A fate worse than death? You betcha!

My mom spent most of last week cleaning out her attic which resulted in a phone call to me later in the week along the lines of, “Come and get your crap that you made us keep because you might want it someday. FYI, today’s the day you want it.”

So Friday evening I opened up a dozen or so boxes filled with various bits of detritus from my childhood and teenage years.  Which sounds wildly more exciting than it really was.  Most of them contained my schoolwork and about eleventy bonkzillion stuffed animals. 

(Apparently sixth grade was my best year as evidenced by the giant Sharpie lettering “Sixth Grade:  MY BEST YEAR EVER! EVER!” on all five of the boxes housing all of my schoolwork from that year.)

(I remember I had chicken pox for a week straight in sixth grade.)

(And one time we made a color wheel that turned white when you spun it really fast.)

(And that’s it.)

(Best year ever, though.  Totally.)

I went through some of the schoolwork, but realized it was just as boring now as it was when I first experienced it.  Mostly I skimmed through it to make sure nothing I wanted to keep inadvertently got mixed up with it and then threw most of it away.  But not without discovering a few gems along the way.

For instance:  My best friends’ folder.  You know, the kind of folder where you store stickers and notes to one another and you write “Private!  Best Friends Only!” on the cover and twenty years later you have no idea exactly which best friend was allowed access to that folder.

And my “Wish Star.”  You know, the kind of star upon which you write wishes on the arms of the star for things like, “My wish for the world is world peace and no more war.” And “My wish for when I grow up is to write good stories and be famous.” And “My wish for my school is to someday have walls.”  You know, that kind of wish star.

Or, how about my letter to Jon Knight of New Kids on the Block?  Where I told him my name, and my address, my age, the names of the seventeen other girls in my grade that loved NKOTB and how I saw him on T.V. the prior afternoon and boy, did his pants ever look great!  And how much I wished I had a pair of my very own. 

But I think it’s my anti-drug campaign that really hits home.

Probably the most effective campaign I've ever seen.

 Turns out there is a fate worse than death.  And that fate is A.I.D.S. 

(For the record, we started D.A.R.E. in sixth grade.)

(D.A.R.E:  Drug Abuse Resistance Education.)

(Yes, I totally just googled that.)

(Best year ever, though.  Totally.)

Tags: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, Dude I don't even know..., Humor, Sixth grade