For some reason, during my last trip home to Colorado, I decided to get really into reminiscing. It might have been the crisp, nostalgic feeling of Colorado fall or the challenge I had made for myself to stop depending solely on the Internet and TV for entertainment (I’ve been feeling dumb lately) but I started looking through a bunch of old stuff in my childhood room. Okay, fine, the Internet was down. You can really learn a lot about yourself by looking through all your old stuff. And the things I learned were shocking.
Shock number one came from when I decided to check the small trap door under the ceiling vent in my room where I had routinely hid a treasure box. I was hoping to find extra cash, an ironic keepsake I once cherished, or at the very least, a funny note from my youth. But instead I found a (ONE) shoelace and the spare key to the very “treasure” box I was holding. Obviously I was disappointed. But that disappointment was quickly replaced by confusion.
What value did I place on shoelaces to warrant hiding them in the ceiling? Had something spectacular happened with this shoelace and it needed to be hidden in memoriam? It couldn’t have been making a game winning shot in a high school basketball game, because if that were the case I might as well have hidden all of my shoelaces (I was an all-star, okay?)
Why would I go through all the trouble of hiding something if I wasn’t even going to bother locking it? Did I really regard the ceiling vent as the end all be all of hiding spots? As if anybody determined enough to check this ceiling vent should be rewarded with an unlocked box. I mean they obviously put in the extra legwork. Either that or they are our electrician. What if banks took on this same mentality? A bank robber, after getting past security, would find all the cash divided into perfect to-go bags and a getaway car idling in the parking lot. Ya know, because they must have worked really hard to get there.
I guess I can only speculate as to what made this lone shoelace worthy of being hidden, but apparently not a lot has changed, because I put the shoelace and keys back in the box and returned it safely to the ceiling vent to relive this anticlimactic discovery in another 15 years.
After putting away my “treasures” I set my sights on my senior yearbook. And this is where I made my second shocking discovery: my family wanted my high school graduating class to remember me as a ho. There is a section in the Cherry Creek High School yearbook where parents of graduating seniors submit a baby picture and note for their child. In these notes parents usually gush about how proud they are and how excited they are to see where the future takes their shining star. My note was just like everyone else’s except for the extra special, “P.S. Oh I remember her…” signed at the bottom. While some families quoted scripture, my family quoted the famous Steve Carell line from “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” that ends with “…she was a ho. Fo sho.”
I know why the quote is there, it was my brother’s attempt to insert one of our favorite jokes and lighten the mood of what I can only assume was the most life altering transition in my parents’ lives (it is really difficult when your favorite child leaves home). I appreciate the connection my brother was making but the unfortunate reality is that our “inside joke” makes me look like a slut. I mean, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” was huge when I was in high school; EVERYONE saw that movie. There was no way to utter the words, “I remember her” without someone following it up with “She was a ho!” It’s a hilarious scene in the movie, it’s a fun line to quote at parties, it’s NOT a great way to be immortalized in your high school yearbook.
The worst part, or best part, depending on your sense of humor, is that yearbooks are all about remembering. My note reads like my parents are predicting the future of what my fellow classmates will say out loud when my name is mentioned at reunions, etc. Or in an alternative scenario, a fellow classmate is also reminiscing while home for vacation and upon flipping through the ol' HS yearbook, stumbles upon my baby picture and note and thinks, “oh, wow. That girl must really have been a ho if her parents will so candidly put that in her yearbook. Who are they fooling? We all know the end of that quote.” Of course this person would be someone that clearly did not know me in high school (which is a high possibility; I had a graduating class of nearly 1,000) because I was anything but a ho in high school and that’s what’s FO SHO.
No comments:
Post a Comment