{"id":131,"date":"2023-08-27T12:02:42","date_gmt":"2023-08-27T16:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/?p=131"},"modified":"2023-09-06T09:12:58","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T13:12:58","slug":"distance-and-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/2023\/08\/27\/distance-and-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Distance and Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Addendum:\u00a0 For this to make sense, be aware I’m on vacation<\/em>]<\/p>\n

So, here I am sitting in someone else’s house, in a place where I grew up, but I never knew this house, or the road it sits on, existed in all the time I lived here.\u00a0 Now that’s a pretty weird thing to admit.\u00a0 It’s undoubtedly a bit mind-blowing to me.\u00a0 But in a way it makes sense, since for the majority of the time I lived here, I didn’t drive.\u00a0 I generally rode on a series of school buses, on different routes, through the backwoods and byways of the town, picking up my classmates and ferrying us all to school.\u00a0 Too, my parents, the ones that DID drive, would have places to go, and very rarely did we visit them in their houses.\u00a0 Typically, it would be at some public function in town, at the school, what have you.\u00a0 My parents weren’t really what one would call social butterflies.<\/p>\n

The reason I’m here is mainly for my 40th High School Reunion.\u00a0 Which was last night.\u00a0 \u00a0Prior to that, in the afternoon was a small get-together at the local pavilion, behind the town pool.\u00a0 Just an informal affair, some of us got together in order to socialize and share information in an atmosphere that was a bit less raucous than what was going to happen that evening at the local Legion Hall.\u00a0 I had contemplated not going, but I was talked into it by my friend Andy, who I happened to run into on the way here. What were the odds of 2 people, from the same HS, 40 years removed from seeing one another, just happening to run into one another at a random rest stop on I-90.\u00a0 Damn, I should have played the lottery Friday evening.<\/p>\n

One of the organizers of the reunion (John) had brought his old yearbook and another (Kevin) had rifled through his closets and come up with newspaper clippings and memorabilia of our time in school.\u00a0 News stories from the old local paper (that has now gone defunct) detailing our exploits and occasional shortcomings, pictures from the day we graduated, as well as of the rehearsal that occurred a couple of days prior to the actual event.\u00a0 What I most remember about the day was that it was really HOT in the school auditorium (in recent years the graduations have been held outdoors, in front of the high school, on bleachers).\u00a0 I still have my yearbook, it’s in storage back home.\u00a0 I was dreading a little finding the page where my picture was, because of the quote that I picked to have underneath it.<\/p>\n

Myself and religion have been at loggerheads for the past 34 years.\u00a0 Ever since my mother started having issues with her liver, from spending a lifetime drinking and smoking, 2 vices that really did a number on her.\u00a0 Then the second shoe with my Dad being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease while I was still in college.\u00a0 The local pastor did what he could to help out, but his platitudes about\u00a0‘God doesn’t give us any more than we can handle’<\/em> more and more sounded like a con, or BS to be blunt.\u00a0 I don’t know about how you, dear reader feel about religion, but to me, it more and more became very hollow and it didn’t make much sense.\u00a0 So after 1989 when my Mom died at home, and I was left with an ailing father to care for, attempt to work a full-time job and all that came with it, religion and me went our separate ways.\u00a0 For a long time I classified myself as an agnostic, but finally talking to someone about it all I came to understand that I’m more of an atheist.\u00a0 If you’re not, that’s fine by me.\u00a0 You believe whatever you want to.\u00a0 Or not.\u00a0 I’ve had my epiphany, I’ve made my decision and I’m content with it.<\/p>\n

So, getting back to the quote under my senior picture.\u00a0 I remember going around and around what I wanted under the picture.\u00a0 There were two options.\u00a0 Some quote, or nothing at all.\u00a0 Even back then yearbook editors and publishers were somewhat savvy, you couldn’t get too cute with what you had in your picture or quote. No special hand gestures in the picture, it had to be approved by the yearbook staff as well as the editors in the publishing house.\u00a0 No hardcore lyrics from heavy metal bands, nothing vulgar at all, since it was going to be a very G-rated affair.\u00a0 If you want to swear, go write on the bathroom wall on the 2nd floor of the HS.\u00a0 And hope that Mr. Cotting didn’t recognize your handwriting.<\/p>\n

I finally went with something simple.\u00a0 I really wanted ‘To thine Ownself be True’\u00a0<\/em>but someone else already had that, so I had to have a second choice.\u00a0 I know, why did it matter if 2 people had the same quote?\u00a0 But it did, so I went with my backup, a portion of John 15:12 from the Bible.\u00a0 “This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you<\/strong>“.\u00a0 Boom, there it is.\u00a0 That’s my quote.\u00a0 That’s what defines me in my yearbook for all eternity.\u00a0 Does it really make all that much of a difference?\u00a0 No, to me it’s the principle of the thing.\u00a0 I was religious back then, I’m not now.\u00a0 Though I suppose it could be argued that I’m no longer the person I was back then.\u00a0 That me was very inward, shy, not willing to take risks and closeted for the most part.\u00a0 There were a lot of reasons for that, none of which make any difference now, and I’m not really going to go into either.\u00a0 I guess it just irks me that I didn’t have the backbone to go with something a bit more topical?\u00a0 Perhaps something more edgy or ‘with the times’ instead of going with the Bible.\u00a0 Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great quote, but it hasn’t aged well.<\/p>\n

Kinda like my senior picture.\u00a0 I’m actually surprised as many people recognized me at the reunion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Addendum:\u00a0 For this to make sense, be aware I’m on vacation] So, here I am sitting in someone else’s house,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[34,80,16],"tags":[81,82,83,86,85,84],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-hs-reunion","category-vacation","tag-hs-reunion","tag-memories","tag-epiphany","tag-hs-graduation","tag-religion","tag-remembrances"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}