Older Versions of People I Knew
I have a lot of time to sit by myself and think here. Since I saw the 12 Monkeys sign last week I’d been thinking about Q, the guy who got me into that movie. Then I remembered that he’d written me about a month ago, so I finally wrote back. We’ve been chatting back and forth, and today I figured out how to get to his website. (Beautiful poetry as always Q, by the way) Anyway, he has a little photo album on there and I decided to look through it to see how life in the Navy was treating him. What I found were pictures of his 25ish year-old self hanging out with older versions of people I used to know. Wasn’t that a trip… Joey, of course looks the same. :-) But the other people in the pictures… I knew them well, but found that I had to think for a second to remember some of there names. I’ve always been bad at names, but these are people I practically grew up with!
I often think about the path I ended up on. I’m not on it alone, of course. Sometimes I can almost see the point at which we girls went one way, and the boys went the other. Those of you who read here probably get that some of the people I link to on the right are my friends in real life who I spend a lot of time with. There are 7 of us and we’ve been friends in varying degrees for a long time, in fact one of them I’ve been friends with since 4th grade. But the fact is, we’re still together. We have lots of common memories: church, camp, youth retreats, trips to Disneyland, swim team, college, and now marriages, kids, careers, higher degrees… When I saw the old ladies in the coffee house on Sunday I saw us girls in 50 years.
But it wasn’t always just us girls. We ran in a pack with our guy counterparts. We dated them. We laughed at their boy jokes. We hid the evidence of burned ukalalies for them. We counted them as our brothers and they took care of us like we were their sisters. They threatened to beat up boys who hurt us. We hated and loved them all through high school and college, and then one day they were gone. We girls went one way, the boys went another. I know from listening to bits of gossip that a lot of them still hang out like we girls do, but I would be surprised if I ever crossed paths with most of them again. We’ve moved too far apart.
But still, a look into Q’s life was pretty cool. Its good to know that while we’ve gone separate paths, they have each other like we girls do. I wish them all kinds of luck, and Q, keep the letters coming!
