Digging Up Bones

When I first started posting here I was a bit surprised by how much I remembered. I seemed to be able to recall a lot of things. The funny part of it is however, that I hardly remember anything.

If the four years we spent in high school was a plot of land I was trying to excavate, the more I dug and sifted thru the layers of sand, silt and cobwebs that have covered it up over the years, the more I realized I remember very little.

The memories I recalled turned out to be isolated little peaks in an otherwise vast emptiness. The gap from one memory to the next is a large unfamiliar void that contains no memories at all.

Of course I remember the highlights -- or most of them. Heck, we all do. But I sometimes have trouble recalling things that were an everyday occurrence. For example, I remember Norma Wallace sat to my left in freshman English and to my right was the wall -- but I can’t tell you who sat in front of, or behind, me. You figure I spent a year looking at the back of someone’s head, and I can’t remember who it was. Some memory huh?

I can see faces so clearly but I can’t always put names to them. Thankfully, I at least have a couple of yearbooks or I would be totally lost, because the two I don’t have are crippling enough.

I’ve stated before that I worked right after school, so to a degree that limited my extracurricular activities and the chance to interact with more people and do more things, but that’s really a cop out. I doubt I would have participated in much of the extra stuff anyway. Besides, there are guys I worked with every afternoon the entire senior year and I don’t remember their names.

That was one of the things that made dinner with the ladies a couple of months ago so fun. They remembered things I didn’t and it helped me uncover a few more things I had missed in my excavation.

Thanks ladies!