Al and Zee Germans

My childhood friend Alison has started a blog about her new life in Germany. You can check it out at The Adventures of Al and Zee Germans. Alison and I attended elementary school together all the way through to the 8th grade when I moved away.

Here we are on the baseball field participating in some kind of sport involving a chair and a fortune cookie? An orange slice? Who knows.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m the one in the pink tank top tucked into the blue shorts with the kneesocks on the left. Alison is the one with the thick black bangs, ruffled pink shirt and blue jeans in the middle behind the chair.

Here’s another shot from that same day. Now I’m no body language expert, but I’m sensing some jealously over those two crowns ahead of me in the line.

Vintage Unskinny Boppy. Gotta love it.

Thankfully my mom was good at writing on the back of photos so I know these pictures were from 1984. So that means second grade I guess? So yeah. Allison and I go way back. She and I reconnected about five years ago on myspace, then we migrated over to facebook. Now I’m adding her to my blogroll.

She recently got married in one of THE most beautiful weddings ever and moved across the ocean to her husband’s hometown in Germany. She has a way with words that I wish I had. My blog tends to be high on pictures and low on words most of the time. I have good intentions of writing long witty entries that describe my life and my history and all the little everyday things that make me happy, like the way you can see the brown speckle in the middle of all the murky green when the sunlight hits Garrett’s left eyeball just right.

But I don’t actually write any of that stuff most of the time.

In my head I have written a couple of dozen blog posts about my childhood growing up in the back woods of Alabama. I keep meaning to tell you all about how my dad once built a house from the ground up. When we moved in we had a floor and walls but he hadn’t gotten around to putting the roof on so we slept under tarps for a while. We also didn’t have any running water inside the house, so we had to bathe under the hose pipe in the backyard for an entire summer. We had a billy goat tied on a rope in the front yard to keep the weeds down.

True story.

Like my daddy says… These are the good old days, my friends.

I’m trying to analyze what is keeping me from writing down those stories. Part of me is scared to put too much of myself out there. Another part is worried about offending someone who may know me and read this blog. A big part of it boils down to just pure laziness. But thinking about the memories of Alison and other people from my childhood reminds me of all of those pieces of my past that I need to document somewhere, at least for Garrett’s sake. I really do want to focus more on telling stories here, not just whipping out a fast photo-laden entry and leaving.

Time will tell if I carry through with that, though.

Alison has totally nailed the storytelling aspect of blogging. I admire her for painting pictures with words instead of just adding forty-eleven .jpg images and calling it a blog. Her entries are not reliant on a bunch of photos to carry them. They are full of good solid words that depict her life and her experiences as an American living in Germany, becoming a German. I really cannot wait to read more of Alison’s blog and her adventures with zee Germans.

Another mutual friend of ours has that same gift of writing. Leslie at Alabama Menagerie is an amazing woman who is homeschooling her four children while maintaining an awesome Christian blog. She even writes book reviews, for goodness sakes! I met Leslie in the 7th grade and we became fast friends. We only knew each other for two years, but reconnecting with Leslie again has been easy. This time around we have Twitter in common instead of tight rolled jeans.

Maybe Alison, Leslie and I should thank our 7th and 8th grade Advanced English teachers for producing such a fine class full of writers bloggers.

I wonder if Mrs. Nichols and Mrs. Berryhill are on facebook?