Meeting Justin Cleveland

At Helen's request (and to fulfill a promise I made months ago) here's everything I can remember about the beginnings of my friendship with Justin Cleveland, with many key details left out to protect his reputation, of course.

I knew of Justin throughout elementary school but it wasn't until Mr. Rigley's class in sixth grade that we became friends. And, as with Dan, we started out as enemies. I do not recall why, though I would think it had something to do with Justin having a big mouth. I remember us hitting each other in the hallway of the school, though neither of us hit hard enough to cause any pain.

At some point during the year we must have bonded over a mutual love of baseball and basketball cards. Of course, this was a hobby which occupied the spare time of many boys our age, and there was a certain social status attached to those who had the most "valuable" sports cards. As an aside, I'll mention that we also looked to shoes and NBA replica jerseys as indicators of social status, but sports cards were the most important. We pitied those poor boys who had an album full of "commons," or cards of relatively minor athletes whose cards didn't warrant a high price in Beckett or Tuff Stuff.

**I'll save my history with sports cards for another post, another day**

Now, my relationship with Justin wasn't exactly continuous. We would fall out with one another every couple years, I think, or there would be extended periods of time when we wouldn't see much of each other. As we were on different "teams" in 7th grade (I was unfortunately on the Madison "team," while Justin was probably on Monroe), our in-school socializing more or less disappeared. The only middle school memory of Justin which I can recall with any clarity (though it may have been sixth grade) is a birthday trip to see the Roanoke Express. There may have been many sessions in which we traded cards, played basketball or rode our bikes but no specific episodes will come to mind.

The high-school years: Justin and I were the only boys in the yearbook class our tenth-grade year. At least a dozen attractive girls surrounded us on a daily basis, though there was a marked difference in the way each of us responded to these surroundings. I don't know if Justin had had any girlfriends by this point but I know he was more advanced than I when it came to any male-female interaction. I was a very overweight 15 year-old, which certainly didn't help. Justin was scrawny with a fashionable haircut, leading some girls to compare him to Ryan Phillipe (some actor from a movie with Sarah Michelle Gellar, I think). It goes without saying that I didn't have the upper hand (nor have I ever), but I think the two of us provided a nice balance within the classroom atmosphere, at least. We did as little work as possible while the rest of the students worked at about a half-pace. I can say I didn't learn much about girls from Justin, though I was always (and still am) puzzled about how he could say absolutely stupid things and girls would find it to be cute (Justin, if you're reading this, I'm not calling your intellectual aptitude into question, I'm merely pointing out my inability to understand the ways in which the mind of a teenage girl works).

I'll leave off here for now...we've had a long history together and it cannot be summed up on this day.