Snob?

When I graduated from high school, I worked for a year and then headed to college. I was home for maybe three months after college before moving to Indianapolis for a year and then to Chicago for four years.

So, after high school, I lived in the area of my childhood home for a maximum of a year and a half before I was thirty.

At work the other day, a woman stopped in from a fork lift repair company. When I got up to greet her, she immediately said, “Tommie?”

I narrowed my eyes at her, as if trying to recognize her face and said, “Yes?”

She laughed and said, “We went to school together!”

Really?

She did not look AT ALL familiar. She said her name. Yeah, still not ringing any bells.

She said she’d been in the same class as my brother.

Let me remind you that my closest-in-age brother was FIVE years behind me in school. (My next closet-in-age brother was thirteen years behind me in school but he went to a different school and so no one from his class EVER recognizes me, thank goodness.)

You know how teenagers are. I had no freaking clue who was in his class. Why would I?

She then said that her brother had been in my class.

Oh.

Well then.

Yeah, I didn’t remember him either. He was one of the three Jasons in my class. I was besties with one of them.

That one was not her brother.

So…I vaguely remember his last name but not him. Not at all.

Was I a snob in high school?

Does it even really matter if I was?

I see people out and about all the time who stop me, ask me if I am me and then talk to me like we’re long lost best friends.

After chatting for a bit, ‘catching up’ if you will, we’ll part ways and Alyssa will whisper, “Who was that?”

And I’ll whisper back, “I have no idea.”

She always laughs at me because I never recognize people I went to school with.

I’m sorry but I was away for over a decade. I didn’t hang out with the people in my twenties or even my thirties. We’ve all changed (though, maybe I haven’t that much, except that I’ve ‘swelled’ as Joan Cusack’s character from Grosse Pointe Blank so brilliantly put it.)

I’ve made ‘friends’ with a lot of these people in social media but I don’t stalk their feeds or check out their lives. I have my own life to live over here.

After this woman spent about ten minutes gossiping about people she thought I knew from high school, including my high school boyfriend who I broke up with over thirty years ago (boy did she dish on that creep, not that I cared one way or the other), she left her contact information for our maintenance manager and exited the building. A co-worker who was waiting to use the bathroom asked me if I’d known that woman.

Nope, I said. I then explained about how I was apparently a snob in high school.

Bless her, this co-worker said, “Maybe you were, but then again, maybe you’ve moved beyond high school and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

I think I like that woman a lot. I’m grateful to be beyond high school and all that entailed.