School's Been Blown to Pieces

Time is a funny thing.  It's also a real bitch.  It flies.  It claims to be on your side.  You can't catch it in a bottle.  Bandits. 

Time has many faces (I think I just made a clock joke).  Time is doing the bird.  Everybody! Whawk! Hallelujah! Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh!

Seriously, this getting old is a bunch of bullcrap.

My high school reunion is this weekend.  Twenty. Fucking. Years.  I know, I look great.

Twenty years?  Who does that?  I'm very confident in the fact that the 10th was just a few years ago.  I remember it clearly.  It was like high school but drunker.  I wore a tie. There was dancing.  I specifically remember dancing.

Flash forward and I'm married with children and Al Bundy is becoming less and less funny.  Not that he was ever that funny to begin with.  I do love me some Sinatra though.

I've had mortgages and lost loved ones and been to Europe and can put on lipstick using nothing but my cleavage.  It's been a banner fucking year at the Honea house.  Years, even.

I walked out of the 80s with a mullet and a cassette player.  My Guess jeans were pegged and the sleeves on my Vuarnet t-shirts were rolled.  I wore a heavy layer of Drakkar over a heavier layer of smoke and my future was so bright that I wore shades.  I mean, I had to.  It was the required uniform.  Like tights.

The 90s were filled with stupidity that I could bounce back from.  There were women and wine and whisky and women and sometimes there was just a girl and a cup of coffee.  The 90s were best spent wooing those that would be wooed.  Also, Nirvana.  I owned a turtleneck and I was always broke.  Always.

Today I have two little faces at the table across from me.  If I close my eyes I can lose myself in the background of a ball game, but when I open them again the little faces will still be there- laughing at me.  These are not visions of time gone by, these are the now and I'm living in it.

I don't know the score.  I didn't even know it was the All-Star break.  I only know that somewhere between 2-for-1 night and this morning a lot of shit happened and I think that I'm better for it.

20 years is a long time gone from the days of my youth and I never saw it coming.  Life just happened while I was busy making other plans.  What came first, Mr. Holland or the opus?  Or the Bill the Cat?

I don't miss it.  I don't feel old - knees and back and hairline aside.  Sure, this weekend will be spent just sitting around talking about the old times, the glory days - I guess it's twenty years gone by now, but we're talking reflections.  Our paintings haven't aged.  We, however, are fucking old.  Relatively.  But we're younger than we'll be the next time, and hopefully the time after that.  There's life in the old girl yet.

Today is the mountain I've made from so many molehills.  It is stress and late nights and the feel of little hands reaching quietly into mine.  There are fears and bills to pay and in the other room my children are laughing at something that I forgot was funny.  The ghosts of my past pale in comparison.