The Boys, Part I

The other day when I was trying to clean out the hall closet (which somehow always ends up more cluttered with stuff than when I started), I found this box of pictures. Cut to six hours later, and I'm still in the hall, sitting on the ground surrounded by a mountain of what can only be called "stuff" - because it has no place in an everyday house, so it ends up in the closet for me to look at and reminisce once every six months when I decide to clean house - and Becky walks in, sees me sitting there in my sweats, my hair all akimbo, crying because I found a drawing she made me once when we were sisters who didn't roll their eyes at each other, and then she rolls her eyes at me.

"You weren't supposed to get distracted!"

"But look at this!"

"No."

"Look it's so cute! Why do you hate childhood?"

"I don't hate childhood, but I need to get to my room at some point tonight and you're blocking me."

"Remember Meg?"

"What are you talking about? We just talked about her yesterday."

"I know. Remember that?"

"Ok. . . I'm putting a stop to this. Now you're remembering, remembering things."

And then she dragged me kicking and screaming into the shower, where, still fully clothed, she turned the cold water on, wrestled me to stop wrestling her while I yelled, "No!! I still have more pictures to look at!!! What if I missed something! LET ME OUT GAHHHHH!" and she held me down saying, "Snap out of it! Snap out of it! Do you see what you're doing to yourself!?!" and then I choked, smeared my mascara all over my face, and came back to reality.

But before we shut the closet up for another six months I managed to save this one picture.

This picture explains so much about who I am today, and makes me so happy I can't even tell you. (But of course I'm gonna. Cause that's what I do. Tell you things you don't want to know, in seven paragraphs more than it should probably take to tell such a thing.)







This will just be a pre-blog, to a much more descriptive blog of what the heck is going on here, but let me just point out some key facts:

1. This was taken on Catalina Island the summer our Dads didn't come, but instead just our Moms (the boy's mom, and Becky and I's mom - not 'our Moms' like they were a couple) ('Becky and I's'?)

2. Becky is topless.

3. The two boys are the kids who lived across the street from us and pretty much filled in as our brothers our whole lives - we did everything together. everything. and even though we haven't all been in the same place together in like 10 years, or talked more than 10 times in 10 years, I'm still 99% sure if Becky and I were getting hassled they'd hear it from the thousands of miles away they live now, like some sort of inner bat-signal, and come screeching in to kick some a for us.

4. Not shown: the boys both had tails. Not, like animal tails on their backsides, but tails like sort of a mullet, but not all-the-way-around-long, just . . . tail-long. Like this, but blond:



5. Becky is topless.

6. I look slightly matronly, and disappointed with my lot in life, because I'm fairly certain I had been trying to get everyone to pose like a traditional, fancy picture but no one would oblige. For such a bossy kid it was rare anyone ever paid any attention to what I wanted us all to do.

7. I think I am now wearing the watch Chip is wearing in this picture. Only mine can call the Pentagon.

8. Ethan is thrilled with his shark-head-chomper thing.

9. Becky is thrilled she's topless.

10. All four of us hit six feet tall in 1989 and rode in a VW bug for like seven years longer than our limbs should have allowed.

11. We bathed in an outside sink this entire trip.

12. We were too old to be bathing outside.

13. Apparently we all hated smiling with teeth.

14. Becky's got something stuck in hers.

15. We're sitting on a tomb. A cool, huge, stone and marble tomb.



Clearly, there's a whole lot more about this, but oh my gosh I love this picture so much. And I love that the entire time we were growing up and Becky was walking around topless because the boys are allowed so she should be too (I love kid equal-rights logic), the boy's mom was always saying, "Lori! Don't take a picture of her, what if this gets out when she's older?" as if she knew, she had some sense that one day the internet would be created, and I would post such a thing.

What? I put a censor bar over it! It's not like I'm showing anything!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to clean out my desk drawer and that's going to take at least the next three hours.