Lincoln Price

I'm sure it should come as no surprise to faithful readers of this blog (all two of you!) but I did not enjoy my school years. Grade school, junior high, and high school all stunk like last week's meatloaf left out in the sun. In July. In Waco. It was bad. I was the awkward, ugly girl with the odd sense of humour who was very misunderstood and mostly disliked. No dates to the school dances and no steady BF to show off at family functions. I always had friends, other outcasts that frankly, were some of the best people ever created, but I never had that fella I'd been hoping for or even an admirer or two. So all this adds up to the fact that compliments and Star were rarely ever together.

Until one day in my senior year of high school in Mr. Sax's Behavioral Science class. I sat in the third row from the door, front of the class, next to Barb Dillenschneider, a great gal that was always good for a laugh and was just super crazy fun to be around. Plus she always wore a purple scrunchie on her wrist - in 1994, that was the mark of a truly terrific girl.

The day in question had Mr. Sax having each of us look at the person next to us, eye to eye. Since I was the third desk, I had to turn to my left and move my desk to face the guy next to me, Lincoln Price. Lincoln was popular, a football player, extremely handsome, tall with blonde hair like a 1990s surfer and always seemed like a decent guy, never one to be mean or nasty to anyone that wasn't considered to be cool. As the awkward girl, being forced to be face to face with any guy would be wicked uncomfortable and terribly daunting, with Lincoln, it felt even more so. I kept wanting to look away since this all felt very intimate, but I couldn't because the task at hand required me to not look elsewhere. So we sat in silence until Lincoln furrowed his brows and leaned forward towards me and said, "Oh my God, you have the most beautiful eyes..." He kept staring at me and finally closed his eyes, shook his head and said, "Man..." as though he couldn't believe what he was seeing. This remains, to this day, my favourite compliment that I've ever received, mostly because it was so startlingly genuine. I still have, somewhere, that long sleeve eggplant purple v-neck Contempo Casuals shirt that I wore that day.

A handful of weeks back I looked up Lincoln along with the name of our high school thinking maybe I'd find out where he is and what he became. (I wasn't being creepy, I was just being curious.) So I Googled him and found out that Lincoln passed away suddenly at the end of December. Such a shame since he seemed like one of the good guys, and the world needs more of them. If I'm still thinking of him some twenty plus years later, I'm sure he left his mark on many, many others.