pardon my old soul in the rocking chair

I sometimes find myself at parties or deep in discussions in friends' kitchens when I imagine filming this time in our lives and twenty years down the road showing it to the teenagers of the people I hangout with now.


Dear Future Seventeen-year-olds,


Imagine your parents sitting on a collection of wooden kitchen chairs, arm chairs, folding chairs, countertops in the kitchen of a house we called "The Hot Chocolate House" where we have all marked our height on the door jamb (and where we can see that while theoretically I am supposed to be average height everyone really is taller than me). We're wearing clothes we bought at thrift stores or our parents bought us when they were worried we were becoming too bohemian. We have all just finished an impromptu potluck meal and are now debating if pulling fingernails or teeth is more terrible. This comes up in the middle of talking about photography trips to Romania and John the Baptist and Venus and what classifies a documentary.

Seventeen-year-olds, I can't believe you're going to happen someday.

Always,
Marge


The strange thing is it gets closer everyday. We're all graduating. Karonius, JBottoms, the other E's, and KB are already hundreds of miles away. Currently Alicia, Gracie and I are graduated but still here. But Alicia's got her grad aps in and I'm thinking I'll be moving hundreds of miles away myself at the end of this summer. And half of the people I hang out with now are married and even pregnant or with new babies.

Where I move, will there be hiking, skinny-dipping, bike rides, pot lucks, gardens, county roads with pastures and industrial wasteland?


We're getting older and some things are going to change. We won't always notice as it happens but someday I'll be going to the station on my fifth job as a researcher for some radio or television program, I'll forget what the latest technology is and ask the intern (who's wearing skinny jeans because they're hip for the bazillionth time) to record a pre-interview on her/his ipod and (s)he'll look at me dumbly because (s)he's never listened to an mp3 only mp11's. Mp11's will probably grow on trees.

So much is always changing.



I'm excited for all of it.