Snapshots of a Modest Life

A Strange Evening

I spent the evening at the home of my middle school youth pastor who has just moved back to Orlando after pastoring [mental note: check correctness of words "pastoring" and "correctness"] in Georgia for several years. Having not seen him and his wife for any length of time in as many years, it was strange being back to six years ago, hanging out and just chatting. Many things have changed. They now have two absolutely adorable children who are destined to be a rabid football fans; they have grown older as have the students they cared for back in the day, though not as visibly; they have passed through many fires, been refined, and become more wise, although I'm sure they would be the first to say that wisdom is not something that is gained over a few years. In other ways, they remain the same. He still has that crazy southern accent, which has been cultivated by the years in Georgia; she still looks the same, despite two pregnancies and the stress that accompanies the resulting children.

Adding to the weirdness of seeing them again was seeing that particular group of people again. I went to high school with many of them, but the years between middle school and now have created chasms between us, save a few people who have remained my close friends. I saw them for four more years along with many new faces from high school. Some people I didn't really know well in middle school; others I considered my best friends. In fact members of that group of people helped mold me into who I am today. Their personalities and resilience against embarrassment bent me to a point that I too seldom get embarrassed, especially when compared to the frightened child might blush at the mention of underwear many years ago. It saddened me how little I spoke to people on whom I once depended for much of my human interaction. I wish that things had not turned out the way they did in high school and consequently in college, but c'est la vie. I am reminded of a Shakespeare quote that goes something like this, [pardon me for butchering it which I know is inevitable] "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." It's as if their lives simply pranced across the stage of mine, and are now waiting in the wings for something else to happen; either their triumphant return to the stage, or their quiet exit from the theatre of my perception. In high school people change, roads split. Mine went one way, theirs the other.

This week has been a return to the past for me. Last Saturday I went to D.'s house for a small gathering to see the gang again before people left for Christmas vacation with family. At this event I hung out with people I haven't talked to recently due to distance both physically and emotionally. On this occasion we made a brief journey back to the middle school years and certain things that happened on school camping trips, all of which were, in my humble opinion, the result of overactive hormones which were at the time untamed (everyone's are in middle school), and all the drama that springs from the teen angst and love triangles which characterize any group where the guy-to-girl ratio is roughly 3-to-9.

It has been simultaneously fun and sad to wistfully remember the days of yore. I am most certainly glad that those days are over, that I don't have to worry about that brand of angst any longer. But deep down some part of me, probably the part that still wants to play pirate in the loft with Johnny Depp, longs for the days of youth when a glance from a certain boy would shake my world and a night out with the girls meant sleeping on someone's floor in a sleeping bag eating popcorn and watching overly sappy movies till saltwater fish could swim in our puddles of tears.