high school

Sags and Bags

/ Clay D. / 1 Comment

Looking back through old high school yearbooks is always fun for me. Taking time to sit down and revisit old memories is one of the things I like to do best. Usually it happens when I’m not expecting it. I’ll be cleaning out a closet or going through some old boxes, and all of a sudden this wonderful book of memories is in my hand.

I’ll see an old friend’s picture and I’ll think, Boy, he looks really young. Nowadays he looks old and wrinkled, telltale signs that he is losing the battle with time and aging. He’s got the same face as he had then, but it is definitely more complex now — more wrinkles, lines, and sags. Underneath is still that fresh-faced teenager, except that the passing years have added baggage to it.

It reminds me of using Photoshop to enhance a photo or drawing by adding layers to it. The original image of the person, landscape, or object is still there, only now it has been deepened with additional features.

I believe that the process and experience of writing is similar to the way a person ages.

Periodically I will take time and look through old journals of mine that I keep safely locked away in an old suitcase I bought at a yard sale. Some of the entries date back almost 30 years, but the most interesting ones I wrote in my high school and college days.

In particular, I have an old, blue, single-subject Mead notebook that we were required to journal in for my English class my senior year in high school. We would write in them, and every couple of weeks the teacher would collect them, read them, make comments, and return them to us.

The content of this particular journal is not nearly so personal as most of my other writings, due to the fact that I knew someone else would be reading it. Our teacher told us over and over to “write what is personal, but not what is private.”

Richard Nordquist does a wonderful job here of explaining the difference between public and private writing. He also tells us how keeping a journal can be therapeutic and gives us a few suggestions on how to get started. His article would have been helpful to me back in high school,  as I was often stretched in trying to find suitable topics to write about, something that was interesting to me and that I thought the teacher would find worthwhile.

Every time that I go back and read through my old Mead notebook I am amazed that some of the thoughts, feelings, and fears I had as a 17- or 18-year-old are still there, bouncing around in my brain.

I was so worried about the future back then. Many entries detailed my fear at choosing the right college for the following year, and what my life would be like one year from that day, and about girls that I liked but were too afraid to ask out. I still think in much the same way as I did then; many of the fears I have now fall along similar lines, although with more adult themes..

Even though a lot of times the subject matter I write now is very similar to what I wrote as a teenager, my emotions and my writing style are more mature, more elaborate now than when I was younger. I may write the same things I did then, but hopefully I write them better now, with more layers, more depth.

Same face, more wrinkles. Same writing style, more depth.

My years of life experience — with all its pain, sadness, happiness, and tears — makes this added dimension possible. It is something that can not be substituted with something else, nor can it ever be taken away.

  When I sat down recently to read through this treasured old notebook, I noticed a couple of very intriguing things. After a long fall and winter of lingering, grinding depression, in March of 1987 — the latter part of my senior year — I wrote down four occupations that interested me:  Air Force pilot, drummer, psychologist, and writer.

I don’t know exactly how I came up with this list, and I don’t really recall wanting to pursue any of those occupations back then (except maybe writing, but that would have been a far-fetched idea at the time).

I suppose that I did dream of these others, however, because the ink on the page still can’t lie even after all these years.

The interesting part of this story is that of the four occupations I had written down so many years prior, in the weeks leading up to this last re-reading of the journal, I had spent time thinking about three of them (the Air Force would never have let me fly with my eyesight).

It’s amazing that after all these years, and all the jobs and careers I’ve experimented with, I still return to this same core of interests.

I’ll be forever grateful to my English teacher that year, Mrs. C., for requiring us to maintain a journal. Rereading it periodically over the years since graduation has been a wonderful source of joy and inspiration.

I recently found this blog entry from Mya. It’s amazing how similar her experience is when she looks through her closet and sees clothes and accessories dating back over the years and decades. She calls it “my window to myself”. This perfectly describes how I feel about my high school journal.

The tendency to romanticize the past has always been a significant weakness of mine; it goes hand and hand with my depression. I read in my blue journal that even as an 18-year-old I was longing for a simpler time.

In my journal I recalled camping out in my backyard with my best friend when we were in fifth grade. I was nostalgic for the movies and music of that wonderful summer. Reliving those childhood days, if only in my mind, helped me deal with the stresses of facing an unknown, potentially harsh future after high school graduation.

Nowadays my writing as an adult often reflects a longing for the simpler days of high school, when my biggest concerns (as recalled almost three decades later) were homework and girls — not a mortgage, kids, health concerns, and a job that is less than glamorous.

It seems I’ve never been satisfied with my present life.

I continue striving to take joy in my life on a daily basis. Maybe I just need to listen to God a little more closely.

Assume Nothing

/ Clay D. / Leave a comment

ImageI had been enjoying talking to Pete; he is a very friendly kind of guy. Then I happened to glance down at the chest area of his button-down shirt. There is was — the little horse and rider. Polo. Because I was in mid-conversation I didn’t spend too much timing analyzing the significance of the emblem. I do remember thinking, however, that wearing that icon seemed rather uppity of him. My impression of him immediately changed to a perceptible degree. Gone was the approachable middle class image I had of him, replaced by an upper middle class image of someone who was well to do and didn’t mind showing it. At first take I wouldn’t have picked him as needing to display this on his shirt. All these thoughts went whirling through my mind and in a couple of seconds they were gone.

