that's it, all the little secrets that make it your home

What’s the toughest decision you ever had to make?     to leave, or not to leave, my marriage. I could have stayed. We could have stayed together forever. It hadn't been good for a while, though. An active good, where we took pleasure in it and felt satisfied by it and found it rewarding. It was.... It just was. And what kind of life is that? With a certain sameness, where emotions are dulled to the point of vanilla blandness? I couldn't live that way, and didn't want him to either. It was sad to see someone I cared so much about being sad, and bored, and weakened by us being together.

    And so I left, which was the right thing to do, but tough no matter what. And it was hard, but not the hardest thing after all.

Do you keep in contact with anyone else from school?     yes, I am still friends with my hometown friends, and a handful of college friends. No one from grad school, strangely, though that was a weird time for me and I didn't go out of my way to make connections. I'm in contact with a few people from law school, and a bunch from the library.

What was your least favorite subject in school?     History, oddly. Pretty sure that was just because it was so easy for me, with no challenge, and the fact that it was almost entirely American History - my least favorite topic. When I got to college and started studying whatever I wanted to, I was drawn again and again to History, until I finally had a degree. Funny, how that happened.

Have you seen any of your old teachers recently?     I was recently friended on FB by my high school math teacher. Though that went a bit sideways for a moment, it's settled into a nice re-connection.

Do you miss school?     more than I can say.

Did you move around much since graduation?     ha! HAHA yes. I think that we settled on 21 as the number of times I've moved since I was 18 - which is funny because I lived in the same house from birth until then. Most of my early moves were the "usual" sort, functions of college housing and then the logical wanderings of an academic marriage. Since then, though, I've had an excess of addresses. I know it drives some of my friends a little crazy, but ... I have a wandering soul.

Do you ever think about your school days?     now and then, usually occasioned by some specific memory. I am gradually reacquainting with a friend from grade school, which accounts for lots of "oh, do you remember so-and-so?" messages and pictures.

Did you ever run away from home?     only for day trips

How did you change since the old days?     I am much more serious. My grade school friends remember me lighthearted and frequently silly. My junior high friends recall my boy-craziness, though it was so much more "from afar" than for real. 

    It would be interesting to hear it from those people, though, to know if my recollections match theirs.

What’s the stupidest excuse you came up with to stay at home instead of going to school?     I was not that kind of kid. The only thing I recall that comes even close was when I was in maybe 4th or 5th grade, I got very sick. (Probably influenza?) I was home for several days. That was before my mom went back to work outside the home, so we two were together that entire time. I know I was really sick because we spent a lot of time together, reading or watching TV or just cuddling - and my mom was not that sort of mom, really. So when I was better, I fibbed about still feeling bad so that I could stay home for a couple more days. I remember thinking that she would be lonely without me.

Is there anything about your school you appreciate now, that you didn’t appreciate before?     there's not much to say about my last school, which is a frankly depressing bunch of cold war-era looking brick cubes surrounded by an inordinately working-class town. The one before that is populated by beautiful historic buildings and a couple of on-campus bodies of water. That's not something you realize when you're a student, though - how pretty it all is. 

    What do I newly appreciate about my first school? It was inexpensive. Tuition at the likely school-to-be is exponentially higher (literally almost 10x more).

What do you think is the most important thing for your BFF?     family

Do you know when and where your parents were born?     uh, yeah. No big secret there.

 

[from here; the title quotation is by Fredrik Backman, from A Man Called Ove]