It's like Joni Mitchell once said, "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." True for parking lots and Mother Nature, also true for the vagaries of the human face, so plumped up with youthful dew in the flower of adolescence, yet so unappreciated.
Had a ball over on Facebook the other day. Old friends had posted equally old photos of our younger selves doing ridiculous things and we had a good time kibbitzing back and forth about how silly we were and, more than anything else, how good we looked.
And we did. Look good, that is. Which is funny because I grew up with the absolute conviction that I was plain-bordering-on-ugly. Now I look at photos of my younger self and I could cry at how pretty that teenager was, and how on earth she couldn't know that.
In truth, I remember my teenaged angst. My high school had more than 2,000 students and amidst that crowd were many stand-outs, I mean raving beauties with Farrah Fawcett hair and faces like movie queens. When you walked the lockered halls with stunning young women like that, you knew your place as intrinsically as a 70% average on the math class bell curve.
Thirty-seven years later and the teenaged angst has been replaced by middle-aged angst and the high school beauty queens are battling their own demons, and all that remains are these photographs of a pretty young woman with a really great smile.
I wish I could tell her she didn't have to try so hard.
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| In the top photo, me and my friend Nicky on a night on the town, sometime in the mid-1970s. All these photos were taken by my friend Mark Champion who got a new Polaroid camera for Christmas. (Thanks Mark!) In this photo, me and my sister Liz in the living room of our Markham home. That couch was high fashion at the time! |
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| My Dad, Liz and me in the rec room of our Markham home. Dad had such great hair! He had refinished the basement himself, using real tongue-and-groove pine. |
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| Goofing around on Yonge St. in Toronto with my "date," Andrew Megarry. I often wonder what happened to Andrew. He was a really sweet young man. |
