High School Yearbooks

You'll do it as I'm doing  now. Reviewing yearbooks. Remembering stories and people's faces. Recalling what was important  in high school. As I search for ideas to write, I'm drawn to several incidents that occurred during my high school days. So I reach up to the topmost shelf and wiggle my fingers until they touch THE BOOK. This one relates  my single year, the tenth grade, that I attended Central High School. I had earlier spent three years in junior high with many of the sophomores pictured in the Cotton Boll. For that reason I keep the book handy.
The photos are available when I'm helping someone research family members, when the annual is the only source for remembering a particular person, as cameras in the late 1940's early 1950's weren't like cell phones of today.

I've turned to a page to remember an old boyfriend; a friend  who recently passed away; a neighbor I"m sure I know but can't place; or a teacher I want to point out to R with a fond experience to tell. Yearbooks are the portals to revisiting our youth.

Recently, while researching on Ancestry.com, I came upon a notice that annuals are being collected and torn page by page to microfilm to add to their vast research resources . I have been trying to tear the Cotton Bowl away from my knarly grasp, like pulling a child from its  mother's arms. I'm fearful that if I send it off to the netherlands I'll find thousands of reasons for having kept it. That is something I'll have to work on.

Valentine's Day A Bust

I'm a romantic. My R is the least romantic guy on earth. He rarely thinks creatively (do engineers think any other way than rationally?) so his idea of readying himself for this loving day begins this way:

"I guess I need to buy you something for Valentine's Day, huh?" I say nothing. I am going to let him be the instigator of any gift or thoughtfulness for the day set aside for lovers, knowing all the well it'll be a bust.

"What do you want?"

"Something in diamonds," is my reply. I hate diamonds but I may as well suggest it knowing that'll never happen. "Just don't buy me a box of candy." That is a hint that I'm tired of the cheap candy he buys at the drug store.

"Well, Joe (our neighbor R walks with) is going to ask me what I got you, as well as the kids."

"Don't worry about what they say," I tell him, all the time wishing he'd be hit by a guilty stone and rush to the bakery and purchase one of those heart-shaped cookies. But no, by the time he'd wait, the cookies would be sold out.

Sunday arrives, I open a card from Sis (we understand to remember each other when a guy doesn't)and I buy her the valentine cookie. We meet for a movie, appropriately entitled "Valentine's Day" and split her cookie.

The songwriter of these words must have thought this of my husband:

I can't give you anything but love, baby
That's the only thing I've plenty of, baby
Dream awhile, scheme awhile, you're sure to find
Happiness, and I guess, all the things you've always dreamed of...

Gee, I'd like to see you looking swell, baby
Diamond bracelets, Woolworth doesn't sell, baby
'Til that lucky day you know darn well, baby
I can't give you anything but love.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY TO ALL YOU UNLUCKY WOMEN FROM ONE WHO UNDERSTANDS