When I started the 7th grade, it was already established that Olive liked me. People said so, even kids I didn't know. "You're C.S., huh?"
But junior high school was a bad shock. Every hour we changed classrooms, teachers, people. Gone was the sense of safety and familiarity that school had been the past six years. Replacing it was a new sense of danger and of excitement. You had to be on your toes. Eighth and ninth grade boys looked mean. They moved too fast, talked to loud. They were veterans. Between classes there was bedlam. At lunch, we were simply set free. "Go to the lunchroom. Get in line. Eat."
Bewildered, I looked around for a familiar face. I saw Allen who looked as bewildered as I. Together we did what we were told. We went to the lunchroom, got in line, ate. But all around us was a free-for-all. Sloppy Joe's and French Fries. We didn't have to buy the limp greens and the overcooked vegetables that had accompanied our every meal before. There was that, anyway. We found two places at the far end of a long line of tables filling the large cafeteria from wall to wall. Three boys approached us that I had never seen. It is never good when boys approach boys. There is always a chance of violence.
"I hear you play in a band," one of the boys sneered.
"Yea, we both do."
"I hear Carol Dann likes you."
"Who?"
"Carol. Carol Dann."
"I don't know. I don't know who she is."
Then they were gone.
"Do you know who Carol is?" I asked Allen. He shrugged. It was like that here in Wonderland.
After school Allen and I walked home together. He lived just down the street from my house. It was two miles each way. Allen and I had been friends since the first grade, but we didn't have any classes together that year. Jr. High School was like that. It just ripped you from your old, safe life, out of the harbor from the place you came. It was sudden like that big gust of wind just before a storm approaches. But somehow it was accepted, reified really, legal. Instantly there were new rules, new relations.
By the second week of class, I didn't see Allen very much. Neither of us waited for the other to walk home. Though we went to the same school, it would be two years before I would see him again.
It's heartbreaking -- really. These (those) middle years - these moments and recollections.
ReplyDeleteI have a middle schooler now. She makes me laugh more than any other person in the world. Her sense of using self-deprecation in light of the pains she is now pushing through (meaning the middle school pains that accompany every one during those years) amaze me. Nothing like humor to get through I think. She has gorgeous wavy hair -- all she wants for Christmas is a hair straightner.
I hope she remembers and writes them her memories -- it would make a great book for kids her age I think. Like reading you right now. I'm thinking of S.E. Hinton. Maybe I fucked my son up -- he was always so bright and ahead of the curve maybe I gave him Catcher in the Rye too early or something.
He was absolutely miserable. Recently he told me he had contemplated suicide by eighth grade. He hadn't discovered his passion yet -- which is music and his drum-set. He was floundering around -- trying sports which he hated but couldn't find a way out of. I was shocked which frightened me because I didn't really know --
I wonder if Boys have a more difficult time but because they are Boys -- we ( Society ) miss it?
Other than being too tall and skinny thereby garnering me many unappreciated nicknames by the very Boys I was madly in love with -- causing me to dream about an operation that would surgically remove a portion of my femur or shin bone to shorten me to more acceptable height (and boy it wasn't it until much later with much older Boys did I thank goodness that operation didn't exist), my best friends and me had a remarkably good time. We were absolutely ridiculously silly -- we loved the same boys (no matter which one of us he picked -- it would all be quite okay, though they didn't pick any of us cause our sights were set very high -- Kevin Heal. EVERYONE loved Kevin Heal. We used to sit on top of this hill and watch him play tennis dreaming out loud what it would be like to kiss him. And laughing like a clutch of mental patients.
Yeah.
Stand By Me. I think I need to watch that movie tonight.
It's our first snow -- you know that gorgeous song falling snow makes? It is heartbreaking out there right now too.
I can't get to the one I love tonight cause of the weather so I think I'll open a beer, light a fire and Remember some more.
A gift:
ReplyDeleteMad As The Mist And Snow
William Butler Yeats
Bolt and bar the shutter,
For the foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night,
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.
Horace there by Homer stands,
Plato stands below,
And here is Tully's open page.
How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and snow?
You ask what makes me sigh, old friend,
What makes me shudder so?
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.