Reelin' In the Years--

I wasn't expecting it, but I experienced a big emotional tsunami looking through my old yearbooks last weekend. All of our books remain in boxes in our crawlspace, and I needed to find a particular one that we'll read in my book group. While doing so, I found said yearbooks, and got the urge to pull them out and even read autographs my classmates were kind enough to give.

The pictures struck me first--once young kids, now middle-age adults. Some are grandparents now. Others are dead. More on that in a bit.

One picture that I loved then, and still do, shows a little 7th Grade boy eating a corn dog, whilst listening to music on 1980s-standard headphones, ignoring the buddies on either side of him.That boy is now a man with 16 years of experience at Intel.

As I flipped through more pictures, I came upon some of a friend(Christina) I made in

Kindergarten about 37 years ago. We remained friends through junior high and high school

She died of leukemia our Junior year, as did two other kids. She played on the volleyball team,

so there were many of her with her fellow athletes. What got me emotional was reading her

words to me. Her nickname for me was "spot" because I'm short. We went to separate schools

Freshman year. In many of her notes, she thanked me for my long-term friendship.

While her comments made me sad, others made me laugh at the adolescent goofiness that

produced them. Here are some of the better ones:

• Let me be the first to sign your crack!
• I hope you stay sweet!
• Thanks for your help on the Africa crossword puzzle ( don't think I could do that now).
• Next year, keep your hands off my french fries!
• Hey Eden, I'm writing in pink again this year.

It also made me laugh to see what I had done to the yearbooks, including sketching some

mustaches on girls that scared me, or writing "bitch" on their pictures. Again, adolescent

stupidity. I also made note of the boys I thought were cute, but will always be worshipped

from a distance.

And then when I finished looking through the books, I got on Facebook and discovered that

the 26th anniversary of Christina's passing was near.

How coincidental that I had just been thinking about her.