School Story:
Ahh, my school memories? What endures, lingers in my mind?
Being not in any in-crowd or out-crowd.
Being the nice nerd instead of the wierd nerd.
Playing the organ in a dracula cape at Follies, and being shocked as everyone when someone like Toby Withers came on stage and sang like no one ever knew he even could!
Palling around with Johnathan Steppe and Errol Siegel. We were all so silly and dramtic together.
Falling in love with music, its performance, its composition, and its broad tradition.
The teachers, the teachers... they are characters inseparable from the experience that our memories call high school. Characters that need no names in our mind, their images being so impressed and vivid:
The beloved, wise, hippy biologist that spoke with true friendship to his class;
the Einstein-ish historian that liked the girls, and taught like he was having a conversation with the class;
The bookish and underappreciated gramarian, who daily would shine, though the air breathed a sort of loneliness;
the misunderstood, robust, cart-riding social scientist, that would teach patiently directly at the one or two students that were actually paying attention;
the lanky, plaid-wearing mathemetician, like a car salesman from an earlier era;
the hardened old shop machineist, who had taught our parents before us;
the counselors and "sped-keepers" (we might have called them at the time), who lovingly remained invisible to most of us;
The foreign language teachers, freeing us for an hour a day from our identities with foreign names, and bringing all of us onto a level paying field with each other;
the scholarly and loveable oddball that would bring us to great literature, and teach our young minds to contemplate ideas on a whole new level;
the band director, reeking of politics and survival; and the choir director, enjoying her role as much as we did ours;
the PE department, complete with rumors about the large masculine woman teaching the girls; and with the locker rooms that forced a silent, collective acknowledgement of our maturing bodies;
the dramatic arts instructors, personally devoted to each one of us, in love with the development of our all-important creative imaginations;
the forensics, debate, and athletic departments, the librarians, the administration, the luch ladies, the janitors;
the circles of friends, the giggles and the struggles, the crowded halls, the fashionistas and the slummers, the spark-flash ah-ha moments and provacative new ideas, and the PROVACATIVE itself, the cruelty and tearshed, victories and spirit, the dissappointments, the self-conciousness, AND the crushes...
the first taste of independence without the responsibilities of adulthood...
All play a part in creating our high school story; all play their roles in shaping the realities that we would carry with us into that adulthood. They are the meaning that supported the time in our lives filled with such tremendous transition and discovery of ourselves and of this world we've been dropped into. No wonder that it's these years that hold some of the most cherished and nostalgic experiences and memories in the lives of so many.
Isn't it funny how people we barely spoke with in school now fill our Facebook as "friends"? Or is it simply a mark of our maturity? We've always been in this together. And though our lives have diverged, we continue to be on this journey through life together, as are today's high school generations, and as have our parents, and genrations before us. We all share THIS, as we share it ALL. We're all the same.
What I recall from my years at Harper Creek is boundless exploration. But this journey isn't over yet, and I certainly haven't learned all of the answers. Perhaps the best thing to recall is that,
Although the books have long since gone,
Yet homework never ends,
We've learned enough to find our way,
This time, with lots more Friends.
