Back When I Was Young

This is me BACK WHEN I WAS YOUNG. This is probably about as HOT as I ever got. Note the cool feathered back wings around my face. I guess I was going for the Farrah Fawcett look. My three redeeming assets were my smile and my boobs. This is a picture of a picture so it's not so clear but I promise you I was a babe. At least, I thought I was. I liked to go out and party with my friends and go dancing. That's how I met Donny. He thought he was Fred Astaire or Bojangles or John Travolta or somebody. He was a dancing machine. To be quite honest with you, I'm not that good of a dancer and I would much rather watch everybody else dance. Donny would lead me tripping out to the dance floor and start some strange moves and try to twirl me around, quite unsuccessfully actually. I would try to pawn him off on some of my girlfriends who loved to dance but he always came back to dance with me. Well, our dancing days are long behind us now but we're still plugging along together. Donny is the most even tempered and loving person I know. Remember when people used to say "It's not easy being cheesy." It's not easy living with me so I think he deserves a gold star.

I wish I could go back in time and have a talk with the young me. I'd tell myself to take better care of my teeth, for one thing.

I was supposed to go with my cousin Donna to get the pictures made but she passed away suddenly. I decided to go get my picture made anyway. Kind of as the last thing I planned to do with her. I wish we could have gotten our pictures made together. She was like a sister to me. She was only twenty years old when she died suddenly.

Donna and I did things together all the time after I got a divorce. We grew really close. She was like my sister. She loved riding around town in downtown Dalton. Teenagers cruised the main drag up and down and around and around like mice in a cage. There was always somebody that Donna knew in town. She was the pretty blonde girl with the little blue Datsun. There was one more Datsun that looked like Donna's but that belonged to another girl.

The girl with the other Datsun was kidnapped and thrown in a well the summer we were hanging around town. Some of Donna's friends thought the girl in the Datsun was Donna but it wasn't. It was another girl. She was a real nice girl. We knew her. She was lucky because somebody heard her screaming and they got her out alive. Later on, I believe, she was robbed when she was working at a convenience store. That poor girl had a horrible life. I don't know what happened to her after that but life isn't fair, is it?

Donna and I rode around and she would talk on the CB with other people. One night we started talking to some guy who said he was the Grave Digger. Donna said she was the Lady in White. He said he was in the West Hill Cemetary. Donna and the boy kept talking and she tried to find him in the cemetary. He turned out to be a friend of hers that she knew from town. He was one of the boys that drove those huge jacked up trucks. We always had a ball back then.

Do you remember the fashions in the seventies? I used to wear those klunky shoes with the cork bottoms. I loved them. They made me three or four inches taller and I could stand up in them, unlike high heels. I thought I was cool in palazzo pants. Remember those? I thought the Eagles was the best band around.

I've come a long way from the sweet young woman in the picture. In that journey from young to old I have had a wonderfully boring life. I care deeply and worry alot. I have been very blessed and I guess it's okay if I never get plastic surgery. Wrinkle with dignity. Carpe diem!

PIO