I went downstairs to sit in on the lesson part of my son’s high school church youth group. The lesson this evening happened to center on materialism and possessions, not placing “stuff” over God. As images of techie gadgets popped up on the big screen TV, text across the screen reminded us that our new car will someday be a pile of rust, our iPhone’s days are surely numbered, and even our designer jeans will be out of fashion this time next year.

My mind went back several years to the day the realization struck me that the brand new PS2 my wife had stood in line outside Wal-Mart to buy for our son was no longer brand new; it had become somewhat iffy and hanging onto life by a thread. After pouting a few minutes that day I began to realize that no matter what it is, if it’s man-made and money can buy it, sooner or later it will be old and maybe even worn out or broken.

I looked over at Pete and again the little horse and rider image popped into my head. Polo. Again. Ostentatious by any means. For some reason I glanced down at the shirt I had quickly slipped on to come here. What was I wearing anyway?  As my eyes landed on the blue of my shirt, reality sunk in. I cautiously glanced slightly to the left at that part of the fabric covering my heart. There it was in dark blue, almost imperceptible against the medium blue cloth. A horse and rider. Polo.

How could I have been so dull in the head not to realize this before I had judged Pete so critically? Am I a hypocrite? Yes, I guess that makes me a hypocrite. I must frame this by saying that that was my one and only Polo shirt, PLUS (and much more importantly), it was bought by my wife (not me) at the Goodwill store for $3.

At any rate, by wearing this shirt — no matter where it was bought — I have placed myself in position to be judged just as I judged Pete. Maybe people were imagining me to be vain and showy by wearing such a shirt that night. How far from the truth that is, I would have to correct them. If they only knew that I originally had on a $5 Old Navy T-shirt, but I thought I would try to look a bit nicer. After examining the Polo shirt for any obvious stains, I decided that the one or two small ones would not be too noticeable, so I slipped it on instead. Obviously, I need to be more careful in judging others. Nobody can ever know the whole story of another person’s life, especially what struggles that person faces day in and day out.

While experiencing mixed emotions of humbleness (at my quickness in judgment) and pride (interestingly, because of the realization my own clothes status), my gaze fell on a teenager seated directly across from me.  As I sized up his attire, even at 20 feet away it would have been hard to miss the bright blue emblem on his orange shirt. The familiar horse and rider. Oh how wonderful it must be to be 17 and supplied with gorgeous, fashionable clothes by your parents, I thought. Life must be simply grand for this lad! I envisioned a wonderful home life, full of joy and love, plenty of discretionary fun money, lots of gadgets, new cars, and plush furniture.

Then, then it hit me again —  I was this kid 25 years ago. I was the one wearing the pale pink Polo shirt in my tiny high school of 300 students. I was the one other kids thought had it all:  new clothes, nice cars, big house, family-owned business, plenty of money to go around, a sort of protected existence. In our rural area with a high poverty rate, perhaps their parents looked at me, just as I looked at this boy, and thought, Man it must be nice to have what his family has.  Maybe I just don’t measure up since I’m not able to provide my kids with those kinds of clothes. It’s tough feeling like you’re on the outside looking in, and even tougher to imagine your kids feeling this way.

Image

The next night my wife and I had plans to go to dinner with some other people who were graduating from the same college program as she was. I was meeting most of these friends of hers for the first time, so I wanted to look halfway decent. That morning as I was about to head out the door for work, she reminded me of the dinner and asked if I had taken clothes with me to change into after work. I made a mad dash back to my closet and finally decided on the trusty blue Polo I’d worn the previous night. A quick glance revealed no new stains from the few hours I’d worn it the previous night, so I thought it would be fine. She wasn’t keen on my choice, so she tells me she’ll go look for me a shirt that day while she’s out. Fine I say.

Later in the day she shows up at my work with her purchase for me to try on. As I pull the shirt out of the bag, I immediately notice the plush softness of the cotton. Then I notice something else. The horse and rider strike again (though only $29.99 at TJ Maxx). Not just any horse and rider emblem however. A bright orange emblem set again sky blue cloth — the exact opposite of the teenage guy’s blue-on-orange design from last night. So now I have two Polo shirts, for a total investment of $33. Not bad I’d say. But what image does this present to others? Did my wife’s classmates judge me as “uppity”, a “show-off” because of my attire that night? Some probably did.

More importantly, however, what does all this say about me? Am I too judgmental for my own good? I like to believe that I am shrewd, able to peg others to a tee with a minimum of given information. I’ve known of many instances over the years where my hasty assumptions have been completely inaccurate, but for whatever reason I continue to persist in assuming and judging. It seems that no matter how many times I am taught the lesson that I should not judge either myself or others by material possessions, I continue to do so. It’s hard to me not to consider my mistakes aberrations. To me it’s just natural to put those people around me into neat little categories based on their clothes, cars, houses, and even skin color and age. I’ve been doing it since I was a little kid.

Nonetheless, it is a character flaw I must continue to work on. As Jesus tells me in Matthew’s account of His life, “Judge not, that you be not judged.”