The way things used to be-- Part 1

Another thing I have been thinking is:
You don't have your kids, they have you.
That has absolutely nothing to do with what this post is going to be about, but I had to put it out there so that I can remember it later.

On with the post:
Last night I had a dream, or a nightmare, or something strangely in between. I woke up and tended to Burbles and then felt strangely like everything in that dream had been true and that is the way things really were. I stumbled back to bed to try and fall back asleep only to lay there thinking about the past and how things were. I will try to explain.

The book that I read, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, dealt a lot with bullying and the defense for the boy in the story rested on the fact that he had been bullied all his life. One of the points in the story was that if a person looks back at their high school years, they do not see the happy times and all of the good things. Every person looks back and can vividly remember something bad that had happened. Every person, even the popular kids, will look back and remember how terrible a certain point had been. Even one instance of bullying can be traumatic to a person, now take a look at those people who have been bullied excessively. I am sure that each of you can relate to this on some level or another. Unfortunately, I feel I can relate to this far more than most.

When I look back at school, I see myself as someone who would have been worth knowing. I seemed to float well in many crowds, although, I would have preferred my friends to be from the "In" crowd. To this day, I would still consider myself friends with a few of the people I went to high school with. I even had a friend from the "In" crowd as a bridesmaid in my wedding. I enjoy her company and look forward to many years of friendship with her in the future. Sure, we have a history, some of it not so nice, but she is more valuable as a person than what a couple of moments in high school can measure. That, and I know we have both grown and changed. We have similar values. We have similar fields of study. But, more than that, she is someone who was there the first time I drove a car and applied makeup. As far as I remember, she was there at all of my birthday parties and we kept in touch through college. With her, there are still some memories that sting. I remember hearing through the grapevine that she had called me annoying. This was right before prom of our freshman year and it started a huge turmoil and changed our plans and caused me a lot of pain. The deal was: I was riding in the limo with the cool kids. I didn't have a date, but one of our mutual guy friends had agreed to go with me as a friend if neither of us had a date the week before the prom. That was the case, but we hadn't settled the deal. I found out (probably on Tuesday before a Saturday prom) that he had been asked by two of the cool girls to go with them together. Because of this, I no longer had a date and had been pushed out of the limo (looking back, I probably wasn't in the limo to begin with, but they were stringing me along saying that I was). I was terribly upset, but they said that I could still come to dinner with them, I would just have to find my own ride. I could still meet up with them before at one of our friends' house and the only difference would be that I couldn't go in the limo. That also meant that I didn't have to pay the $50 fee for the limo either. Unlike most of my friends, I had purchased my own dress and accessories (in excess of $400) and would also have to pay my way in the limo and at dinner as well. (You have to wash lots of dishes to make this kind of money at minimum wage.) My mom and Gummie agreed to drive me to and from the restaurant, over an hour away. In the meanwhile, they started an ongoing conversation with the limo driver. I didn't know about this, but while over an hour away and at dinner, Mom and Gummie made friends with the driver who agreed that it was pointless for them to stick around and that I could just ride up front with him. I was his "guest" and wouldn't have to pay for the ride. While I am sure they meant well, and I was terribly excited to be riding in the limo, even if it was in the front, their plan back-fired and by the time we actually arrived at the prom, I had eight "close-enemies". One of the parents called Mom and demanded that I pay the $50 for my ride. We did, just to make sure that that wasn't the reason I was their immediate target of dislike. During the dinner I had felt like and outsider. During the prom, I felt like I was the plague. To this day, I can't see a limo without thinking bad thoughts. And, I have never had the opportunity to ride in a limo to make things right. Oh, I made the best of a bad situation, I just hung out at the prom with my other friends who weren't the cool kids. I had an OK time. Certainly, it wasn't the fun time that I would have had had everyone been OK with the situation, but it was fun. I made a few upper-class friends that night. Became friends with a boy and his girlfriend who were in choir with me. Monday morning, the cool kids still treated me like I had the plague. This would continue for the rest of the school year and into the next. I was still in track and field, and I started to befriend the older kids who weren't in my grade.
The following year, I made friends with a girl who was a year younger than I was. They were freshmen now. I had known this girl forever. She was a neighbor and her parents and my parents were friends. Her friends became my friends and I found myself spending lots of time with them. I started getting invited to the parties that I wanted to go to. I spent nights chatting girl talk on the phone. When I got my driver's license, we went shopping and hung out even more. The spring of my sophomore year, my new friend and I rode a Greyhound Bus to North Carolina. It was an amazing experience--one that I will never forget. Things just seemed to keep getting better. Although I had some classes with my old friends, I had taken a course designed for juniors and had to rearrange my schedule because of this. I managed to avoid them for the most part (my school was very small and I graduated with 28 other kids in my class). The fall of my junior year, my parents decided to sell our farm and move into town. We had lived in our house my whole life. Coincidentally, my friend's family also decided to sell their farm and move at the same time. Both our families were shopping for homes at the same time. Our family had found the perfect house and put an offer in on it the following day. I was so excited that we finally knew where we were going and I called my friend to tell her about the house. It just so happened that her family had also looked at the same house and was putting in an offer on it as well. With my excitement, I lost our family the home that we wanted. They put the offer in before our realtor could present ours. Their offer was accepted. That morning, my friend's father called and told my father that because we were putting in an offer on the home, they would not be putting in the offer. I don't know why he did this, because they did just the opposite of what he said. That tore our relationship apart. Our families divided. Our parents had gone on their honeymoons together almost 25 years before, but now there was war. I was asked not to speak to my friend. We ended up buying a house only a quarter mile away on the same street. Without realizing it, we became friends again. Our parents didn't really agree with this friendship, but they understood, I think. That summer, my friend and I worked an eight hour a day job together wrapping caramels by hand at a factory in a nearby town. We spent more and more time together. She had changed some of her classes and was able to manage an early graduation. We were graduating together. We were looking for colleges together. We were growing up together.
My beginning of my senior year was great. I wasn't on the outside. People took a while getting used to the idea that my friend would graduate with us, but eventually everyone was hanging out. After football games, we would go to someones house and hang out and talk for hours. We were all on top of the world. We could see the future. We could see that we wouldn't be stuck here forever. We had started to plan who we would become. That winter, there was a basketball game that happened on the night of a snowstorm. We were all at the game and figured that the following day would be a snow day. We decided to go to my friend's house and go sledding. Living so close, I went and got my snowmobile. I had gotten a new one that year. It had an electric start and reverse and I was so excited to show my friends. I got to the party and there were a few people from my grade there, but more than that, my friend's little brother was there. He was still in elementary and was a little snot, but for whatever reason, what he said that night got to me. I had pulled up to the top of the hill and needed to drive down, so I put my snowmobile in reverse. It beeped, like other machines going in reverse. Her brother said something to the effect that the beeper was appropriate for a person of my size. Everyone laughed. I was devastated. I don't think I talked to my friend after that. I may have said only a few sentences to her since including speaking with her at her older brother's wake when he died in a motorcycle accident. I keep in touch with some of the other people I graduated with as well. I have more in common with some than with others and things have changed over time. I try not to hold grudges. Things that happened in high school should stay in high school. We were young, ignorant, and we all thought we were right.
In the end, though, I'm sure everyone can relate to this at some level. I felt so alone, but so did everyone else. High school was over and I was moving on to bigger and better things. I don't know if I would have chosen the same if I had to go back, but that is where Part 2 of the story comes in. A different day. As to my choices, they are what they are. These situations made me who I am. As I go on with my life, I sometimes wonder where people ended up. I wonder if they ever felt as alone as I did. I wonder if we could have a conversation nine years later or if things would be the same as they were back then. I hope they learned as much as I did about people and the rules of life. As much as I wish I could have some closure about certain things that happened, I know that some people aren't big enough to deal with it, or maybe they just don't remember because it wasn't that important to them, or maybe they just don't care.

