Observations Unearthed from a Box of Memories

My 13-year-old daughter had been asking me to get out a box of memorabilia from my high school years.  Mainly she wanted to read the stories I told her I had written as a teenager, though I let her know they were pitiful.  I tended to take favorite parts of books I’d read and combine them into weirdly configured stories that I usually wrote several chapters of, but rarely finished.

On Saturday, I finally braved the storage closet and pulled out the box.  After lifting layer after layer of stuff from the box, I discovered a few things.

• Those overdone hairstyles of the ’80’s?  Yeah, my yearbooks were full of them.  Let’s hope they never come back.

• My parents spent a lot of money on me.  From senior pictures to a class ring to that high school trip to Washington, D.C., they managed to find the funds – making many sacrifices along the way, I’m sure.  Thank you, Mom and Dad.

• My husband wrote some amazing love letters!  Yes, we dated in the years before e-mail, texting, and cell phones, so I’m blessed to have a stack of pages-long letters from our college years.  Makes me wonder if mine will be the last generation to unearth those handwritten treasures.

• There are some tragedies we never forget.  I saved a newspaper from the day the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded; I was a junior in high school.  It was also the occasion for one of my favorite speeches from perhaps my favorite president, Ronald Reagan.

• This poem, jotted down by my dad on a small sheet of paper, but remembered from his own dad, made my girls laugh.

• Your perspective on life in high school and the one you’ve developed 25 years later are worlds apart.

And, yes, my stories really were as bad as I remembered them!