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| Glee cupcakes from my daughter's birthday party. |
I am so excited that the new season of Glee has started. I love that it takes place in Ohio, though I don't think my high school had a glee club. Or maybe they did and I just didn't know. Glee clubs were never on my radar, despite the fact that my father was in his.
My dad is a mechanical engineer by trade. If you talk to him, the conversation will be the epitome of any engineering conversation you can imagine. Lots of details, facts, measurements, and mechanical terms. He never, never seems to realize that I don't know what he's talking about. He goes on with his explanations for hours. But I'm fine with that. Every once in a while I do have a glimmer of understanding and get the chance to really talk with him because he's telling me about his work and what excites him.
So, imagine my surprise when I was working as a hotel auditor near Mason, Ohio back when I was 21 years old, and Sgt. Hornsby stopped in on his nightly rounds to make sure everything was okay. He knew me by face, but looked at my name tag a little closer one night and asked, "Are you by any chance related to Elaine Wetz?"
"Yes, she's my aunt."
"I went to high school with her."
The next night he came in with a high school yearbook. He opened it up and showed me my aunt's picture, and his. Then we looked up my dad. I'd seen his high school picture before, but then we looked at my dad's name in the index and there were several numbers next to it. We flipped back through the pages and there he was as the star in his high school musical, The Music Man. There he was at the prom (prom court?). There he was in the orchestra with a violin. And there he was in the glee club. The glee club! My father played the violin and was in the glee club, and I had no idea until a policeman came into my workplace at 3:00am when I was 21-years-old and showed me his old yearbook.
Naturally, when I got off work I called my dad and asked him why he'd never told me that he was in The Music Man, or played the violin, or sang in glee club? He gave me a typical engineer answer:
"You never asked."
Lol.
ReplyDeleteI always think it's weird, in a good way, when I learn details about my parents' "past lives." As kids, they have such a strong role in our lives already, that we don't need to think about the people they were before us. But as we get older, I think curiosity kicks in, or maybe a sense of maturity has us wanting to connect to the "real" them. Whatever the reason, I know that as I get older, I have more and more questions about what my mom and dad were like before me. I hope someday my kids do too.