Sifting through my boxes of stuff has brought me a lot of laughs. It is quite possibly the reason why I can't seem to get this organization project finished. I have basically been through all of the "things" boxes and have now moved onto the thirty or more boxes of paper.
These boxes contain just about everything one can imagine that most people throw away. I seem to have kept everything, but it has, like I said, provided some good laughs.
I found the receipt for the plane tickets from my 1972 trip to Hawaii. Round trip ticket from San Diego to Honolulu - $114.00! That's once all the tax was added in. Island hopping from Honolulu to Hana - $12.00! These will be nice mementos to add to a scrapbook someday.
I also found a page from a journal I kept from that same trip. Hopefully I will find the entire journal, but if not, I have a kazillion letters that I exchanged with friends and family here on the mainland while trekking around the islands with a backpack and a tent.
This particular journal entry gave me a good laugh though. God, I was so young and silly. My friends and I would laugh at everything. The entry is dated June 3, 1972 and reads:
"The plane was an hour late taking off and "S" and I cruised the airport to see what was happening. We got a little hungry so we went into a snack shop. Everything was pretty expensive. Luckily we were in the mood for a brownie, the cheapest thing on the menu. However, they were in small portions so when the chick asked us what we'd like, we told her the biggest brownie you have. She was peeved but we were hungry. We chowed down on those brownies next to a drinking fountain. Our next adventure was in a telephone booth. We decided to call each other on the pay phones. I deposited a dime but since we were economizing, we just let it ring, just to blow people's minds."
As I read this entry, I remembered that my friends and I loved the word "peeved" and we used it often. It was always pronounced with a great deal of emphasis --P -EEEEEEEEEEEEE- VED. Eventually we substituted the word for "pissed off" due to a cat we had found whom we named Leo. Leo was not very friendly and always seemed mad. Calling him Peeved Leo just didn't cut it so we dubbed him Pissed Off Leo and it stuck. From that moment on, any angry person we met was referred to as a Pissed Off Leo.
The telephone booth episode is historic. First, who can make a call for a dime, or even better yet, who uses a telephone booth these days? Superman would be in a world of hurt today. We did make public pay phones ring though, and we would make them ring and ring and ring until the people nearby would get so ticked by the distraction, they'd answer them only to find no one there. Naturally, we would roar with laughter, thinking we were so clever and sneaky. I wonder now just how many were onto our little game. It was so much better than prank calling from the home phone because we got to see the faces and reactions of our victims. We died laughing.
As ridiculous as all this may sound, these were innocent and harmless gestures of our immaturity or should I say, our growing years. What was far more wonderful was that we were four teenage females, taking off to Hawaii for adventure and discovery. We paid for the entire trip ourselves without parental donations, working at fast food joints and saving. We had no chaperones or means of communication with our folks back on the mainland, other than the two cent postcards we would send home.
Along with my plane tickets and journal entry, I also found the receipt for my Travelers Cheques, a grand total of $290. I stayed months in Hawaii on that small amount of money. I knew exactly how to budget, often times picking wild avocados for the day's meal. We had no interest in hotels or souvenirs and used our thumbs as our means of transportation.
Ah, the good old days! This must be a sure sign that I am getting older as I tell stories about how times have changed. Those were the days though when life was simpler and allowed for raw adventure that one only seems to find on a reality show these days.
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