Old pictures and other discoveries

The other day, I finally decided it was time to take a stab at cleaning up the piles of stuff all over our office. I don't know what it is about that room, but everything manages to collect in there. Old magazines, unread magazines, winter boots that don't fit Austin yet, dumbbells, junk mail, a back massager that doesn't work and the odd bill or two that needs to be paid, all manage to find their way into pile after pile on the shelf underneath the window.

So, while cleaning up and throwing stuff out, I came across an old picture of my sister in a really nice frame. At some point, of which I have no memory of, I must've taken it off the bookcase in the living room and brought it in here -- presumably because it's a really old picture. Since I was in one of my ruthless cleaning moods, I opened the frame and took out the picture, having every intent on replacing it with a new one.

Behind her picture, I found another picture, which made me forget about cleaning.

It was dated November 1995 and it's a shot of the gang I used to hang out with in High School. It was taken after most of us had already graduated and moved on, but a few were a year behind. We had one last 'reunion', if you can call it that, when those few remaining at Mayfield performed in the school play that fall. (Pretty much all of us thought ourselves to be actors, musicans, singers or dancers in those days -- very few of us went on to actually pursue those talents with any degree of professionalism.) The picture was snapped after the show, with all of us standing on stage -- and the three who were in the show still in full makeup, but already changed into their street clothes. (I'd post the photo on here, but I don't have a scanner.)

There's 12 of us in the picture. And, although with our teenaged ideals, we promised to be friends forever, I look at this picture and realize that over the years, I stayed close with just one person pictured in this shot -- and recently become friends again with two others. A few others I've once again become loosely in touch with over the last few years, but I don't think I'd consider them friends -- more like someone I may talk to over e-mail from time to time. And thanks to my recent addiction to Facebook, a few others have been 'found'. Which leaves just two people who have dropped off the face of the earth. I even tried searching their names in Facebook the other day but came up with nothing.

Maybe I'm getting all sentimental over a silly photo but it was just a really neat find -- and I can't stop looking at it. Partly because it's a fun photo from the past, but partly because I think that thanks to digital cameras and online albums, we're not likely to lose a photo like this in the future, which means we'll never get the joy of finding it again.