Friday night happy hour

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Amy, Cindy, and I went out for happy hour Friday night. Kristi was supposed to go but she blew us off to go to a jewelry party (dude, seriously?)

At one point during the evening Amy said, “I’m going to send you a text.” That was odd since I was sitting right next to her. She’s known me since we were five so she probably figured my head would spin like Linda Blair’s if she said, “don’t look now but…..” She’s all covert like that.

The text said, “Is that Bobby from the class of ’83 sitting at the table next to us”? I turned my head slightly under the guise of reaching for my purse hanging over the back of my chair. It was him. It took a minute for me to reconcile the face of forty-four year old Bobby with the one I remember when he was an eighteen year old senior in high school. He still looked a lot like he did in high school although his goatee had more than a hint of gray.

Our high school in the suburbs of Des Moines was small enough that we pretty much knew not only those in our own class, but everyone in the other classes as well. We weren’t a particularly clique-y school, at least not in my recollection. We had the stoners, who sat out by the bleachers on their lunch hour smoking and drinking Mountain Dew from long neck bottles and then there were the rest of us. Though it wouldn’t be long after graduation before my Honda Prelude and dorm room at college would carry a hint of eu de Cheech and Chong, the thought of getting high on schoold grounds, during the school day, was as foreign to me as not taken college prep classes.

Amy said, “should we say hi”? and my three Miller Lites said, “Sure!”

I turned to his table and said, “Are you Bobby?” And he said, “Hi Tracey. Hi Amy.”

Yay! I must look just like I did in high school too.

Wait a minute. Do I want to look like I did in high school?

I’d gotten my eyebrow situation under control and my hair was much better than it was circa 1983 but still, wouldn’t it have been preferable if Bobby had been unable to place me? Then again, since I tenned my face into boot leather in my twenties I’m lucky my face hadn’t aged so dramatically as to render me unrecognizable.