this was the memory i meant to ramble about for a few minutes before i went off on my tangent .....

i got an email, two, well, three when all looked up and cross referenced between emails and classmate.com etc....from my biggest high school crush and one of the people who wound up being a close friend my senior year - including being my prom date (i asked her the first day of class senior year in homeroom and she said yes...i never thought she'd actually go through with it, yet alone be the one to come to me 7 months later to let me know what she was wearing and that she'd already bought the tickets for the dinner/dance at the manor....not only did she floor me (and all of her friends who were "cool", "popular" and hated me (notice the lack of quotes?)) but, she threw a real monkey wrench into the works since i'd accepted being uncool, unpopular, hated and ignored by my classmates after 3 + years in their school....little did i know, somehow, by association or perhaps by disassociation, i'd become cool, popular, fun, liked and actually was spoken too on occasion with neither malice nor contempt in their voices....

that said, i saw paula berardi a few times after we graduated 20 years ago. she moved to binghamton to live with her older sister diane and her family so she could dance professionally with helene yelverton dance academy (she'd done this all through high school as well - she's an amazingly gifted ballet/toe/jazz and lyric jazz dancer). she visited mom's house at the lake over christmas break and then i never heard from or saw her again...until tonight.....

she's a beautiful as she was back then and based on the mugs i've seen from my school days in the last few months, she's aging incredibly well. unfortunately, she was out here a few weeks ago and didn't find my contact info on line until last week or she would have gotten together with me. i would have loved that. she has two beautiful girls now, Abigail and Paige. they have paula's eyes, but both have blond hair! she wrote and said it must be recessive since both her mom and mother - in - law had natural blond hair when younger....i remember her mom fondly, and i can report, she had blond hair when she was older too, but it wasn't a color that happens in nature....her mom is still going strong, and she's got to be close to 90 now. unfortunately her dad died 4 years ago. that is a shame. he was a very good man. he let me borrow someone else's car one day to take paula to the mall so he didn't have to....he never told me that it wasn't their car and that it was their so it wouldn't get stolen. of course, he never asked if i had a license either....so i guess my getting kelli's car back relatively unscathed (it was a stick, i was a learner) was thanks enough for his night off from sitting in rush hour traffic on i-80.

so, since i have no pics of me this moment for posting, here's one of my biggest crush that came true....one of those moments in life that makes you realize that maybe it's better to dream than to realize a dream....after all, without dreams, we die....and some dreams can't ever be replaced.

(ok, blogspot isn't taking pictures at the moment, i'll try again another time....)