.

Of course, you know the end of this story.  I am amazed by how caught up in the details I’ve become.  Over breakfast, I ask my fiancé questions like, “What size pitcher do you think we should have on our registry?”  I wake up in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep until I revise the announcement text again and I write a list of printers I will call for quotes first thing in the morning.  The irony is that I’m never awake first thing in the morning because I was up in the middle of the night having a thought attack about my wedding.

This worry of mine is obviously a reflection of my anxiousness about the impending (no matter how desirable) change in my life.  The moral of this tale is that we all (me especially) have to be very careful about criticizing the ways that people become obsessed, as we are all prone to thought attacks of our own.