Hello, Life.

So, I did write every day this week, but not here. I did my writing in longhand, in the blue Mead notebook I'm currently using as a journal. I had some access issues: keeping Zirpu's laptop powered up, getting somewhere with WiFi, and it is, after all, Zirpu's laptop and not mine...

Unlike last week, though, I will not be transferring what I wrote in my journal into this blog. Believe it or not, I do not post about everything I'm thinking, and a lot of what I have been thinking is about other people and those things are those people's stories to tell. You'll just have to take my word for it that I wrote every day. I have come up with some good ideas for future posts, too.

+++

Bug is graduating from high school tonight. I keep thinking that this should blow my mind, because it seems impossible that Bug and Boy should have grown up this much while I haven't changed in the last eleven years. However, Bug is way ready to be done with high school and start her "real life" in the fall.


It's not how I remember ending my high school years. I had applied to just two colleges which could not have been more different, San Francisco State and University of Puget Sound. I had decided to go to Puget Sound while standing in line at a grocery store with Mom. My thought process was this: "I think I should see what it would be like without this circle of friends. If it's terrible, I can always come back at the semester break."


I attended an unusually small public high school in San Francisco and there were just 154 of us on stage that afternoon. Each of us was going to give the principal a penny as she gave us our diplomas, but some students persuaded the rest of us that it would be disrespectful and "ruin graduation." A friend gave me a bottle of bubbles and we blew bubbles during the ceremony.
Afterwards the family, some family friends, and I went out to dinner to celebrate. I was not in a celebratory mood - in retrospect, I think I was frightened about leaving home, both my mother's house and my high school, which I loved and had been such a relief after junior high.


My friend Chuch had invited me to the graduation party his parents were hosting, and I spent the dinner waiting for it to end so I could go to his house. Chuch was in one of the circles in which I traveled, but we didn't spend a lot of time together, just usually in the early mornings in Mrs. Myszak's classroom. We knew each other, because everyone in my class did, but he wasn't one of my close-close friends.


The dinner went long. There were a lot of adults. Finally we got back to the house and I took Mom's car to Chuch's. When I got there the party was over and his folks had either gone to bed or out. Chuch pulled a bottle of champagne out of the ice-filled washing machine and we walked to a playground nearby.


I only remember that we sat on the swings, drank from the bottle, and talked. I've recently been in touch with Chuch and that's what he remembers too. Both of us remember that part of the evening as if it was the event that sealed our friendship, though we were at the end of our daily contact.


I remember that it was a warm, quiet night with the stars twinkling above us and the city lights twinkling below. I remember that we talked about Life, and Adulthood, and Leaving Home. "Real Life." I remember that I felt like Chuch understood me better that night than anyone else had for weeks.


If that's not how it was, well, it's my memory that matters.