Reminiscing

Jaxon did not know what braces were. So we got out our high school pictures to show him that we both had braces. This old picture grabbed my attention. On her blog, my sister-in-law has been talking about how she met her husband, so I am going to copy her idea.



Carie: “What about your friend from the seminary thing?”
Janelle: “What friend? I don’t know who… oh, you must be talking about Andre.”

Setting: September of our senior year of high school.
The situation: Carie and I had decided to go to the girls choice dance coming up in October.
The problem: Who do we go with?

For those who don’t know, Carie and I were inseparable during high school and we still love each other even if she moved to Kansas! (I guess we can still be friends). We decided that since we were very cool seniors, we should go to the fall girls choice dance thing. Carie had a boy friend, but he was on a mission so she was stumped on who to ask. I finally decided to ask Jonathan who had been a neighbor/friend most of my life.

I had been bugging her to death to find a date. I wanted a group date. I was not going to go with Jonathan by myself! She had no idea what to do. Finally she asked me about that guy we talked to at the seminary thing. There had been a seminary opening social at the beginning of the year. It had been a few weeks and we had talked to lots of people. It took me a while to figure out who she was referring to. I remember after she mentioned that she would like to ask out Andre Bartlome I wondered why I hadn’t thought of him myself.

So Carie and Andre went together. Marianne and Scott went with us too. They were some of my really good friends my senior year too. We all had a blast that night. We did not stop laughing. I don’t remember anything about dinner but we came back to my house for some games. There was something about wearing gloves to unwrap a Hershey’s kiss with two butter knives. That is really all I remember but we laughed SO hard. It was fun.

I must have known Andre before that Seminary thing. So it must have been in our junior year that we met. (Andre just came in and says he has a memory of playing cards with me in our 11th grade English class). After that dance Andre was more in my circle of friends. We had choir together. Choir was more than a class- it was a lifestyle. You had to do the school musical if you were in choir. You lived at the school practicing for the play for months. That year it was “Guys and Dolls”. If it wasn’t your scene you entertained yourself like doing homework or playing card games with friends. So “choir people” got to know each other very well. At the end of the year the choir went to California to sing in a competition (it was really a vacation with 200 of your closest friends). Andre and I hung out in the same group at Universal studios. He came to my birthday party at the end of the year and then when we graduated we ended up at the same graduation party in a Park City condo. (Just to reassure you- it was really fun, but any bishop would approve of the activities there.)

After that I went to BYU and Andre went to the U. I did not contact him again even after I came home for the summer from Provo. One morning at 6:00am I was asleep. Of course I was asleep. It was 6:00 am! Something started tickling my cheek. I wiped my cheek and then muffled laughter started to sink into my semi-conscience state. I turned over to find Andre and Dave (another high school friend of ours) standing in my bedroom with a feather. We went to the mountains and had breakfast. I was impressed that they managed to get a fire burning even though it was starting to rain.

Because of that early morning date, I went to his mission farewell and felt more like a close friend to him. If not for that date, he would probably be in that friend category of “remember that guy in high school?” We wrote a bit while he was on his mission. One of his letters to me was describing a Spanish custom of stuffing grapes in your mouth on New Years Eve. I read that part to one of my room mates. She starting laughing and told me that I was going to marry him one day. I dismissed her comment in front of her and told her that I didn’t think I really would ever see him again (but he was on my mind). We wrote a little while I was on my mission.

I came home from my mission and called him to tell him when my homecoming talk would be. I was bugged because he told me he couldn’t come. He was going to be in Europe! His choir at the U was touring Europe, singing in great cathedrals like Notre Dame. Wasn’t my homecoming talk more important?


Sometime during the summer after I got home from my mission we went on a date. I hadn’t seen him since I left on my mission almost 2 years previously and I had only seen him at his homecoming talk and at my farewell talk. When I opened the door for our date, it was my "wow" moment. All of a sudden he wasn’t “my high school friend” anymore. He was a man that I wanted to get to know better.