Classmates: How Did You Get This Number?

I keep getting emails from classmates.com saying "Do you remember Obscure Name Here?" As though the mere name of someone I haven't kept in touch with for 20 years will send me scurrying to the website. I don't have nearly that much nostalgia for people I knew years and years ago (and in the case of these emails, apparently DIDN'T know.)

I signed up for Classmates around 10 years ago when all excited about the 10 year HS renunion. I strongarmed BFF into going, mostly because Husband's 10 year reunion had gone so well & fun. Hubby's 20 did NOT go well. We figured that was a sign and didn't even consider going to the 20. I'm sure there were people I would have liked to see, but I think, for the most part, I have kept in touch with the few people from HS I wanted to keep in touch with. I may not see them as often as I would like since I live a ridiculously long car drive from them and don't go over like I oughta (maybe soon!) but we are still in touch.

Anyway. These classmates emails are pretty much a new thing. I don't know if they just amped up their desire to find lost souls or if I accidentally went and looked at something there-- perhaps because I did recognize a name, or perhaps one day when I was looking at people on Facebook. I dunno. But it makes me feel weird to get almost daily emails from the site reminding me that I was apparently an obscure weirdo in High School, too good, even, for the party from Donnie Darko.

On a final note, since I have the labels/keywords that are listed below, perhaps if I click there, I will see a post that reminds me of why I am hearing from Classmates.... I have apparently blogged about something on a related note before. Curse this fragile thing we call shunning the masses memory!!

What I Learned There

Stealing an idea and modifying it a little bit from the wonderful Jo(e) who wrote about what she learned in second grade, I thought I'd see if I can remember something I learned that was important in grade school. Hey, maybe this will turn into an annoying meme. (I doubt it. I don't have that many readers. Now if Jo(e) picked it up, maybe it would go viral because she's totally a rockstar.

Anyway:

• preschool: do not pull the decorative wax candle that looks like a foamy beer off the counter onto your head. It will hurt. You will lose your hair as your mother tries to pick all the dried wax out of your hair witha comb. You will scream when she comes near you with a comb for a long time.
• kindergarten: it feels good when your mom comes to get you after school. You can walk home in the warm Indian summer together, holding hands, while you tell her about your day.
• first grade: when it's the bicentennial and your school does all kinds of "Colonial" activities in honor, and your class makes real butter by shaking and shaking and shaking a jar filled with rich cream and then spreads the yellowish goo on saltines, that butter will be the best butter you'll probably taste in your whole life. Uber-butter.
• second grade: don't pull on the beak from your cool puppet of an ostritch. When your mom says she'll take it to Grandma's to get it fixed, you'll never see it again.
• third grade: mixing raw egg, vanilla, cinammon and bread in a bowl does not make French Toast, even though that appears to be how mom makes it. But the dog will LOVE it. And your love for cooking, for pleasing others with the food you prepare, will be born out of the preposterous mix.
• fourth grade: moving very far away to a new place where you don't know anyone kind of sucks.
• fourth grade, the second time: because you moved, your mom asks if you can be "held back a year." It sucks again.
• fifth grade: don't write "Kim Loves Vance" all over your notebook, even if you do. Because when someone else spots the heart with his name in it, you will be teased, unmercifully.
• sixth grade: moving sucks again. And when you kill a spider in the girls' bathroom & all the other girls swear you ate it, you'll figure out that you really don't like it in Louisiana.
• seventh grade: reading. reading. reading. the library. long long rides on your bike. horses. horses. horses. poetry. funny letters to your sister.
• eighth grade: when the much older slacker failed a lot of grades but looks-kinda-like James Dean or John (Cougar--at the time) bully on the bus picks on you and/or grabs your butt, and you try to fight back, even if you try to get him with your nails & purse, you will only end up losing the fight and getting a black eye. And no, putting raw meat on it does not help. Nor does putting makeup your mother got from the lady in the trailer next to you. Everyone will see your black eye anyway.
• ninth grade: this time, moving is kind of cool. Florida has beaches. You can actually get just a little bit of a tan if you go every single day. And lots of freckles. And go with your mom to the movie theater that sells beer (to her) and nachos and wear surfer shirts & have other kids not totally hate you.
• tenth grade: the hot air while you stand outside at night for marching band practice, combined with hormones, cute boys, stadium lights, dandelion seeds on the wind silhouetted against those lights is a heady mix. And the music is kinda cool too. You really like performing in band wearing the uniform that smells like dry cleaning solution, standing up so straight it makes your back hurt, playing your heart out on the clairinet. The thrill of competition. But really, it's those summerish nights and daydreams about the unobtainable boy of the moment that is the best part.
• eleventh grade: getting contact lenses and joining drama club really makes you feel normal. Even though you're still Not.
• twelfth grade: do not date that guy. That one. With the stupid blue paint in his hair last year. Ever. And, also: you're not going to listen to your older self when she tries to scream this back over the years at you at 4 in the morning.

Hmmm. I like how that came out. Feel inspired? Come on. You can do it. It actually got harder to remember specific things by school year as I got older, which is weird.

Jah Heat

The closest I've ever been to Jamaica.*

Summer 1991, a beach bar in Florida. Dark weekend night, bodies pressed close together on the sand dance floor, bare feet buried deep for stability, braced slightly spread. Cool wet sand just under the sugary still warm white top sand. Dancing to a middle-aged white-guy cover band, who can flip from Jimmy Buffet to Bob Marley in one song. Drinking iced-down but toxic liquor--the bartender says "All the light alcohol mixed, with a splash of cranberry or coke" from a mason jar left to sweat on the graying picnic tables parked to one side of the dancing.

People are moving slow, that lazy sexual beat of Marley's tunes, bodies keeping just far enough away for public decency. Sweat trickles down the backs of knees, makes a cool spot down the leg, and the light from the bar catches glistening spots here, there-- a cheek, a thigh.

For me, there is a kind of peaceful strangeness, ironic clash, in dancing, getting a bit drunk on dancing and alcohol, to Marley's lyrics: "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds"-- "Exodus: movement of Jah people! Oh, yeah! Movement of Jah people! Send us another brother Moses!" Lyrics about Revolution, about Holy Retribution. About Jah, the great Messianic God of the Rastafarians. And yet, here we are, a mostly white, young crowd, some dancing in bikini tops with cut off shorts. Most have spent the day suntanning, some are making out on the dance floor. They are on vacation, and they are sin personified. And we don't really blame them.

Most people have no idea what the songs say. If you asked them, told them, they would be surprised that this party music, those pot smoking Rastas, were anything other than what they seem-- peaceful zoned out hippies. Would God mind our revelry, see it as pagan ignorance? I like to think not. He made wine at the wedding, hung out with the whores and thieves. He knew that often the sinners are the ones who most understand redemption.

It is a bliss of a sort... this wet heat, the wind blowing salty and slightly musty, tasting of seaweed and fish, off the slow waves of the gulf, the gulf which here luminesces emerald blue in the day against the snowy white, white beaches. We forget anything else but here. Now.

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*Inspired by this morning's CD selection in the car, and a wandering mind remembering those days.