Topper

My friends in high school were kind of strange. They were members of the drama club. They were also the majority of the scrabble club. In fact, I think they started that one just to have a club just for themselves, though they were pretty open-minded when other people would want to join. They had a locker cluster which they named "topper." It was named after a local weather guy on the news, Topper Shutt. I think the idea was that when all the lockers were open, it would be "Topper Open" but when they were closed.... They had a website dedicated to topper. I don't know if I was ever considered an "official" member of topper. I never had my own locker in the cluster. I was assigned one once, but it was before I was friends with them, and I was ousted. I did have honorary membership by senoir year, and my own page on the website. The name they gave me was Bobq, and my animal was "mynabird from the planet zork." I don't know how I feel about that. I've always felt that Zebulon was a better name for a planet. Its also a town in North Carolina, I think. The Bobq part was my own. I would always joke that my name was Bob, spelled with a silent q at the end. It was French. They like strings of silent consonants at the end of words. My friend even made me a bobq the mynabird email address to try to get me to use Yahoo personals. She had recently met some people that way and thought I should too. As it turned out, she met her husband that way and became the first in our group of friends to be married and, not surprisingly, the first to be divorced. Frankly, I was appalled at the time, and the email address got little use until I decided to use it as my extra, anonymous email address that had no connection to my real life. I still use the email occasionally, when I want to remain disconnected from whoever I'm talking to. Usually, at some point I'll migrate them to my real email address. But that email is pretty much the last remnant of much of my high school life.