Oh, Oh, Sheila

I’ve been remiss in identifying the photographs I’ve posted lately. The girl dancing with Zeke is Stacey Holt (right?). The last senior portrait is Annmarie Crochet Sartor, a Swingerette and my roommate for two separate semesters in college, which means that even after putting up with my melodramatic angst the first time, she let me come back to generate more. The two girls in the classroom are Rebecca Blake and Letza Bendele Fogleman. I don’t know whether Stacey and Becky got married and attached other names, but if you do, will you drop me an email?

I might still have a poem or two written in long hand on notebook paper by the teenage boy in this photograph. Yes, in addition to serenading many people with lines from pop songs whenever he walked in a room, JMB wrote rhyming poetry about the girls who didn’t return his esteem at the same level it was offered. (To be fair, he told me that each poem wasn’t about anyone in particular. But someone had to have inspired them.) JMB was also skilled at teasing people in general: I usually couldn’t think of a clever response, which was frustrating even as I laughed. Maybe his skill came from growing up with a lot of siblings.

I also had a brief poetry-writing fit in high school, dark verses about suicide that I showed only to my best friend. During an English test, I wrote my own poem instead of finishing the lines of a Wordsworth verse that began, “The world is too much with us; late and soon.” It would have been an easy A, a memorization challenge only, but I was blowing off senior English that semester and the first line was the only one I recalled. I felt vexed when I didn’t get the poem back after the tests were graded because I thought it was pretty good for a spontaneous creation. (Here I reassure you that I’ve recovered from that kind of vanity to the best of my ability.)

It is cringe-making to read the journal I kept for another English class. Do you still have yours? If I were to perform a survey of its content, I’m sure 75% of it was about the boys who made me swoon, much to their dismay. Most of them I met through the drama club (Actors Anonymous), my sophomore-year enthusiasm. Another thing I kept from high school years, and recently discovered in a plastic container with journals, letters, and the green diploma folder, is a formaldehyde-soaked tag for the frog Zeke and I dissected in Mrs. Gouzy’s class.

If Zeke remembers the name he gave that frog, I would be more surprised than anyone on earth.