Halloween, 1995

I should be 100% way too embarrassed to share this photo with you. But I just can't help it. It is too horrifically glorious to keep it all to myself. It should be against the law for me not to share it with you.

This weekend, my childhood best friend, Sam, came into town to be with his family. (He may kill me for posting this--I'll have to deal with the consequences later).

I met Sam when I was about eight years old. He and I were the same age, our birthdays only twenty days apart. Almost instantly we became inseparable and remained that way for many years to come. To this day, he is the one person on God's green Earth who knows me best. In fact, I think he may be the only person in my life who knows every one of my secrets.

He is the wisest and most loyal friend anyone could ever have. Besides Bob and Cathie, he's also probably the most responsible person I know. He's never been anything but a wonderful friend to me, and I love him as much as I think I could love anyone.


Whenever I have a problem, no matter how big or small, I get Sam on the phone, explain my situation, and then listen to him tell me exactly what to do for the next hour. Then I call him back a week later to tell him that I didn't follow his advice and to explain to him how my situation has now become much worse. And he starts over, ever patient, and walks me through my life choices again.

I won the lottery to find him as a child, mostly because it was an absolute miracle that I located a kid who was as strange as me.

You guys. I was a freaking weird child. You've heard some of my journal entries from The Lost Journal Series. You've heard some of my stories. TIP OF THE ICEBERG.

I cannot really begin to describe for you how odd of a child I was. But I think the picture I'm about to show you will help give you a better idea.

Sam texted me on Saturday morning to tell me that he was digging through some old family photo albums when he stumbled across a Halloween picture from 1995 when he and I were only eleven years old.

For some reason during that time, Sam and I thought that The Sound of Music was the most ridiculous film ever created. We thought it was cheesy and long and boring and we associated it with our grandmas, because at that time, we couldn't imagine that anyone other than our grandmas could like this film.

We ironically sang the songs from the movie, mostly the one about "how do you solve a problem like Maria?" We sang that song at the top of our lungs in Sam's basement, in "nun" voices, and in excessive vibrato.

Then one day we had a great idea: why not dress up as the nuns from The Sound of Music for Halloween?

We begged our mothers to create costumes. They reluctantly agreed. They consulted with one another. They had no idea where to even begin. They had no patterns to follow. Keep in mind that this was before the Internets.

Against all odds, they found a way. And our costumes came hot off the sewing machines just in time for October 31, the day that Sam and I wandered the streets of South Jordan Utah in our habits, singing in beautiful geriatric harmony, "how do you catch a moon beam in your hand?"

He probably should have known better, but Sam went ahead anyway and texted me a picture of the photo he found on Saturday:

Sam on the left, Eli on the right.

 If any of you out there have a more embarrassing photo from your childhoods, I don't want to see it.

~It Just Gets Stranger