I live about a mile from the house I grew up in (the west coast house, that is) and Lex goes to the same middle school I did.  Back then it was a junior high, and I still call it that because I'm old and cranky that way. 

Every day when I drive my younger kids to their elementary school, I drive past the house of the boy I had my first kiss with (this song was playing  I thought it was about Magic Johnson, but I was a total goober in seventh grade).  I am pretty sure that one of his wife's young cousiny relatives is on Lex's soccer team, but honestly I haven't thought much about it other than the unusual name and same religious background. 

My teenaged son has to run laps around the same track I did.  He even has first period PE like I did, and I remember that mostly because I thought I was So Clever in the mornings when I shouted up at the grey sky for God to please turn on the heater because we are freezing down here.    

I remember loving my grey Nikes with the pink stripe/swoosh thing, and my layered pink and grey polo shirts and my string of pink beads, like Lex was recently into his Chuck Taylors and black skinny jeans.  Now he's moved up to blue denim, sorta-skinny, but not too tight jeans, and Oh My God if he doesn't start pulling them up I may lose my mind, which HELLO is the first clue that I'm the mother of a teenager, thankyouverymuch.

He's a reader, like me, and very into music (most of which I sort of like).  He tends to buy stuff off iTunes before checking with me and is always SHOCKED that I'd actually have all the (good) REM (or whatever band) CDs sitting on a shelf in my room when he just paid to download Superman.  SG and I both are constantly saying You PAID for that?  I HAVE that!  Ask first!  

It's funny, watching him with headphones on, intently listening to some of the same stuff I did when I was his age.  And this is neither here nor there, but I found a video thing for the first REM song that grabbed me and made me feel cool when I heard it on the radio while driving with my dad in Houston one 1980's summer (cool because I *knew* that alternative song, so I must, therefore, be totally rad) and it has the lyrics and you know I love Michael Stipe but he is not a Great Annunciator and so I had to laugh all these years later at seeing what the real words are. 

And another favorite REM song (favorite in the way that you *l o v e* music when you are young, because everything is so much, I don't know, just MORE when you are a teenager), was this totally unintelligible masterpiece.  I'm putting the words below so that I can change the wrong ones I've been singing for over 20 years. 

Does this mean that I'm about to start my midlife crisis?

I see your money on the floor, I felt the pocket change
Though all the feelings that broke through that door
Just didn't seem to be too real
The yard is nothing but a fence, the sun just hurts my eyes
Somewhere it must be time for penitence. Gardening at night is never where
Gardening at night, gardening at night, gardening at night
The neighbors go to bed at ten
Call the prayer line for a change
The charge is changing every month
They said it couldn't be arranged

I see your money on the floor, I felt the pocket change
Though all the feelings that broke through that door
Just didn't seem to be too real
We ankled up the garbage sound, but they were busy in the rows
We fell up not to see the sun, gardening at night just didn't grow
Gardening at night, gardening at night, gardening at night