OK, I'm Back

Not that you were waiting.

I just returned from a trip to Pennsylvania that was part business, part pleasure. While there I designed and built a website for a friend's landscape architecture business. I took all the photographs for the site except for three "before" pictures.

Click Image to View Larger Size

That's the gallery page. I was really pleased how the whole site turned out. My friend wanted something simple and elegant. We agree that she got it. I'm not an expert website builder but I know enough HTML, CSS and Flash to get by. It helped to have some stunning scenery to photograph.


I also attended a reunion gathering for members of my high school's swim team. Everybody and their brothers were there. At least everybody who graduated in my class who was on the team. Even my brother. One of them, anyway.

Some of them I hadn't seen in nearly 20 years. It was good to see them again. Even better since no one tried to fit into a Speedo.

More from the Mailbag

Last week I got an e-mail through the contact form of my website. Not my new photography site but the tried and trusty JohnMcQuiston.com.

A woman named Michelle asked if I had attended Brookfield Elementary School in Chantilly, Virginia. She wanted to know this because she had attended that school several eons ago with a boy named John McQuiston, whom she remembered for once having won a class contest by correctly naming all of the U.S. Presidents in order. Could I possibly be her former classmate?

Indeed I could, though she didn't remember my elementary school claim to fame quite accurately. Loathe as I am to correct anyone who may have overestimated my intelligence, it was actually the state capitals I correctly recited before an assembly of the whole 4th grade rather than every president.

There was a time, maybe in late high school or in college, when I could go through the list of commanders-in-chief in order. In eleventh grade, I think, we had to know all of them from the 20th century, which at the time was still well underway. Now I can probably make it from G. Washington up to about 1845. After that I'm spotty until William McKinley, what with Grover Cleveland coming and going and then coming back again just to confuse things.

Give the girl a break, though, it was more than 30 years ago. And the Michelle that I remembered as the red-haired girl with gold wire-rimmed glasses who carried her burgeoning novel around in a three-ring binder is not a girl any more. She's now a contact-wearing, blond-haired single mother of a 22-year-old college graduate!

How do these one-time contemporaries keep getting older and try to drag me into adulthood with them? I bet someone from my high school graduating class is a grandparent now.

I have had regular contact with only a few people from high school. If Facebook friend requests -- yes, plural -- from people whose names I have absolutely have no recognition of is any indication, there were many with whom I had no contact while still in high school.

Contacts with elementary school classmates have been entirely absent since I left Brookfield in 1978 until Michelle's note last week.

I told her that I have stopped in Chantilly twice this decade while visiting, or returning from visits with, my brother Jim in Alexandria. One of them I detailed on a page on a former version of my website that included a section called "John's Journal." That was before blogs. Anyway, here is the link to that entry in case you're curious.

The other time, Jim went with me as we discovered that the then-occupants of our one-time home at 13603 Pennsboro Drive did not speak English. The pool five houses down the street was still there. I explained to the kid at the check-in window that I had learned to swim there almost 30 years ago, choking on the words as I realized that it had been that long, and he let me inside to take photographs. The high dive from which my youngest brother once fell was gone, replaced by a giant slide -- much closer to the ground and, I'm sure, more liability friendly.

Thirty years ago accidents still happened occasionally. It was not always cause for a lawsuit. There wasn't always someone else to blame for one's misfortune.

I still remember the times of the four 25-yard butterfly races I swam my first year on the team, and precise details of a couple of them, which I'll spare you, as I did Michelle.

It is interesting how the mind and memory work. Some things I remember clear as crystal. Like those races when I was 9-years-old. And Mrs. Blevins reading the state names for me to answer with their capital cities. When she read Rhode Island, I spaced. Couldn't think of it. She said, "we'll come back to it." After Wyoming, she said Rhode Island again. "Providence," I shot back. And I had done it.

Don't worry; not many other people my age were impressed, either. But at least one of them remembered it. Sort of.

