Thoughts of Days Gone By…

Whenever I visit Sue’s site, I think back to the years in Kankakee, Illinois and all of the friendships that I have left behind. My own personal “where are they now” thing. So tonight I started poking around, looking for information on my high school there, Bishop McNamera. While I graduated from high school in Houston, I was there first, with almost all of the kids I went through 2nd – 8th grade with. Which led me to the Bishop McNamara Alumni Home Page. Poking through the links, I found a list of “deceased” alumni. I was class of 1987 – a small class of about 200 (I graduated with almost 600 here in Houston) and I knew pretty much all of them. I never bothered to learn the words to the fight song at the school that I graduated from, but to this day I could sing every word of the Irish Fight Song. So I was stunned beyond words to see the name of Chris Leclaire there. Well, they have her listed as “Christina Leclaire Wood”, but we both went by Chris our freshman year, and we had two classes together – Religion and English. Seems like we had Art or some other class together too. We went through freshman initiation and wearing beenies together. She sat in front of me throughout Religion that year, and I still have doodlings that she did in the margins of my Bible. (Yeah, yeah, not too religious to write “Chris *hearts* Curt” in a Bible, but I was 14.) We talked about our very first crushes together. My sophomore year we went out with friends that our moms would have never said ok to and we went to our first party, and it was the first time I was in a car with friends with beer. (I hate beer, I didn’t drink, but acted as drunk as them.) I remember the very first time I ever heard the song “Superfreak” (“she’s a very kinky girl… the kind you won’t take home to mother…) was at her house, turned down low so we wouldn’t be busted for listening to music like that. Wow. I have so many memories of her, I could go on and on … and she’s dead. I am … I don’t know what to say. Now I have a long list of other people that I wonder about, people I would love to find, people that I want to know again. All of them are people I knew in Illinois – ones I went to school with at St. Patrick’s or Mac. Or people I knew from Momence. So many people … so much time has passed. Where are they now?