High Shool Photos

Do you ever get absorbed by a project? It's fun, isn't it. I've started scanning the pictures from my photo albums and saving them on our computer. Almost through Volume One, I realize that what started out as an attempt to compress four photo albums into a hard drive has morphed into a love/memory fest.

"Volume One" chronicles my high school adventures. Maybe I should rephrase that - adventures I had while in high school. I didn't have a camera for the normal, day-to-day part of high school, so my photo album only captures the big trips and happenings. Vacations, summer camps, etc. It's funny to open up the photo album, all these years later, and see mainly pictures of people I met briefly and then never saw again.


This photo is from the Caribbean cruise my parents took me on, Easter Break of 1996. The Macarena was big that year, and as you can see I had mastered the steps and was eager to pass on my knowledge. That's Erin to my right and Kim to my left. They were sisters... or were they cousins? They were from Ohio I believe, and their grandparents had brought the extended family on a trip together. The three of us hung out all week, along with the other teens looking to lose their parents and flirt the nights away in the ship's teen lounge. I was always a little amazed that they wanted to hang out with me, because they seemed so much cooler. They had better clothes, they were better with boys, and they had that easy manner all cool people seem to have. They liked me though, and we even corresponded for awhile after the cruise. Kim even gave me a little decorative box from her trip to Spain. I still have it.


I love this photo. It's Scott, one of our group leaders for my first church-group canoe trip in the Boundary Waters. Summer 1995. We were camped on an island high over the water the day this picture was taken, and he was the only one (?) brave enough to jump off the cliff. He caught a fish that night too, and I think we all ate some of it. His son was also a part of our group, and if I remember right the son was starting to veer off with the "bad crowd". I think he might even have gotten his girlfriend pregnant the next year. Maybe that was just a rumor. I liked Scott.


Ah, my Georgetown summer school experience. The best three weeks of my teen years. Tons of kids who liked school, a world-class city to explore, and no parents within a thousand miles to tell you what to do. We went wild. By "wild," I mean that we went to all the monuments on the National Mall, and stayed up late writing foreign policy papers and spraying each other with silly string. This picture is, let's see... John from Tennessee... Jen from Utah whose boyfriend was about to go off on a Mormon mission... Mitch from Texas who had a cheerleader girlfriend back home... I forget the names of the next two guys... Jason from Chicago, who ended up becoming a real, long-term friend. He was my senior prom date, student at a college a mere hour and a half from my own, and an usher at my wedding. This photo was taken at Washington DC's Hard Rock Cafe, which seems pretty dang classy to a bunch of high school kids. Seemed classy to me at the time, anyhow.


And Ned, from Turkey. The alpha males at the summer school treated him pretty badly, and I'm embarasssed to admit that at first I didn't see anything wrong with that. Ned turned out to be a really neat guy. I wonder what he's doing now. Maybe he's married, maybe he has some interesting job where he does good things for people/makes a lot of money (whichever one he's after).

I wonder whose photo albums I'm in, out there somewhere. Are there people that come across my picture and wish me well? Do they remember things about me that I've forgotten?