Two of my favorite people are having a hard time getting each other’s emails, so I offered to act as a go-between until the email problem was resolved. As I wrote them this morning, this reminded me of an incident that occurred when I was in the 9th grade.
I sat between one of the school’s most popular boys and a very pretty girl in math class. While my wonderful Russian teacher was at the board writing out his esoteric messages, I was enlisted as a conduit in an entirely different message communication process, i.e. I was elicited to pass notes between the two.
When the popular boy first gave me a note and I looked at him in pure astonishment he hastened to add that the note wasn’t for me. Of course not. I was a tall, skinny girl with long frizzy red/brown hair, granny glasses ala John Lennon, and wearing Nehru jackets. This is not the picture of a girl who gets passed notes in math class in school.
I wasn’t offended that the note wasn’t for me. If it had been, it would have shaken my world and caused me too much confusion about my understanding of the roles each of us played. When the situation was clarified, far from being offended, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to rise to such unexpected behavior and gratified to help out in this endeavor. Though the two were popular and pretty, they were also very nice people—being pretty not being counter to being nice contrary to popularly held views.
However, in the next year when variously assorted curves all of sudden started appearing, and I discovered the shag haircut, make-up, as well as purple-red short, short velvet hot pants and see-through lemon yellow gauzy blouses, I was ready to fit into a new role. But by that time, high school was a dead bore, and I had moved on.
All of which I remembered this morning when I offered to help my friends get emails to and from each other.