Arrrgh….

The tears just never stopped. Hannah went to bed angry at 5 o’clock, refused to come down for supper, and was asleep when I went up to get Bekah ready for bed. Think she stayed up too late at her slumber party? All efforts prior to that to talk to her were fruitless. She woke up around 9:30, hungry and a little chastened, but still crying. She said she was only crying because she was so hungry.

This, of course, can only get worse as she gets older. By coincidence, I ran across a couple of my old high school journals today, and browsed through them tonight. The last time I looked at these was 20 years ago (when I had the forethought to annotate them so some of the more obscure references might still be understandable lo these many years hence). At the time, I think I was embarassed to have been such a manic, dramatic dweeb. Now I just look at it and think, “Well, that’s what 15 was like.” Endless speculation about girls, about whether one might like me, whether I would ever get up the nerve to talk to her or, god forbid, ask her out. Assessments about whether I was in or out with a particular clique — hugely important. People and places and events I’d completely forgotten, and even now can’t really find in my memory. Crushes I’d forgotten I even had. And dreams, hundreds of dreams, all laid out in the kind of detail you can afford when you’re a teenager and have all the time in the world to write. 13 different kinds of experimental handwriting.

The songs that I liked — now, those are embarassing.

— Mr. Johnson denies ever having been thrilled that “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was playing on the radio