Remembering High School



Marianne put me up to this before my Internet went out this morning and I am not sure how long the above picture will stay on this blog. Was not sure I would ever use it. Marianne is the delightful mother whose book I reviewed recently on this blog. Andrea on her blog Maybe It's Just Me has challenged readers to blog hop today, May 25 and Marianne did it here and was disappointed that I didn't also blog hop this morning. Marianne didn't follow the directions exactly she said, and I am impaired also.

For example,  I am not ready to take out high school pictures as Andrea suggested. They are in Room #7 and I am into "hotspot" clutter and weeds in the front yard these days when I am not working or seeing to the needs of my husband. Not going there, Andrea, but you can enjoy the above picture for however briefly it stays on my blog.

Since we are senior citizens, high school is a long way back  and even though I substitute teach in high school and once taught high school along with other grades, I do not even think about it much at all. I live over 2000 miles from my high school and do not even have high school Facebook friends. 

Even hubby who does have some long-term (but little short-term) memory couldn't recall much about high school. He said he was a ham radio operator and dated girls, He cannot remember any names of girls he dated in high school. He is 75 now and I am his third wife.

In high school I do remember starching dresses and wearing those starched slips that made the skirt stick out. (Can't remember what they were called.) We did not wear pants to high school, and even when I started teaching in the late 1960s in elementary school it was a scandal even in California for teachers to wear pants--another teacher and myself were the first to do this.

My journal apparently started in college with a hunt and peck typewriter and carbon paper. (For some reason I made carbons.) During the era of the hippies while I attended San Francisco State and finished my BA at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, I wrote very philosophically and religously:

• He shall receive what he fears who bases his life on fear; he shall find serenity who accepts suffering.
• Greatness is all to the young man--incidental to the great man.
• New creatures in Christ are not stuffy stereotpyes.
• Courage to accept my vile self stews from my Hope.
• If it concerns me that men depart from my standards, must it also concern me that I depart from men's standards"? Yes, if I live to please men. But since I do not live to please men, then men need not live to please me. Hence my standards concern none save myself, and hence it should concern me only slightly that men's standards differ.
• Never doubt that God guides you, but do doubt that you are wise to His ways.
• That person is real and free who practices thinking apart from his limited scope and experiences feeling apart from his ego-centeredness.
• Why do I expect to appear perfect before men whereas I know I am far from perfect before God? It is as men know me as I am--defiled, dependent--that I approach the nearer God.
• Poetry is older than either the novel or the short story because poetry is bound up in the heart of man. All men are poets and need to develop their potentials.

So why didn't I write more poetry then? It would have been more correct to not use "man" to indicate person, but we weren't doing that yet. I took myself so seriously then!

Yet life, though serious, is also fun, renewing and joyful because of Jesus Christ whom I have known all these years. And this blog hop surely is fun.