Sunday, January 08, 2017

The Notebook

As 2017 rolled around, putting the final nail in the coffin of the turd of a year 2016 was (with the obvious exception of the Chicago Cubs breaking their one hundred eight-year World Series drought), I sat down to write my thoughts on the year past and the year upcoming. But after thinking for a while, staring at a blank screen, then a blank piece of paper (I thought a change of venue might help) then back at a blank screen (the change of venue did NOT help), I couldn’t come up with something worth saying that hadn’t already been said, or written, or tweeted, or shared on Facebook a hundred thousand times. Instead I went to find an old notebook to see if I had started something in there that jump off from now.  And while trying to find a recent notebook, I found a twenty-five-year-old notebook (the fact that I have something that is twenty-five years old is frightening to me). It was a notebook from my senior year of high school.  It was called ‘The Notebook,’ well before the Nicholas Sparks book of the same title, which led to the movie of the same title.

Our Notebooks, dog eared and everything
‘The Notebook’ started in my freshman English Comp class and was shared between myself and my friend Rachel (I changed her name in case she doesn’t want to shared just because I am sharing). I’d write a few pages over the course of a few days, then pass the notebook to Rachel and she would do the same. Sometimes, we’d have other people write a page or two, but for the most part, Rachel and I did the bulk of the writing. I’m not sure why we started it, but we kept it up the rest of high school, and even into college. After college, when she moved away from Chicago, we kept it up by writing letters to each other.  She wrote a lot more than I did.  And of course, because I’m sort of a pack rat, but not in a creepy hoarding kind of way, I saved them all.


Our Notebook predates this one
Our communications in ‘The Notebook’ were pretty typical for high school kids: complaints about parents, friends, boy problems, girl problems, what were we doing that weekend, why Suzy is a jerk, why Jane shouldn’t like Ricky, the joy I had after I quit my job at the pizza place, Rachels’ frustration with her new manager at her job.  The notebook I found started in October of my senior year, right before Homecoming. As I flipped through the pages filled with my hardly legible chicken scratch, every one of them started with me fawning over a girl, let’s call her Leslie, and my disappointment at her not returning my fawning.  I was quickly taken back to that time, the nervous pains I felt in my stomach each time I called her to find out she wasn’t home returned to me. I was a miserable, lost, surly, whiny, complaining (and occasionally funny) brooding seventeen-year old again.
In between descriptions of what I did over the weekend, Rachel’s notes on the fights she had with her parents, the song lyric game where we would each write two lines from a song and the other one would try guess the song and artist, I whined about Leslie for months. While reading it, I remembered that it all came to a head after the Turnabout dance in February. Leslie and I had gone to the dance together but as soon as we were back at school on Monday, she no longer had time for me. Spurred on by several friends I did something bold, something I never had done before and haven’t done much since. I brought a rose to school and gave it to at her locker, hoping that this display of affection in front of dozens of other teenagers would make her understand my true affections for her.  Clearly, what I said when I handed her the rose didn’t work. She said, “You shouldn’t have.” And she meant it. Literally. Lucky for me, we both wanted to avoid a scene at school, so she told me to call her that night.
Totally on my bedroom wall
After putting it off as long as I could without calling so late Leslie’s parents wouldn’t let her talk, I called. Leslie told me she wasn’t ready to be in a serious relationship. She had been in a long one prior to senior year but when her boyfriend went off to college, they broke up. I’m not sure if I was looking for a serious relationship either, but I was looking for at least a relationship. The bad news is that Leslie and I weren’t going to be anything. The good news is that after months of pining and whining and brooding and stewing and not being able to fall asleep at night, and my stomach feeling like crap and ignoring the dozens of girls who were interested in me (okay, there was probably at least one), at least now I knew.  Reading about it even twenty-five years later brings me right back into my bedroom, my plastic blue phone with the super long headset chord on the floor, Michael Jordan poster alongside a Rush poster on the paneled wall, just the lamp light from my desk illuminating my room (plus the dirty laundry that was all over the floor).
I kept reading ‘The Notebook’ to see how I managed to survive getting my heart ripped out and stomped on by a girl. Just a week later, I wrote in ‘The Notebook’ that my cat, Deacon, died. She had been sick on and off for the last few weeks. At first the vet thought it was a thyroid problem, but then quickly determined it was heart related. I wrote in the notebook “I’m going to get her from the vet after school to take her home then she goes to a specialist tomorrow.”
She never made it to the specialist. She died that night howling in pain while in my lap. I cried a lot. She was still in my lap, tears running down my face when my brother came home from work and knocked on my door.
Prior to re-reading ‘The Notebook’ I remembered these two events as wholly separate. I didn’t remember that they happened the same week. My heart got crushed and my cat’s heart gave out. I know, I’m digging deep there for a connection, but come on, I was seventeen. That’s the kind of shit we do when we are seventeen and any little thing makes us think that our lives are over, or we are going to end up alone, or the world is dark and miserable place, or our parents are just trying to keep us from having fun.
I closed ‘The Notebook’ and slid it back on the shelf among its other dozen or so volumes. It was refreshing to see that in high school, at my most miserable, I was upset about a girl who didn’t like me and sad that I had lost my first pet, my cat.  At the time, it was devastating. But now, looking back at high school in comparison to what has happened in 2016, things weren’t so bad for me back then.   I was just a few months away from heading off to college, the track season was going well, I had my weekends free since I wasn't slinging pizza anymore. And I even went to Prom that year, with different girl (who after Prom, wait, that's another story altogether). And while there were terrible things in 2016 and a lot of things didn't got as hoped, my personal life wasn’t terrible.  It was a hard year at work, but 2016 doesn’t hold a candle to the two personal worst years of my life, 1983 and 1990.

So, no, I’m not here to wrap up 2016 in a few sentences or to offer bold predictions of doom and gloom for 2017.  But, shit, it could be a lot worse, right?  At least I’m not pining over some girl who doesn’t like me. I've a wife who I love (and I'm pretty sure she likes me too) and three kids who drive me crazy but make me smile at the same time, and two of them are even excited to see me when I get home from work. So good riddance to 2016 and bring it on, 2017. I’m ready for you. And in twenty-five years when I’m reading through the digital detritus of my life, the angst I displayed in my early forties, I expect that I will look back and realize that maybe it wasn’t all as bad as it seems right now.

Right?

Thanks for reading.

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