Code Names!

At the start of my 8th grade year, my family moved to Utah just a few fences down from the Deckers and I began attending Joel P. Jensen Middle School. I had more than half my classes with Craig-- in fact, he was the very first person I met.

That year and in 9th grade, I was very close friends in a tight-knit group of 5 girls. We were all in Craig's ward. More than one in the group had a HUGE crush on Craig. We're talking HUGE in the way only an 8th grade crush can be. Naturally this is pretty much all we talked about... that, and the other girls' other crushes, but really The Craig Crush took up more talking time than any other subject, and there was a lot of talking. There was even a song about him, as I recall.

Obviously, we needed code names to talk about him. I think of them now and they still make me giggle-- first, because of association-- we giggled when we used them-- and second, because they're even more absurd now than I thought back then.

The first is pretty obvious-- "compact disc," because his initials are CD. Then we thought that was too obvious, so we called him "Cordless Duster." (To be able to tell complete stories in code, all the Decker brothers had "Duster" names. Dave was "Diesel Duster." I forget Lynn's, I'm sure it was ridiculous. Kevin was "Kinetic Duster.") But that was so obviously a code name, and so easy to figure out. When we really needed to be secretive and tell stories in a way that no one would suspect, we'd simply call him "Jenny"-- yes, from "Jenny Craig." But the number one name we called him was "Particle C." We'd tell such complex stories about how Particle C bumped into Particle M or Particle A, and Particle R was sent careening of somewhere, and what happened from all those "chemical reactions."

Ah, these are the things we thought we'd never tell. But it's poignant to me to recall that although I came to love him as a wonderful adult, people loved him in more ways than just that! I wonder if he ever figured it out...

--Rebekka Matheson