Now, let get on to the topic of today’s blog.
Today we will discuss school yearbooks. I didn’t buy my high school year book,
not even in senior year, which I sort of regret. My sister and I love old
yearbooks, even if we don’t know the people in them. We love the time capsule
feeling. We love how carefree and happy everyone looks in a yearbook. School
takes on a sort of mythical fairytale-like odyssey in a yearbook. Too bad my
sister wasn’t there the moment I was sitting in Shy Boy’s apartment when he
suddenly decided to fish out his old high school year book from the back of his
bedroom closet.
Earlier that evening, over dinner, we sat at his kitchen
table when the subject of previous relationships came up. Out of the blue, he asked what was the worst
date I had ever been on. When it comes to relationships, I am the opposite of
him. I am constantly on my guard for red-flags. I absolutely refuse to let a
man control or break my heart. Shy Boy, on the other hand, is very trusting.
He’s willing to overlook a red-flag or shrug it off for fear of being
hyper-critical. As a result, he has walked into numerous dating disasters and
painful situations. As he went on in detail about his various past dating
encounters, I realized his trusting, hopeful nature in dating extended into
other aspects of his personal life as well, mainly in his career, his schooling
prior to his career, and in his friendships. From the handful of early,
embarrassing school and work related stories he had once told me combined with
the crazy dating stories he was currently telling me, I could now visualize the
early Shy Boy. Early Shy Boy had been a guy trying to find his way, wanting to
give his teachers and his bosses the benefit of the doubt but constantly having
it backfire. He was a man that learned from trial and error. Once his schooling
was over and his career finally started to fall into place, he gained
confidence in life, but not in love and so the trial and error cycle began
again as he started the search for a good girlfriend. I recalled the timid,
eager to please annoying Shy Boy of one year ago versus the calm, comfortable,
confident Shy Boy I now knew and the puzzle of Shy Boy began to come together.
There was a reason why the Shy Boy I initially knew almost a year ago was so
timid and eager to please to the point of infuriating. He was a nice guy who
wanted to be loved but it took time and experience for him to figure out who
was worthy of that love and how to express that love. I don’t think he understood why I had the
sudden urge to throw down the chicken wing I was eating, grab him, and give him
a kiss. I felt sorry that he had to go through so much heartache and trial and
error to find the right career, find the right girl, figure out how to be a
grown-up. I just melted for him.
At any rate, after such a dinner, it was rather interesting
that he should whip out his high school yearbook. Our entire dinner
conversation had to do with dating horror stories. There was no mention of what
he was like as a younger man. I got curious and brought up the subject of yearbooks
and that’s when he mentioned he could go dig his out of the closet. I relish
the lost-in-time feeling that washes over you when you look at a really old yearbook.
Of course, “really old” is a relative term. Shy Boy graduated high school the
same year I did, yet something about his year book felt decades old. The edges were
worn. The spine was starting to crack along the inside front cover. All the pictures
were in black and white. The art-work on the cover invoked the feeling of
someone on an acid trip.
Shy Boy had told me very little about his adventures in high
school. All I knew was he tended to develop crushes on his teachers rather than
his classmates. He only had a small handful of close friends. He was clumsy and
couldn’t see very well because he didn’t want to wear glasses. He didn’t talk
to girls, and he wasn’t a great student. Based on what little Shy Boy had told
me and how awkward and timid he acted when I first knew him, I was expecting a
complete disaster when I opened his yearbook and searched for his picture. I
was expecting a somewhat disheveled boy with poor posture, thin messy hair and
a confused, bewildered expression on his face. If the three of us (my sister,
Shy Boy, and I) went to school together, I was sure teenaged Shy Boy would be
the type of guy my sister and I would want to be kind to, but would also want
to lovingly joke about behind his back once we got home from
school. I pictured him as a sort of project the teenaged versions of my sister
and me would take on to improve.
