Rememberies

One of my resolutions for the new year was to embark on a "Picture-a-day" project. I had come across several suggestions on how to approach this: Some people took a picture of whatever interested them that day. Others took only self portraits. One person who (wo-)mans a blog I read (a beautiful and artistic soul) is starting a project with a friend where they are taking a picture of every morning for the next year. While that is admirable, I think mine would be a lot of last minute toothbrushing pictures before I fly out the door. (Hmm... that might actually be interesting... anyway..) Some people are rigging their computer cameras to take their photo everytime they log in. I think I might get tired of over-exposed pictures of my face after awhile, though. So I decided to go the least specific of all these routes. As long as I take one picture a day, I'm happy.

This is actually from day two (I'm counting my "Dusty Buddha" as 01.01.06), but as I was looking around my home, this caught my eye. It's been sitting up on my dresser for the past year or so, as it has sat up on a number of dressers in my various domiciles for a number of years. Back before all my digital endeavors, here is a roll of film I actually developed.(Don't ask how many are still sitting in boxes in the garage that will never see the light of day.) I can't remember how old we were here, maybe high school seniors - so that would put us at about 17. That is the same bedroom set I had used since my tenth birthday and it was the same set my mother used as a little girl. The walls (and ceiling) were my pride and joy - an on-going project of found words and images. There is a giant chalkboard that my dad brought home from a job site at some point. Later, he brought home a giant box of chalk of nearly every color imaginable. Besides love notes from my friends, it also held a list of every song on the radio I heard and liked enough to want to buy the cassette tape. Ciara's Superman antics? I have no idea where that came from.

We met in the summer before our junior year of high school. I had hired on as a clerk in the local pet store. My job? Cleaning the fish tanks in the hottest part of the store during a sizzling Santee summer. She waltzed in a couple weeks later, batted those eyes, flipped that hair, and manned the front register from day one. I thought she was cool, but resented the fact that the new low man on the totem pole actually sat a lot higher than myself. On her behalf, she said I was pretty, but too sarcastic for her taste. So, we basically didn't like each other. A couple weeks later, we found ourselves in the same AP English class and the rest is history, (err, English?). Although cliche, opposites do attract, as they certainly did in our case. Somehow, we found in each other the missing pieces of ourselves and that has become the glue that binds us together.

Fast forward 12 years... We live 100+ miles apart and in completely different worlds from that hodge-podge bedroom in Santee. But somehow, on New Year's Eve, we found ourselves ensconced in her new home, drinking Champagne and reminiscing about that old chalkboard