In the small town where I grew up, we had a weekly paper. It couldn’t have been more than 10 or 12 pages, but boy was it packed with everything you needed to know. Marriage announcements, school lunch menus, new hours for the general store, obituaries, nature notes … and more.
In one issue, when I was in high school, there appeared a thank-you notice from a local parent. “How do you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume? It isn’t easy, but I’ll try,” began the note. My mother and I, both avid readers of the paper (she its former editor), discussed it later. “What has she, lost her mind?” we said. “What the hell does that mean?”
Clearly neither of us was familiar with “To Sir, with Love” — I know I wasn’t, and if my mother ever had been she’d forgotten it two decades on. So we didn’t catch the reference to the lyrics, and it wasn’t until years later that I heard the song — “oh my god, did she just say crayons to perfume?”
My thoughts upon hearing it this morning went down another path as well. It so happens that the author of said thank-you notice was the mother of a boy who Liked Me in high school. (Did I say “a” boy? I mean “the” boy. There were not hordes.) And it so happens that I dreamed about him last night. (The Girl on the Swing will have a good laugh at this, because she thinks I dream about people from high school every night. It’s not true!)
In last night’s dream, I was with Said Boy. I was in a wedding dress. We were not together, but we were having a lovely visit. I was happy. I said to him, “I wish I’d been this confident and happy when you liked me!” He told me how he’d married, then remarried. We had a warm and friendly chat.
It’s so emotionally retarded of me to still be processing this after eighteen years. I know. I know! Part of it is guilt — because as a cripplingly shy high-schooler, my solution to dating anxiety was cold, cruel behavior. And I always wish I could apologize.
It’s dumb, teenagers do dumb things, everyone survives, etc. And since I can’t find him on Facebook (what? not that I tried!), I suppose I just need to move on. In the immortal words of the ever so aptly named Lulu, “It isn’t easy, but I’ll try.”
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August 31, 2009 at 1:42 pm
thegirlontheswing
Oh, Mama Kitt. It is so true that you dream about high school every night, and you know it. But take another look at my first few posts. Which of us has obsessed more about high school in first month (!) of our little blog? Greetings from the glass house. I cast no stones.
Pluswhich, poor Mama Kitt and the crippling shyness! When he was so cute and sweet and might have been your density! (Not that Current Fella isn’t your density. But HS Fella was awfully awwwwwww!!!)
I of course laughed right where you said I would laugh. And I will have a big grin from thinking of the Mother of HS Fella for hours. What a trip.
January 26, 2010 at 11:00 am
Those golden dreams of my yesterday « Auto Tunes: We Drive, We Listen, We Write
[...] a station wagon, on a double date. A few feet away (told you it was wide) sits The Boy. The one who likes me, really the only one who’s professed to like me since fifth or sixth grade, and one I like in [...]
March 15, 2011 at 10:52 am
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[...] written before about the boy who liked me in high school, and the crippling shyness that kept me from responding to his overtures, and our relatively recent [...]