The 90's

This past Friday, I had the immense pleasure of going out by myself for a little bit.  The best part of getting out by myself (no matter what I'm doing) is playing my own music in the car.  Not Sunday School Songs, not The Lion King soundtrack, not even sports talk radio.  Just the station I like, which is mostly pop music.  So on Friday, I get in the car and immediately switch over to my radio station, only to be even more pleasantly surprised that they are doing a 90's music weekend.  Playing all the hits from the decade when I started listening to popular music and deciding for myself what I liked.  It was wonderful.  I drove along in a rainstorm listening to Chumbawumba and Backstreet Boys and Dave Matthews Band.  And every song reminded me of my friends and my experiences from the 90's; its amazing how music becomes linked to memories in such a powerful way.  I wistfully thought of high school and marching band and uncertainty and crushes.  And as the rain continued to beat down on the windshield, I remembered this Kathleen Turner movie that my sister and I liked to watch when we were growing up, called "Peggy Sue Got Married."  Its about a woman who suffers a head injury at her high school reunion and wakes up 20 years in the past, reliving high school.  Even though everyone else is exactly as she remembers them, she still retains the memories of the life she lived after graduation, getting married and having kids and the Vietnam War.  And then I imagined, what if this storm somehow transported me back to the 90's just as I am while everyone else remained the same?  What would it be like to go through high school with an actual idea about what life would be like after?  Would I be as hardworking in school, knowing that I really didn't need those math classes, or would I try harder to understand?  Would I confidently approach a boy that I liked, or would I try to find the teenage boy who would one day become my husband so that we didn't waste any time?  I guess the question boils down to, would I try to better prepare for the life I'm currently living, or would I try to change the future?  Kathleen Turner tried to do things differently, yet still ended up with Nicolas Cage at the end of the movie, because it was her destiny.  I like to think that my life has so few regrets that the only things I would change is managing my money better when I was single, so that there wouldn't be such a struggle now.  Then I thought of all the things I enjoyed about the 90's: meeting Melissa at Tinseltown and going to the movies together with no other obligations inhibiting us from being together; riding in the back of the Micciche's Camry while they played Jay-Z or Third Eye Blind; living in a house that I wasn't responsible for, where I could sleep in on weekends because I had no other obligations.  Riding bikes with my sister in the middle of a summer night; my sophomore lunch table that threw each other birthday parties (and tried very hard to impress the table of senior boys that we sat next to); spending a week with all of my best friends at Band Camp every year.  I even miss my French teacher that I had each year and who seemed to genuinely want me to succeed in the future.  I have all of these wonderful memories of my teenage years, but at the end of the evening, I was glad to return home and find my husband and children exactly as I left them.