My husband and his younger brother, when they were… younger.

Today’s post is brought to you courtesy of empty boxes, my husband, and high school.

The fun thing about emptying boxes (or the torture, depending on how you view that sort of thing) is the walk down memory lane it provides. Since everything had to be touched, moved, sorted, and put away, it gave me the chance to see things I haven’t seen in years. My high school diploma. School year books. Pictures of my family from when I was very little.

I also discovered a box of memories that weren’t mine. They were my husband’s. It felt so strange to sift through his school things and realize he had a life before he met me. I mean, sure, I knew he’d had one, but since we’ve been together so long I’d forgotten about it. We met in college. There isn’t much of his life I don’t know or haven’t experienced first hand except his childhood. He grew up in New York, and I grew up all over the southwest, but mostly New Mexico. Might as well have been different countries.

Yet there’s something we have in common, even during those years we didn’t know each other: high school and the angst that goes with it.

I present to you a poem I found, written by my husband:

Please Don’t Read Me

Oh, this is terrible!

Mine will probably be read

Behind the best poem

In the class.

There’s no way in the world

My work will match up with that!

It’s choppy,

Sloppy,

And awkward.

Besides that,

It doesn’t even rhyme —

And I call this a poem!

Secretly,

Laughing at my poem,

With theirs

So,

So,

Poetic!

It’s embarrassing

When it’s read aloud.

I’m glad

That this is finally over

Please don’t read me

Again.

The teacher wrote at the bottom: “Now THAT is a poem!”

I never had this problem with English class. It was my best subject, and I always got rave reviews over my little stories. I wasn’t very good with poetry, so I felt the same way he did and preferred not to have mine read aloud or, really, at all. However, it didn’t stop me from the attempts, or from going on to major in English. My husband still remembers the day this was read aloud in front of the class. He told the teacher that if he were forced to write another one, that he would include odd sounds like pigs oinking just so the teacher would have to say them out loud. Strangely, he never had to follow through on that promise, and he went on to major in math and business. I wonder why?

*Please note: no husbands were harmed in the making of this blog post. Reprinted with permission from the author.