The dream, itself, was a picture of me at a reunion with all of the girl-friends (platonic, obviously; high school and college) that I had had over the years all meeting up in Las Vegas (a place where I do not really have a desire to revisit because I felt so out of place for the one day that I was there). They invited Fundi and I but told us that everything would be happening at one hotel when in all actuality, we got there and everything was happening at another hotel/bar. They had managed to "forget" to tell me that plans had changed. In all actuality, they never changed the plans but had told me incorrectly from the start. I found them, accidentally, while I was having a drink with Fundi at one of the bars. We had been looking around for them but stumbled on them by accident. They obviously were not expecting me. I confronted them and asked them if I was not important enough to have just left me alone. If they hadn't wanted me there, they should have just left it be and not made me spend money to get somewhere I wasn't wanted. I asked if that was the case. They admitted to stringing me along like it was a joke. They were playing a joke on me. After all of this, I asked them, point blank, if I was not indeed important enough to know as a person. They said that they "hadn't had the time then and didn't have the time now." They said that I had never really been their friend, but they had used me for whatever they had needed at the time. They said that currently I wasn't worth their time as an individual to get to know again. They had absolutely no interest in me or my family and they had me escorted from the hotel bar making me pay my drink bill, which I refused because the bartender had been witness to all of this, and anyone with an iota of compassion would have said that my six dollar bill was on the house. The bar owner had happened to be a former classmate of Fundi's and she was in on all of this as well. I walked out.