I just spent an hour or better looking at my dad's senior year high school yearbook. Before tonight I had only ever looked at his picture, getting freaked out and putting it back when I discovered he looked just like me, but tonight I went through and read all the things people wrote to him. I didn't know he had been in stage crew, or involved in theatre at all, so that was weird, but that was just the beginning. All the girls addressed their notes to David, and the guys to Watson, a trend found in both mine and my brother's histories. In multiple cases, he was noted as having the nickname of God, in addition to other, less significant nomers. Besides the inherent hilarity of late 60's teen slang, once I realized people actually used to say that stuff, I found the whole thing thoroughly funny. A couple of people said something about listening to Carolina beach music and Motown and how off that was for country ass white kids. Most all the people made a reference to "raising" or "raising it," and it wasn't but one or two that actually wrote out raising hell, and everybody told him not to do too much of it or he'd fail out of college. The whole thing was chock full of his great sense of humor and inviting personality. Plenty of the girls told him how good looking and "understanding" and "sweet" he was. I expected this much, as yearbooking signing is pretty much always the same, but much of it was specific to him and his experiences and relationships with these people. They talked about power, but not the way I do - just a lot about his ability to listen and solve everyone's problem's, just like me only he solved said problems instead of exploiting them. I especially enjoyed reading about his escapades involving "parking." If you've seen Back to the Future, you know what I'm talking about. Aparently he gave a lot of rides, and parked plenty, and sometimes took girls for drives. Some of the rides were just rides, but enough of the passages were worded in a way that makes me think more of the drives. Then I remembered how I used to give everybody a ride cause everybody used to give me a ride before I got a car and I pay things forward. Then I remembered how I take girls for drives, and why that's different from giving somebody a ride. Turns out my favorite macking technique is genetic. And in a style much like mine, an abnormal proportion of his friends were juniors or sophomores from theatre, and the one girl who made a reference to giving his class ring away was a sophomore. Of course I then looked up the pictures of the girls that wrote anything particularly flirtatious and damn did he catch some sweet action. But the most surprising thing was one of the most subtle, and I might be inventing it out of nothing. As I read I caught several hints that he was vocally skeptical of religion in much the same way as I am, including "I know better than to say 'God bless you' because I know you'll take care of yourself," and "Maybe I'll see you at church (HA!)," etc.
So it turns out I've spent the last 5 years unconsciously turning into my father. Some of it was conscious, that I purposefully emulated from him, but there's some stuff where I want to know how I turned into what I never knew he had been. I'm excited about the implications of this prospect.
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