Old Photos - Me and Gloria

Partway into our teens, thinking we were older than we were. 

In that top photo, I wore my big hoop earring and medium blue sweater jacket that I started high school with, the jacket I so often wore into our driver's ed. class with shirts that ended just short of where they were supposed to, some small bit of skin showing, prompting our driver's ed. teacher to declare in his highly enunciated way, "Zip it up!"  Which of course I always did for the duration of his class. 

Gloria, do you remember how he always put his emphasis on the strangest words? "Before you turn THE corner, you will want TO use your brakes..." Do you remember how Gilbert would proclaim, "Glllloria TOVeeoff" from his place in the room, distorting your name in his idea of a Bulgarian accent, unfailingly confusing the teacher as he glanced around for the source of this interruption, and we'd always laugh at that same joke?   

And an Antelope Valley Fair photo from the summer. From those booths that we always spent too much of our small amounts of money on. 

Still to come in life were Gloria's kids, my kids, Gloria's grandkids, our partners, split ups, moves, homes, jobs, bewilderment, realizations, confidence (and over-confidence), humility, hurt in its many forms, grieving, exhilarations, quieter joys, disappointments, losses, new beginnings, resilience. The rest of our teens and our whole adult lives. 

Like so many others in the many variations possible. 

And through it all, our friendship. I'm a big believer in holding onto people. Back then, we declared we would be friends for life. We could not know then that we would actually keep that promise. Keeping that promise has made us who we are.

Now I imagine the us of twenty or thirty years from this present, if we're fortunate enough to both still be living, looking back at photos of the us of this 2013 time. What possibilities might we see open to the women in those photos that we did not fully realize were there?  Or what will we see in the women of now that already held the promise of what would follow? 

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Postscript:

And still, I find myself drawn to these photos. I felt something shift in me when I first saw them after so long. The theorists who claim that all reality is only reality through language - how do they account for these feelings which I search through my mind to find words for? I'll know them when I see them - the right words for the feelings that already wait for the words. The life of then, that photo time, and so much in between that finally led to now feels closer. Well, what am I going to do about that, anyway?  Does it mean something? Is it just a feeling that seems urgent, but has no way to be acted upon?  And if it calls for action, what is that action?

Sometimes these little encounters change our whole lives. In May 2009, I went to a reunion gathering that changed my whole life. A woman I didn't know, just finishing her PhD in political science at my undergrad university, responded to what I'd said about having stopped pursuing the B.A. in 2007 because I just couldn't see where it was even going anymore. She said sometimes you have to do something as well as you possibly can and live your way through it to see who you become. I kept thinking about that.  Sometimes you do things, and you aren't fully sure why, but something in your core says yes, this is right. What is that inner guide?