The Date Has Been Set

For my high school graduating class's 25th reunion. I first thought that some nostalgic fool was doing some far advance planning. Then I noticed that the November 28th event happens this year!

All those people have gotten fat or bald or both and they're trying to drag me into middle age with them. Never mind that if I live another three weeks I'll be 43 years old.

The organizer of the event sent an Excel document listing the members of the Methacton Class of 1984. The Excel document was weird enough. Excel documents did not exist when we graduated. Was there even a Microsoft?

Then I noticed that there were only 347 names, which, thanks to Excel, I didn't have to count. There were 355 when we graduated. Have eight of us died already?

I scanned the names of the apparent survivors, 95% of whom I have had no contact since the day we did not throw our graduation caps into the air because the principal threatened to withhold our diplomas if we did.

I was geniunely happy to see that the girl who was easily the ugliest girl in our class and probably the entire school had a married name. Maybe there really is someone for everyone.

I don't know if the man she married was the one who knocked her up in high school, which was my first witness to the fact that even the homliest girl willing to have sex will find someone willing to accomodate her.

It was good to see an e-mail address for a friend with whom I'd like to reconnect and bittersweet to notice the e-mail for another I did meet again after more than two decades but have since fallen out of contact again.

Many of the names I can no longer associate a face. I honestly couldn't tell you if Carmen G. is a man or a woman without consulting my 1984 Methactonian. And I'm not entirely confident that Methactonian was actually the name of our yearbook.

Me and My 140 Million Friends

I joined Facebook. Not all of its 140 million members are my friends yet but I'm sure it's a question of time. It apparently matters not that I don't know them.

I learned this when one of my high school classmates, with whom I never had a conversation, made a friend request. Another person I did know but didn't particularly like also requested to be a friend.

I accepted both. I'd hate to go to a reunion and face enemies because they thought I big-timed them on Facebook. Some people apparently collect as many people on their friends lists as possible. If that's the case, I was glad I could help.

But I'm not linking to anyone whose name I don't recognize and I saw a lot of them as I scanned members from my high school graduating class. Granted, some of the women have different last names than they did in high school but either my memory of the early 80s is even poorer than I thought or there are a lot of people claiming to be members of the Methacton Class of 1984 who weren't.

Trust me, I do remember enough to know that membership in our graduating class is not such a distinction that you need to pretend you were a part of it if you weren't. It ain't like we went to the Harvard of high schools.

I did trade e-mails with a couple of friends from high school whom I hadn't seen since then. That was cool. But the ones I didn't know well I have no strong desire to meet now. I am curious to see how some of them turned out, where they went and what they're doing but my interest doesn't go much deeper than that.

I am sure the feeling is mutual. I am easily found on Google. Those who wanted to reconnect could have done so without Facebook.

Alumni Meet

Note: This is the last in a multi-part series about my trip to Pennsylvania the weekend before Christmas. You might want to scroll down to the entry titled Audubon and work your way back up.

The alumni meet's purpose was not solely to amuse current members of my high school's team. Nor was it for the alumni to compare how fat we've gotten. It was a fundraiser. Our $30 entry fees will help pay for jackets or something else that the team members' parents will throw away when the kids go off to college.

Give this generation credit, though. When I swam, we raised our own money with a swimming marathon. We'd get people to pledge a few pennies per lap and one day over Christmas break our practice would simply entail swimming 200 laps. One year my brother Jim got people to pledge a total of $300. Even more impressive was that he collected the money and proudly handed our coach three brand new $100 bills.

The kids now have us raising the money for them. Smart.

There was also a bake sale. So that's why after coming back to Jamie's place from the Martin Guitar factory we spent the afternoon decorating cookies. Jamie did most of the decorating but I did just enough that when the woman running the sale asked Jamie if she had created the cookies all by herself and Jamie said yes within my earshot, I could needle her. "All by yourself, huh?"


The Cookie Maker
I shot another frame with Jamie in focus instead of the foreground but she preferred this one. It appears I'm taking requests on the blog now so just leave yours in the comments and I'll get to it as soon as I can.