At that moment, a heavy drenching heavy rain started to pour
outside. Shy Boy got nervous about whether I should go home or not. We decided
to wait a half hour and see if the rain would calm down. If it calmed down, I
would go home at the usual time. It if continued or increased, he wanted me to
spend the night. In the meantime, no more distractions! I had to see his
yearbook picture already! He told me there were actually four different
pictures to looks for: his senior picture, his group picture as a class, his
group picture as a class posing and making silly faces, and a picture of him in
one of the school clubs he belonged to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, alright already, let
me see! I was surely expecting disaster now that there had been so many
convenient distractions. What I discovered when I pulled opened and came to a page somewhere in the center of the book completely took me aback. I was astounded. It was incredible, amazing, utterly surprising…High School Shy Boy…was…not a disaster. High school Shy Boy was…he was…hot. He sat in the front row of his group shot, leaning forward with a silly, almost coy look on his face. He had a mound of nicely styled luscious brown hair combed to the side. Hair, so much lovely hair (I have a thing for a head of hair. I think it goes back to my love for the Beatles and 1960s rock stars). You mean I could be dating that hair?! Where is it all now?! Shy Boy isn’t terribly bald today, not as badly as say Prince William compared to when Prince William was a teen, but still. I couldn’t believe I was looking at the same person. High School Shy Boy had the same face, but it was thinner, longer, and more angular, a skinny somewhat lanky youth he was. He looked so innocent. His face was so smooth, although the black and white photography might have played a role in that. His face lacked all the deep lines and crevices he now has near his eyes. I saw a wide-eyed, hopeful face unaware of the grueling school work, unappreciative women, and years of difficulty finding the right career path it would soon encounter. High school was rough and awkward for him. He once said he had no interest in ever going to a high school reunion. He hated high school. As a quiet kid, I supposed he felt like an odd-man out, or maybe even a little like an outcast in a school with its fair share of self-absorbed classmates.
However, the sweet, gentle, good looking, nicely dressed boy in those pictures didn’t look like he suffered from any of the horror stories I was told of. The only indication I could find was that he stood and sat alone in all his pictures. The people around him didn’t look to be his friends. Everyone was in their own little world...
And then I wondered would he have dated me if we had gone to high school together? He wasn’t the complete disaster project I was expecting. He looked very sweet. I wasn’t very confident in high school. I wondered what that boy in the picture would have thought of 17 year old me. We would have had a lot in common when it came to our love of 1960s pop culture and music, but would he have noticed? Would he have talked to me? Before I could get too sentimental or pining for a completely impossible scenario, grown-up Shy Boy stepped in with some logic. He pointed out that he didn’t think we would have dated. He was far too shy at the time to approach girls his age, and he was far too busy fantasizing about teachers much past his age. Well, thank you for bursting my image of what that cute faced lanky high schooler was like!
Incidentally, is it wrong to be drooling over a picture of a 17 year old? And oh by the way, is it illegal to be over a certain age and say a 17 year old is hot? I mean there are middle aged Twilight obsessed ladies who do the same thing.
I’m not sure why seeing an early picture of him amazed me so much. It felt sort of like looking at a picture of your parents when they were kids—sorry that didn’t sound right, what I meant is a relative you know very well in the present time, but didn’t know at all when you were a kid. You look at the picture. You are fully aware of who the person is in the picture, but at the same time, you can’t quite grasp that it’s the same person. You stare at the picture in wonderment. You see all the hope and innocence in their face, a naïve youthful glow unaware of what was to come both good and bad.
Outside, the rain kept coming down and I really wanted to stay. Rain! Rain! Rain! Keep going. I didn’t want to go home. If it cleared up, it meant it was time to go home. I wanted to spend the night with Shy Boy. No, I didn’t want to sleep with him. I just felt really close to him and I didn’t want the night to end. Come on, keep raining. He didn’t have to work in the morning. I should add, something strange has come over me over the past few weeks. I love Shy Boy, but it’s always been a very comfortable, steady love. I’ve never felt the madly in love excited feeling that most people feel early on in a relationship. Sometimes I used to wonder if that meant I didn’t truly love him and as a result I wondered if I was forcing myself into a relationship. I wanted to feel that wild crush sort of feeling that people say makes love so exciting and I wondered why it never showed up. A couple of weeks ago, it finally showed up. It’s not a feeling of lust, it’s a feeling of wild crazy love from the heart not from the groin. Its steady love sprinkled with the crazy love. I’m guessing that’s a much better place to be in, to have crazy love slowly develop and simmer rather than have an initial impact of it that gradually fades. Now, he’d better not do something stupid to annoy me and make me take back those feelings in a future blog post. Eh, you know he will. Boys are idiots.
