While home this past weekend I was a little bored. I decided to look through my old high school year books. That ended up being quite a shock to my system, and somehow made me feel a hundred years old! I mean, I don't feel like high school was THAT many years ago. I know that whenever I sit down and put numbers to events I feel old (like high school was over half my life ago, I started law school 12 years ago this August!, etc.), but seeing it there in words and pictures, all bound together was somehow worse than just doing the math!
I found several things funny/odd. Like how in only a class of 50 (+ or - a few people), there are people I have no recognition of. None. Zilch. I know that I knew them back in 1994. I knew everyone in my class in 1994, but somehow they've been erased from my brain. One guy for example, was voted friendliest guy. Seriously, how damn friendly could he have been that I have no recollection of him! And what does it mean that I cannot remember him? Do I have early onset dementia? Has any memory of him just been replaced with some random tidbit of useless knowledge that I seem to retain like "If you buy or sell goods or services..." a portion that I have memorized from the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Consumer Protection Act (thank you bar exam review!)?
Anyway, this little excursion down memory lane caused me to go through photographs once I got back to my house. Some of this stuff has made me laugh, some has made me think "If we'd only known". I think that this photograph that I found is the epitome of all those emotions.
Let me set the scene... Prom night. These are two of my very best friends growing up...Tres on the left, Jarret on the right. Having known each other since birth, we had had more fun together and gotten into more shenanigans over the course of 17 years than you could ever imagine.
I look at this photo and think of the fun times, but then my mind wondered "If only we had known...". You see what was unknown to us at the time was that in a matter of a couple of weeks, Jarret's Mom would be killed in a tragic car accident. A few years later Tres, got caught up in drugs and now sits in prison.
Of course I then looked around my house at more recent photographs of family and friends and thought "what will I think when I look back at these photos 15 years from now?". It kind of snaps you back into the enjoy the here and now and the people in your life mentality.
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