If it's OK I'm going to gloss over the whole Pennsylvania Turnpike incident currently under appeal that caused a $2 toll to cost $18.25 except to say that the visit back north would not have been complete if I hadn't gotten at least one stick in the eye. "Welcome back to Pennsylvania, John! Now screw you!"


The meet was a blast. I was probably not the only one sore the next day but no one suffered serious injury or water intake during the races and some of them resembled actual competition. In a concession to our decrepitude, the butterfly race was shortened to 25 yards and in the 35-and-over race all of us finished within a second of each other. And I was wrong. I could have lasted two laps. Maybe not gracefully but I could have finished. But it was probably just as well. I had enough trouble moving my arms the next day.


The pictures from the meet didn't turn out well. My camera refused to cooperate. It wanted to shoot with the flash and I thought there was plenty of light. I think the camera blurred most of the images to spite me. When I wondered later if it was fitting that the pictures matched the fuzziness of my old swimming memories, Jamie wondered if I was reaching too far to make a metaphor.


Afterward most of us went to the former Eagleville Hotel to catch up and tell lies. The place is called Brother Paul's now.


Below is supposed to be a Flash slide show with more pictures of the meet and the meeting afterward if it will work. It works for me using my Firefox browser. Not so much using Internet Explorer.

Martin Guitar Factory

It was great to see Rich. Except for the white patches in his beard, he looked a lot like he did 20 years ago. OK, so he didn't have the beard, either, back then but, unlike your humble correspondent, he still has as much hair on top of his head as he did back then.

He also has a wife, two kids, a dog and a nice house in a good neighborhood, or at least what looked like a good neighborhood judging by the size of the houses and the amount of electricity their inhabitants were willing to expend to light their Christmas displays. I was impressed.

When it was time for me to go, Rich gave me directions to get from his house to the Pennsylvania Turnpike's Northeast Extension. He even drew a map, which I tried to explain was unnecessary because my laptop has GPS and I could follow my maps, but it seemed important to him to spell it out for me so the gracious thing for me to do was to nod my head gratefully as he drew.

But I was venturing into the unknown in a way. I was driving to another high school classmate's home near Easton, Pa. Jamie is the one who Googled me down and e-mailed me out of the blue last month. When I say "out of the blue" I mean that the last contact I had with her before she popped into my Inbox was in high school. Back then we didn't have e-mail. That's how long ago that was.

Rich had mentioned the alumni swim meet in an e-mail exchange we had back in October but Jamie's note also included the entry form and a more direct plea for my appearance. Back in high school a personal invitation from Jamie would have shot me to the moon. I had a terrible crush on her at one point. When I finally mustered the courage to make a fumbling attempt to ask her out, she deftly -- but pretty gently -- swatted it aside and I eventually got over it. Several years later I heard she had married her high school sweetheart and moved to New Jersey.

That's the last I thought I'd ever hear.

Even now I expected to read about the 2.5 kids, the large house with the white picket fence and all the rest of what Americans are supposed to do with their lives after high school. Only she was single again, had no children of her own and had moved to Easton, in part, to live near her sister and her two nephews.

In a later e-mails we traded, she offered use of her guest room and made it plain that hosting me would not be a hassle and, in fact, she would appreciate the company. For that matter, so would I. So instead of to a hotel located closer to our high school, I was winding my way north to Easton, wondering what it would be like to see her after all this time.

When I got to her place I got to wonder a little more. I knocked on the screen door and waited. No answer. I opened the screen door and rapped on the inner door. That got results. The man in the neighboring unit of their duplex opened his door. I smiled and waved. He smiled and waved in reply before receding back into his house and I waited some more. Finally Jamie opened her door.

We had been corresponding and we spoke on the phone a couple of times so the reunion was not as strange as it could have been. But I thought it was trusting of her to open her home to someone with whom she'd had so little contact. Maybe the delay came when she realized the same thing!

