Saturday, November 3, 2012

Misty Water-Colored Memories

I pulled out my high school yearbook in order to look up some folks who have become friends on Facebook. They weren't necessarily friends in high school, but you know how this social networking stuff works.

I wanted to see what they looked like 34 years ago and try to establish a context for them with regards to who I knew and interacted with back in those tumultuous teen years.

Leafing through the book I, of course, recognized many names and fewer faces. There were quite a few pictures where I know I knew the person, but wasn't sure how. A good number of the memory connections have apparently long since evaporated over the three-plus decades.

This isn't astounding to me as I realize that my memory circuits aren't in as good repair as they used to be. My recall at my current age of 53 isn't as quick and effortless as it was even five years ago. Maybe my mind has grown lazy. Maybe it's just a natural result of aging. I sometimes wonder if I've accumulated too much over my life and have run out of brain room to store it all.

I was looking through some team pictures in the yearbook and reading the names in the caption below the picture in order to match them with the faces. Then when I moved to one particular person, I said to myself, "Oh, that's Brenda Aceto." What's strange about this is that she wasn't a friend of mine, and I don't remember having much interaction with her at all over those three years.

Browsing through the senior pictures, I realized that there weren't very many attractive girls in my class. I guess the butch look was in at the time, for there were a lot of very short hair styles to the point where I couldn't tell if the picture and name were mismatched. Some of those girls were decidedly guyish in their looks.

Come to think of it, there weren't many good-looking fellows, either. I include myself in this.

Maybe it was the high school atmosphere. Maybe it's because it was Maine and not southern California or Florida. Maybe it had something to do with the 1970s. Whatever the reason, few in my class would have been admitted to beauty contests.

Does this statement make me shallow? Hey, I'm an artist. I notice esthetics.

It's all irrelevant now anyway, and I won't even mention the male teachers with plaid pants.

Speaking of teachers, a few years ago I ran into an old high school biology teacher at a Little League game. I was there to watch my nephew play, and he was there to watch a grandson.

We talked for a while, and he insisted that he remembered me. I think he was just being congenial because I can't think of a single reason why he would remember me. Anyway, I asked him about wearing ties with rugby shirts in class because I recall that about him. He said no, it wasn't him and maybe it was one of the other science teachers.

I let it go, though I'm fairly certain it was him.

We both remember it differently, and who's to say who's right?

Probably me, but I wouldn't bet on it.