Sunday Scribblings #14 - "Two peas in a pod"

There is only really one person who comes to mind for me when I think "two peas in a pod:" Lori! My other half in high school, Lori Lee Fitzgerald. We met at a Model United Nations meeting at Fountain Valley High School, California, in the heart of Orange County in the worst of all hair decades: the dread '80s. 1987, to be precise. Lori was a native to this soil; I was a newcomer, fresh from 6 years in Europe, and I was discovering that most of my new classmates had no idea where "Belgium" was. Texas? Eastern Europe? Close... (Have you heard the horrifying tales of Americans' geography skills? They're true.) I had come from a school of 200 kids, to a monstrosity of 3000+, a zoo of weird bad hair choices a few miles from the beach. I had made some friends playing soccer over the summer, so I had some girls to eat lunch with, but it wasn't until I met Lori that I had a REAL friend, and instantly. An instant click. After that, we were inseparable. I can't hear Erasure songs without flashing back to her, and to the boy we both had a year-long unrequited crush on. For me, this agonizing crush ended abruptly when this boy corrected my grammar. It was like a switch had been flipped. I saw him later, we both went to college at Berkeley, and he looked... meager... as is the way with so many cute boys from high school when you get a peek at them in college. My other big crush went to Lori's college so I saw him too. He was the adored-by-all quarterback of the football team, with black hair and light light blue eyes, and he didn't look meager, just balding, which inspired a certain amount of schadenfreude.

But it wasn't all boys. I sort of cringe thinking of what the social world of that time and place was like, the stupid parties I never enjoyed, the big expensive proms and the football games. But I have very fond memories of driving the Coast Highway with Lori in my convertible beetle with the top down, singing at the top of our lungs. A lot of the other stuff is sort of vague now. I was NOT one of those people who lamented the end of high school. The DAY AFTER graduation I was on a plane back to Europe, and didn't come home, and missed my first semester of college.

Ironically, it is LORI who is now an EU citizen. She married a Dutchman and has lived in Amsterdam for some 12 years now. The picture above is when I visited her there ten years ago. Ten years! God, how time goes by! So we're two peas long ago shelled out of our pod, but I love her dearly. I think I'll call her...