We stayed up talking until about 12:30 a.m., which is way past my usual bed time, and went to our respective rooms with tentative plans to visit the Martin Guitar Company factory in Nazareth the next day. When I knew I would be staying at Jamie's, I checked and saw that the Martin factory was less than ten miles from her house. As a proud owner of a Martin myself, I looked forward to making the pilgrimage to their source.


Martin guitars are world famous and its guitars are played by just about everybody who is anybody among acoustic guitar players. They are also played by nobodies like me who are willing to spend the pretty penny it costs to own one. Even in my unskilled hands, the Martin has a wonderful feel and sound to it. I was glad I bought mine even before I saw how they were made and met some of the people who work at the factory.


Martin usually offers tours of its factory, where it still produces its guitars right here in the U.S. of A., but tours had ended for the holidays. It museum was open, though, and we got to see displays detailing the factory's history, old guitars as well as vintage and special edition guitars made in honor of many of Martin's famous players.




Jamie and I got there as the employee party was going on. That's what the people gathered around the two guitarists are doing.



The museum also has what it calls the "Pickin' Parlor," where you can ask to play some vintage Martin guitars. The people at Martin were exceedingly kind and it made me even gladder to know that I had bought one of their guitars.


One of them even gave me some guitar picks. (I offered to pay for them but she said no.) Jamie was willing to indulge me so I played her a few songs. I was nervous at first! First because I don't normally play for any audience other than my cat. Second because many of my songs are ones a guy would sing to his girlfriend and I didn't want to give Jamie the wrong idea. I was a house guest. She shouldn't have to worry that I was looking for an opening to put the moves on her. That's why the pictures she took of me playing don't include me looking at her.

Reunion Tour

John James Audubon's mansion is not the only sight to see in his namesake town. No, sir-ree. There's the former Audubon Inn, which now houses a lawyer's office. And old Bud's Bar, which has seen better days. If you can look past the paint scheme, which was not there when I last saw it, you'll notice on the left where the building appears to have been carved into to accommodate cars and trucks. I don't think that was planned. I think passing traffic simply knocked away part of the building.

I did drive by the house I lived in but didn't stop to photograph it since I already have pictures of it from the time I lived there. Those are more relevant to me. I did take pictures at my old high school. I didn't have any of those.

From there I wandered west toward Collegeville, stopping along the Perkiomen Creek to take a couple of shots there. After a lunch of genuine Philly soft pretzels from the Pretzel Factory in Collegeville -- MMMMMM! I circled back around to Route 363 and stopped at the Worcester Historical Society building and the cemetery behind it. Later I drove by Markley Farms Swim Club, where I worked one summer as a lifeguard making a whopping $2.95 an hour.

It's also the place where I suffered the only injuries requiring stitches so far in my life. Once I hit my head on the diving board in an ill-fated attempt doing a back flip. The other time I hit my face just below my mouth on a basketball moving at high speed when my friend Rich made an ill-fated attempt at a trick shot.

That didn't come up in conversation when I visited Rich at his house that night.

Below is a Flash slide show of pictures I took during my travels that day. It doesn't seem to work in Internet Explorer but if you have a Firefox browser, it should display fine.

Audubon

As mentioned, I ventured north to take part in an alumni swim meet at my old high school. Note use of the phrase "take part" rather than "compete." I am happy enough to report that I did not require emergency medical assistance afterwards.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I flew to Philadelphia Thursday, hopped into the best Chevy Cobalt that Enterprise had available and drove to Audubon, the small town in the Philly suburbs where I went though middle and high school. Yes, Audubon is named for the bird guy John James Audubon and, yes, the streets are all named after birds.


OK, there is Egypt Road so not all of them are but let's not get bogged down in technicalities here. I lived on Mourning Dove Road, which connected to Falcon Drive, which also branched off onto Meadowlark and Mockingbird Lanes. Bud's Bar wasn't always that color. However, for as long as I remember, it has been missing a chunk that appears to have been knocked out by passing traffic.

