I finally broke down and renewed my Classmates.com membership

After all the e-mails and enticements from classmates.com to see who has visited my profile over the years and sent me e-mails, I finally renewed my membership. And wow what a flash from the past!

My "secret" Junior High School crush was listed in my guestbook. Guess it wasn't so "secret" after all. I sat behind him in a class or 2 since in those days they used to sit us alphabetically by our last names and lucky me (or so I thought) the boy with the most perfectly feathered hair had a last name that started with "He". My Junior High yearbook is covered with "I love you Jeff" all over it, circling every photo he appears in, no matter how dorky. He ended up taking a blond girl with really big, poofy hair (aka damaged - probably from all that sun-in and crimping) and braces to the Junior High prom.

Now 23 years later - and here I see his photo in my guestbook and at first had no idea who this guy was. A guy with 4 kids - 2 kids in high school, and a set of elementary school aged twin boys. And then I see a photo of him dancing with his daughter and it was something about the smile that transported me back to my Junior High days when I hoped that he'd come to his senses and realize that I was a much better catch than the peroxide queen. No such luck. He barely said anything to me, as I wished upon a star and stared at the back of his head.

Come present day, he searched through our shared Junior High School (we went to different High Schools since I moved away after Junior High). He's still living in my childhood neighborhood and his kids are going to the same schools he went to. I can't even imagine. He looks happy though in the ton of photos of himself and his family that he posted. But I can still read between the lines with his career (he left his work e-mail address to contact him) and the choices he made in his life. Plus he still seems very full of himself so I can't feel too sorry for him.

Then there was another boy who I went on a group date to the movies with in High School, who left to get some popcorn during the movie's sex scene. His younger sister Summer was a contestant on The Apprentice.

And another girl who was a cute, petite blond with a hard edge. Turns out she joined the Air Force and now has a kid and lives in Oregon working at some plant doing quality control.

I'm still searching for Justin Velo, a Diamond Bar High School classmate, also a modern day beatnik who was unique, bizarre, interesting and kind. For my 17th birthday he drove me and a bunch of my girlfriends to a party at my friend's house in his baby blue VW van, and gave me Jim Morrison's biography. I had heard he moved to San Francisco and was working in a bookstore (which is easy to imagine), but no one's heard of him since.

And why is it I didn't know we had a guy name Frankenstein who graduated in my class? Seeing all the unrecognizable names makes me realize just how few people I really knew in High School.

I'm not one of those that ever looks back and claims, "Those were the best times of my life." That's a blessing! As my adult life now is so much better in every respect from my childhood. In some respects I remember Junior High better than any other period in my life since it was so traumatic. High School is a complete blur as I saw it just as a stepping stone to college. After college is when my real life started. As it should be. But it's still fascinating to see how we all ended up in adulthood.