Sunday, February 1, 2009

Box Full of Memories

Someone in one of the groups I used to belong to on CompuServe has set up a Facebook group. Char has set up a Facebook group for our Pinata group. So I've been spending time looking over old photos and scanning them.

I was pretty good...no...I was compulsive about keeping scrapbooks and photo albums up to date up to a point, but I reached a point where I was waiting for a large bunch of photos to be sent to me by a friend. It's been about 15 years now, and I'm still waiting! But that kind of stopped my scrapbooking. The advent of the digital age was the final kiss of death to scrapbooking, but I have three boxes of photos resting in limbo, neither digital, nor scrapbooked, so I looked through tme a few weeks ago and had found several photos to scan for the two groups.

Last night I spied another box and decided to see what was in it, thinking it might be more photos. Instead it was a treasure trove of worthless stuff from my grammar school and high school years.

There were all the class pictures from my grammar school years (see Photo of the Day) and prom pictures from high school.

Proms.jpg (41800 bytes)
(I remember "waists." It seems so long....)

The guy on the left is Bill, whom I met when I was 13 and dated exclusively, until he went into the seminary when I was 16. The guy on the right is Marty, who lived with his mother in the flat upstairs from us. Because Bill was in the seminary, I had nobody to take me to the Senior Ball, so Marty took me. I was not very nice to him and we never went on another date.

There was a photo of one of the many, many ceremonies we had when I was in grammar school.

MayCrown.jpg (62352 bytes)

The Mary statue on the altar tells me that this was a May crowning, where the May Queen processed in and placed a crown of flowers on the statue. I can't believe we all dressed up for this ceremony. I don't remember that. But we had ceremonies like this all the time. This is the old St. Brigid's church which has been closed now, needing earthquake retrofitting that the diocese couldn't afford. A shame. It was a beautiful church.

There is a book of school work from some Parents Day, which proves, in part, that I really did diagram sentences and was pretty good at it.

diagram.jpg (43496 bytes)

And then there is this picture, taken at San Francisco's famous "Top of the Mark" hotel on my 21st birthday.

TopoftheMark.jpg (35127 bytes)

(in case you ever wanted to know what Walt looks like behind the beard!)

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