When I lived in Audubon, there was a bird sanctuary but I don't remember ever visiting it and I don't recall that there was supposed to be much to see for anyone who did. Not now. Now Montgomery County, probably to justify not letting developers plow the place under for new McMansions, has made the place into the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove. There's a paved driveway and places to park and everything.

Travel Ready

"When I die, I'm not going to wish that I had done more push-ups;
I'm going to regret not playing my guitar more."

I just printed the boarding passes for my US Airways flight to Philadelphia tomorrow. I'm going north to take part in an alumni swim meet at my high school. My first trip back to the area in more than ten years was spurred in part by a correspondence with an old classmate. We had no contact since high school until she e-mailed me out of the blue last month. Thank you, Google.

That experience could inspire an essay of its own. For now, I'll say that absence might make the heart grow fonder but it makes the brain grow forgetful. I have spent a lot of time lately thinking back to high school and the most striking thing is how little of it I remember. Like shards from a shattered mirror, I have only bits and pieces that still reflect anything from that time. There is no making up for 23 years of lost contact. In many cases, seeing old classmates will be like meeting new people except that I'll be pre-disposed to liking them and will be able to picture them with 80s hair.

I packed this morning before work, wondering if my few remaining winter clothes will be enough to withstand a Pennsylvania December. It was only a few days ago that my air conditioner stopped running. Last week, I swam a few practice laps in my community's outdoor pool.

Whenever I'm about to travel, a part of my brain acts as though I'm going away and never coming back. I have to set things in order. At the office today, I cleaned my desk, cleared out my e-mail box, caught up on any outstanding tasks I had and, save for a few slices of cheese, ate the last of the food I had in the office fridge.

I have a compulsion to clean the house before I go too. The place is pretty neat ordinarily but my computer room has some clutter that needs sorting and storing, the upstairs bathroom will get a good scrubbing and my home refrigerator is already clear of any open containers. I even did laundry this past weekend and if you have ever seen how high I can let that pile up, you'd know what a feat it was.

I don't know why I do all of this. I don't think it's because I'm afraid the plane will crash. I go through the same thing before I travel by car. It sometimes happens even before I go through a stretch of heavy freelance work in addition to my regular job. And if I really worried that I might die, maybe I'd do something sensible like have a will written. Instead I dust.

Maybe traveling is a mental chapter and cleaning before I go is a way of tying up the loose ends of one part of the story so I can start the next one fresh. The days before a trip do feel like an ending. There are arrangements to make and goodbyes to say and I find myself regretting things I can't squeeze into the schedule before I leave.

I haven't been playing my guitar as much as I'd like lately and last night, as I cleaned the stove top, a PBS show about Ralph Nader's run for the presidency played on the TV. Footage from a Nader campaign rally included Eddie Vedder singing and playing acoustic guitar and it saddened me that I haven't played my guitar as much as I should have. I haven't missed any workouts in the past few weeks, which is understandable for anyone about to show himself to old high school classmates in a Speedo, but it made me think: When I die, I'm not going to wish that I had done more push-ups; I will regret not playing my guitar or piano, taking pictures, telling TV stories or doing something else that created something, touched someone and nourished my soul.

It's great to put one's house in order. Better to have that task rightly prioritized far below things that should matter more.

Returned

An envelope came to my mailbox that I had sent to someone else. As I suspected, the letter I wrote to a long lost high school classmate (detailed here and here) never reached her. It took more than a month to come back. I wonder how many places it went before someone slapped the big yellow sticker on it directing its return to me.


For fun I do another zabasearch on her name and this time the results include a different last name for her and a more recent address. I'm surprised. Not that she's apparently married; it would have surprised me more had she never wed. I'm surprised that the zabasearch made the connection between her maiden and married names after failing to do it when I tried only a month or so earlier.

