Imagine If....

I came across a contest online to win tickets to the premier of David Duchovny's new movie. It's an essay contest asking you to write about a friend from your past that you would like to reunite with. While the contest is useless to me (I live hundreds of miles from any of the premiers) the topic is interesting.

In the past few years I have sought out quite a few people from my past, and found a good number of them. It's been interesting getting to know who these people have become. I have been out of high school for 7 years now so most of my friends have graduated from college, some even from graduate school. Some are married, some have kids, some are even buying house. It's all very strange. And even though we have changed so much, there are still those things we have in common that nobody can ever take away from us. Those teachers we had, the places we hung out, the friends we made and lost, the fashions we experienced, the rumors we started and the bullies we endured. There will always be some things particular to our hometown and our age group that only we know about.

When I graduated from 8th grade, our class made a yearbook. The last 2 pages of the book were lists of "Remember when...." and "Imagine if...." statements. I recall that one of those was "Imagine if there was no Picasso's." Picasso's was a pizza place that we all used to go to after dances. Anybody who was anybody gathered there after dances and if anything interesting was going to happen it happened there. Almost everytime we went there was some kind of fight planned, and someone was going to hook-up with someone out back. Always drama going on. In 8th grade we honestly could NOT imagine Picasso's not being there. We thought we would all still meet there after every dance through high school, and, well we pretty much couldn't imagine existing at all after high school! Ironically, Picasso's went out of business about a month after 8th grade graduation! We were all shocked.

I think that was the beginning of the end of a lot of things. We all had to find different places to hang out and it split people up more. We tried other pizza places, but they all had rules and we'd get kicked out. Some people hung out at their friends' houses. Soon, coffee houses became popular and that really split us up. Only us "artsy folk" hung out at coffee shops. The jocks and cheerleaders preferred house parties.

It's odd because we were probably the reason Picasso's went out of business, we were always there really late and we were really rowdy, and the kids working there (making minimum wage and not caring about the bottom line) gave us free stuff, especially the sexy little girls in very little clothes....we certainly weren't good for business. But it's funny to think about how our lives revolved around that pizza place and how it's closing really did change our lives. And I bet that everyone, in every school in the country has a place like that. But I think if I were to reunite with people, people that I haven't already reunited with, I would like to reuinite with teh Picasso's crowd, because it was such a diverse crowd and we all went our separate ways so long ago that we barely remember that we were friends, and I'd really like to see how they all turned out....and then brag about how great I turned out! Tee hee! I'd also like to dig up that 8th grade yearbook and see how many other "Imagine ifs" have come true since then.