Chantilly Laced
September 30, 2000
Happy Birthday!
OK, so I probably missed the actual day but the sentiment is the same. Thiry one, huh? And still playing soccer. Wow, the advances in medicine that allow people your age to stay active now just astound me.
Did you do anything fun? After the game, that is.
I just got back from vacation. My brother Jim recently moved to Alexandria, Virginia, and I visited him for a few days. We went into DC and did some of the tourist things: the zoo, the Smithsonian, the Vietnam War and Lincoln Memorials. We walked by the White House as some Puerto Ricans protested in Spanish about using the island of Vieques off Puerto Rico for bombing practice. I snidely joked that the President's response was to issue a statement saying: "Be glad we don't use the main island."
Oh, and we watched the South Park movie. Twice. Jim's birthday comes next week and I bought him a DVD player as a present. He bought "Bigger, Longer and Uncut". I had only seen the show those couple of times at that bar Red Dog's in Tampa but the movie made me laugh my bleeping head off. The next night, on what was surely not a tearjerker weekend, we rented "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me." That one had its highlights but nothing as entertaining as the "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" segment of South Park so we watched that one again.
On my way back home through Virginia, I stopped at Chantilly High School. I went to high school in Pennsylvania but I lived in Chantilly from the second through the sixth grades and would have gone to Chantilly High School had my family not moved.
I went inside and asked to look at a yearbook from 1984, the year I would have graduated (Actually, I did graduate that year -- just not from that high school). Once they had adorned my shirt with a visitors' sticker, the folks there were kind enough to let this unshaven stranger (It's not vacation if you have to shave. That's my rule.) sit in the school library, leafing through a yearbook from 16 years ago that stirred his memory from years before then.
Now I have some idea what amnesia must feel like. I recognized the people in the pictures, I knew their faces and their names but there was a gap between my memories of them and who they had become when these shots were taken. But that's what happens when you move away. People you knew you don't know any more and you can only wonder how you would have fit into the pictures had you stayed.
I drove through my old neighborhood, past Brookfield Elementary School, where I made my first catch in kickball ("Now there are TWO outs!" I shouted. What elation I felt! I still remember it.), past the Brookfield Swim Club, where I learned to swim and then learned I could do it well enough to compete at it, and picked out our house at 13603 Pennsboro Drive.
It was raining and cold so I didn't get out and walk around. I would have liked to seen the creek that used to run behind the house. With the rain it was probably swollen and muddy. Too dirty and flowing too fast to go hunting for crayfish. Plus, Mom gets mad when we play outside in the rain.
At least she used to many birthdays ago. I hope you have many more good ones to come.
John
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©1997-2000 John McQuiston