I'm also relieved. I didn't picture her as a perpetual bachelorette. I don't picture most women staying single forever. And if she had stayed solo, part of me wondered what had gone wrong. I know half of marriages end in divorce so it's not crazy to think that some people decide to skip the aggravations of acrimony and alimony not to mention the legal fees and simply stay single. But we were made to mate even if we aren't good at staying mates.

Now I decide whether it's worth another try. I know I have the correct address now because I poke around some more to confirm it. But do I take the letter out of the returned envelope, put it in a new one and send it off again to some uncertain fate?

Reconnection

In case you were curious, I have not heard back from Diane. Not that I thought I would. The only surprise is that the letter has not come back stamped "UNDELIVERABLE." At least not yet. Maybe it bounces around between post offices until someone decides that even if it's possible to find the person to whom it's intended it's not worth the effort. Or perhaps the mail carrier delivers it to the address on the envelope without even reading the name and it's up to the people who get it to alert the post office. Maybe the current residents of that address tossed it out with the rest of their junk mail. Maybe Diane got it and tossed it out with the rest of her junk mail, either not remembering or not caring about who the sender was.

What does it matter, anyway? What would come of it if she got it and she did reply? She lives 1,000 miles away; it's not like she was going to invite me to lunch.

Whatever sparked my memory of Diane has not disappeared. She made a cameo appearance in a dream a couple of nights ago. I saw her at a party. Her face might have aged some but her legs looked just like they did in the yearbook photo of the girls track team, right down to the shorts. I told her she looked the same as she did in high school. Maybe I only thought that and didn't say it. I can't remember for sure and maybe you've noticed that the contents of dreams are tough to go back and verify later.

I don't understand the need to look backwards, to recollect and reconnect, but I'm not the only one who has it. I've visited classmates.com and seen how many of my former high school colleagues are listed. I don't want to contact them badly enough to pay the membership fee so there's a limit to my curiosity but it's there.

Diane

Out of the blue I decide to write a letter to a high school classmate I have not seen in more than 20 years. I don't know what caused me to think of her. We rode the bus together and had the same physics class. We were friends but not close outside of school. We never dated, though I asked. When Diane does occur to me, her last name does not and I have to go thumbing through my old high school yearbook to find it.

Of course, that was her name 23 years ago. Some women get married after high school and some of them take on their husband's surname. Diane would have had the chance at some point. She was a late bloomer, a skinny long-legged girl with loose black hair who was just beginning to grow into her body. You could tell she'd always be long and lean and her fair but clear skin would age well if she took care of it. She wasn't quite a head-turner when I knew her but I could see the potential.

Google doesn't offer much hope that she still has her maiden name. Her name shows up only in an online listing of our school's track-and-field records. It's possible that I'll get no closer than knowing that her high-jump record still stands.

Whitepages.com gives me nothing but links to sites that promise information. For a fee. I wish I had thought to look more people up when I reported news for that Cincinnati TV station a few years ago. It had a subscription to Lexis/Nexis, which is a terrific resource for tracking people down. It's also expensive and I'm not stalking, here; I'm just curious.

Then I try zabasearch.com and get a match for Diane's name with an address, age and even a birth month and year. For some reason I'm relieved to see that she's 40. As if I would have kept adding to my age every year and she wouldn't. It makes no sense, I know, but my brain does not come equipped with age-progression software. The picture of her in my mind fades but doesn't age.

Her address is dated 7/2001. I have no idea whether she still lives there. For me that was two states and three residences ago. But it's the only one I find for her.

Now that I have an address to send the letter, I have to write the letter.

Diane:

Lordy! Lordy! Look who's 40! At least that's what the Internet that Al Gore invented tells me. Happy Birthday! Let me back up a second because if you're not the Diane W. who graduated from Methacton High School in 1985, this letter is going to make even less sense than if you are the Diane to whom I meant to write this.

I should back up again. My name is John McQuiston and I went to high school with you. For a while, anyway. I finished a year before you did. I wish I could brag that I left early to sign a fat pro contract but, no, I'm just older than you are and graduated in 1984. If you don't remember me, try ginko biloba. Kidding! Did I type that out loud? I meant to say that if you don't remember me, I understand. As the years pass, my memories of high school fade at an increasingly rapid rate.

