My How Times Have Changed!

So I have this huge ongoing project of taking all the boxes out of my closet and getting rid of stuff and organizing the rest of it. It's difficult sometimes to decide if a certain item should go or stay. Some things I keep because they have special meaning to me, other things I keep because they will be fun for the kids to have in the future. There is a fine line though, I don't want my poor kids to have a boatload of random stuff to sort through at some point.

One of the things I came across recently was my yearbooks from junior high and high school. This was back in the late 70's early 80's when we went to junior highs and not middle schools.

Some of the autographs in my yearbooks I would hesitate for my kids to read, as back then my friends and I liked to act like we were big stoners. A lot of the messages start out "High" because we thought that was so clever, and there's a lot of "don't party too hardy", "have a bitchen summer", "don't get too high" and various renderings of pot leaves. We were a high-brow bunch to say the least.

Some of my favorites were written by my dear friend from 4th grade. Here's one of the classics that she wrote in my 7th grade yearbook,"Keep cool this summer and don't get into too much trouble with your parents and you know who! Don't go with too many guys or get into cars with foxes, unless I'm with you." Now that's advice to live by! The greatest travesty in her mind was if I should happen to meet some foxy guys without her there. She really needn't have worried!

Yes, those were the days. She and I would either go to the mall or to the roller rink and look for "foxes". She was completely boy crazy and I was painfully shy. She would get lots of attention and I would be the tagalong wallflower. Just the memory of the feathered back hair do's, the skin tight Ditto's jeans and the big clunky shoes send a shiver down my spine.

What really caught my eye as I was going through this particular box was the graphic on the front of my yearbook from my junior year in high school, 1981:


and inside it looked like this:



I'm thinking this kind of art work wouldn't fly anymore. Back then Urban Cowboy with John Travolta was popular, and everyone wanted to look like a wanna-be cowpoke for some reason, so putting old west style revolvers in a yearbook wasn't even given a second thought. Just interesting...

Now, do I go through all of my old yearbooks and take a black Sharpie to the things I don't want my kids to see, or do I not worry about it because they are never going to be interested anyway? Big decisions and painful teenage memories await!