cancer – day 423
Nostalgia is a strange thing. I can’t explain why, but high school has been on my mind lately. Maybe it’s because High School Musical (1, 2, and 3) was on TV this weekend and I kept seeing it in the movie list. Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about my life and how many times it’s changed so completely. Even seeing that the Dick Tracy movie was on tonight made me remember how Johnny V. and I went to a midnight special premier of that back in high school. But the Dick Tracy movie was a special event, a midnight showing, and since my curfew was midnight it was a big deal that my parents let me go on a date until two in the morning or however late it was. I can count on one hand the number of times I didn’t have a midnight curfew, and every time was with Johnny V. Having a single high school boyfriend makes the memories a lot easier to come by . . . there’s no confusion about who I was with at every dance, movie, lunch, school event, band trip, boating, hunting, snowmobiling, 4-wheeling, skiing . . . and sitting at his locker every day before school. Before we started dating, I had fun in school, but it became memorable around the time he and I got together. Not that I remember everything, like, I have no idea what the movie theater was called, though we went to dozens and dozens of movies there over the years.
Over the years. I was one of “those,” the kind with the high school sweetheart, I dated the same guy for most of high school and into college. And then I can’t explain exactly what happened, but it ended, fairly badly. I had too much growing up to do to really be something good for him, and even when we got together again a few years later when we were both in Fargo, I blew it with him again, I still hadn’t gotten a hold of what my life was or what it should be.
Not that I have any idea now. I used to be this driven, motivated person, rocketing my career right after rocketing through grad school. But I don’t feel that now. I still care about my work and have a tendency to work too many hours without realizing it, but it doesn’t drive me anymore. At least, I don’t think it does. Cancer didn’t do that to me, though. Somewhere along the way I let life get the better of me and the hard things changed me. Cancer changed me too, I can’t deny that, though I can’t quite put my finger on how (disregarding the physical issues left over from the surgeries and chemo and radiation).
When I think about who I am now versus what I was then, in school, I remember a lot of things that I regret. I guess the consolation is that I’ve grown and changed a lot, hopefully for the better.
The weird thing about nostalgia is that things that happened a long, long time ago feel like they happened yesterday, or last year. High school doesn’t seem that long ago to me. Yeah, I went to college and have degrees and a career and professional accomplishments and all that, but unlike so many people I went to school with, I’m not married and I don’t have kids. Not that I regret it, after Artie died it never seemed that important to find someone else and have kids, but when I think about my friends who do have kids, or look at my brother and sister-in-law (three kids), I feel like my life hasn’t contained a lot of what other people fill their years with. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I generally prefer who I am now to what I was in the past, but in a way it’s like the past ten years or so of my life never happened, and I’m still just, like, 25 or something. High school and Johnny V. don’t seem that long ago. Neither does the USingers tour in Europe, though now people that were on tour with me have teenagers, which is just shocking to me. We were all in college on the tour, it’s not like anyone was more than maybe five years older than me at most. And heck, plenty of people I went to high school with have teenagers now. They are the parents. It’s a kind of maturity I never expect to have. Not that I can’t act parental with my nieces and nephew, but I have that little luxury of being able to step away from it too and just be an aunt.
I have this luxury of being able to focus on my life that I don’t think many parents have. Not many good parents, anyway. The good ones put themselves second to their kids, I think. That’s what it was like for me growing up, anyway. But even with this luxury of non-distraction from my life, I haven’t figured out much, and when I look back at it I don’t see that I’ve done much, though obviously the time was filled with something. I do feel guilty about my quiet hermit life sometimes. Like I’m supposed to be doing more. And then time passes so quickly. The months after treatment that I’ve been living at home again in the woods have gone by like a flash, and all I’ve done is my work. No teaching dance lessons, and essentially no dancing.
I’m home a lot and I rest a lot. Rest my hands and my feet so the neuropathy doesn’t burn as bad. But it’s getting old. This feeling of not accomplishing anything creeps up on me, and makes me wonder about myself. I mean, like, why do I care about “accomplishments” anyway? Wouldn’t it be more zen to just be content with being? But when I let myself do that for long, I feel guilty, it’s strange.
And this nostalgia about high school seems mixed up in that. Because I always told myself that the reason I didn’t stay with Johnny V. was because I wasn’t really suited to the quiet northern Minnesota life. So instead I traveled the world, lived in big cities, moved a bunch of times, got claustrophobic, and ended up squirreling myself away on this quiet little property in the mountains of California. Aside from the lack of mosquitos, is there really a whole lot of difference?
My family is taking our first post-the-birth-of-grandchildren family vacation (so, it’s been more than ten years at least) this August, and we’re staying in a cabin on Lake Vermillion, about 30 minutes away from Virginia, MN, where we moved during high school, where I graduated with Johnny V. and where he’s still working, though he’s not the high school band director anymore. Well, duh, no wonder I’ve been thinking about it. I’m going to be there soon. That’ll be a trip.