I happened to page through my old yearbook recently. One of the people who signed it apparently found me witty, charming and all around great company, which means she thought more highly of me than I did. She even left her phone number. And I have no recollection of her at all. Not a clue. She signed only her first name and in such a small script that I couldn't make enough of it out to go searching for a possible match among our classmates. Maybe I should call the phone number. It's only been 23 years. I'm sure she's still there.

I lived around the bend from you on Mourning Dove Road in fabulous Audubon. We had physics class together. You were cute. When you signed my yearbook (in much larger letters than Miss Mystery Girl above, thank you) you instructed me to keep in touch. It has taken a couple of decades but now I have. E-mail has made me a much better correspondent.

I'm sure you're waiting for the sales pitch. And if I had one, it would go right here. Unfortunately, I don't have a fabulous investment opportunity for you. I'm not raising money for any worthy cause. (Some unworthy ones, yes, but I don't solicit donations to those.) And my Nigerian e-mail scam comes, by definition, by e-mail. So it's none of that. What happened was that a moment of idle curiosity caught me when I was at a computer and here I am. Well, you were cute.

I went to the University of North Carolina where I learned that I had vastly overrated my prowess at mathematics.* I remember sitting in my second semester of calculus class and realizing that I did not understand a word the teacher was saying. How I pulled a C-minus out of that class I have not the foggiest notion.

I majored in Political Science and Communications, which meant that I had two degrees for which there was no practical use. My GPA was nothing to write home about, though it was something my father often wrote to me about. My principal achievements were that I graduated in four years with no summer school and I never cheated. Don't worry. Nobody else is impressed by that, either.

The time I should have spent doing schoolwork I devoted instead working at UNC's student-run TV station. I learned how to write and report TV news and sports stories. After college I made a living at it for the better part of the next 17 years at stations up and down the east coast. I own a lot of license plates.

I abandoned the life of a TV news nomad in late 2004 and re-settled near Tampa, Florida, which had been one of the stops along my TV tour. (John likes warm weather even more than he likes referring to himself in the third person.) Now I work in the marketing department of a large real estate developer here and do some freelance TV work on the side. I've also produced a couple of short documentary films.

I still know the four chords I learned in high school guitar class and the three I learned in the four piano lessons I took when I was 17. I continue to play both of the instruments equally badly and I have recordings of my original compositions to prove it.

It is said that a rolling stone gathers no moss. It gathers no spouse, either. I have never married nor fathered any children. It's just my cat and me. But, I promise, we're just friends.

I hope this letter finds you -- I hope it finds you at all, first of all -- healthy and happy as you pass another of life's milestones. I would love to hear about your life after high school if you care to share it. You don't even have to use a stamp. You can e-mail me at johnmcq@hotmail.com. If you're curious, you can watch some clips of my TV work at www.JohnMcQuiston.com or visit my blog at http://mcqueue.blogspot.com where you might read about how I sent a letter to a girl I once knew years ago and wondered about the woman she became.

Take care,

John McQuiston

*In high school I excelled at algebra, geometry and trigonometry and also made A's in biology, chemistry and physics. Academic success that did not carry into college.

---

I print it out, fold it up and for the first time in I don't know how long I seal an envelope that contains neither a greeting card nor a remittance. An actual letter from an actual viewer.

I don't know if she'll get it. The address could be wrong. The Diane could be wrong. She didn't have a common last name so I'm confident that's not the case. Maybe the letter will get there only for a jealous boyfriend or husband to see it before she does.

And what does it matter? What if it does reach her and she happens to remember my name, or doesn't remember but is curious enough to open the envelope? What if she finds the letter engaging, amusing and occasionally profound? (sure signs of premature senility but still) What will come of it anyway?

I have no idea. I do know is that for reasons I do not understand, I felt terrific after writing the letter. That's reason enough.