I remember

Today, memories of all sorts were flooding my mind while I was busy at work.  Random ones, many from elementary school.  I like memories.  A point in time that is infused in my heart.  Though many of my memories aren't good, I have many that are, and they total up to who I am today.  

I remember...

....being in Miss Hatton's sixth grade class.  She was a nice teacher, prone to smiles and good cheer, really only getting mad once in a while at the class clown.  It was during the days of Nancy Reagan's drug education program called "DARE".  Remember that?  If you don't, just go to any thrift store and look through the t-shirt section and you are bound to find a t-shirt adorning her mantra.  Anyways, on this day, we all received a red DARE ribbon to put on our backpacks.  They were poorly made and had little red frays at each end of the ribbon. If you pulled just a little bit, you could pretty much just destroy the ribbon, leaving just a pile of red thread.  Well, a few of the guys in class figured this out and proceeded to destroy their ribbons.  When Miss Hatton saw those poor little ribbons all shredded up, she was infuriated!  Now I had pulled a few threads out of my ribbon, but so little that my ribbon still looked intact, but enough to have a decent pile of thread.  Miss Hatton screamed at the two culprits and then posed the question, "Is there anyone else involved?"  Well I was scared to death, so I sure as heck was not going to raise my hand.  But before I could even think, Kurt Miller, who was sitting next to me, reached slowly into my desk, pulled out my clump of thread, and raised it towards the sky, for all the class to see.  Miss Hatton looked at me as if I had just dropped the f bomb out of my little elementary mouth and with all the fury she could muster, screamed at me to get out in the hall.  I can't remember what happened after that, but I will never forget the way I felt when she looked at me with her big brown eyes and screamed at me.  Thanks Kurt.

....going through a phase that same year of loving everything baseball.  Baseball this and baseball that.  I had a whole crew of friends who all shared my passion, and it would consume our conversations.  One day I brought in my mint condition Mike Schmidt baseball card.  The pride of the Phillies and my collection.  My baseball loving "friend" asked me to see the card.  I gently handed it to him.  He looked at it for a while and then, as if I wasn't watching, slowly put the card under his desk and proceeded to bend it completely in half.  He then handed it back to me as if nothing had happened.  Now if you know anything about baseball cards, you know that a baseball card with a crease in it is rendered worthless.  I was mad, but I didn't do anything about it.  This is the earliest memory that I have of me not standing up for myself.  I asked him why he did it and he insisted that he didn't.  And I left it at that. But man, I was sad....

I'm still not sure why these memories were living in my mind today.  They are random and from another time in life that has been long past.  Maybe it's that still small voice telling me to stand up for myself, or maybe it's saying "your sins will find you out".  I'll have to think about that for a while.  It's hard work processing memories, or scars, or joys.  Whatever you want to call them, I  am thankful that the lines on the road are still comming.

The word of the day is a conjugation of remember and memories.  Rememberies.  Go make some.