Well, today my daughter reached a landmark: her first day in Junior High. She is prepping to head out to school right as I write this.
I look back and don’t have many memories of elementary school. Here and there, I have a few, like kids rough-housing on the playground and calling it a “rumble”, or when Jennifer With The Braces walked up to me and announced that she heard I wanted to “go with her” and she wasn’t interested, or the time Shiloh decided that we were the two smartest kids in the class and wanted us to do something together every day to show how smart we were.
OK, I guess I have plenty of memories from elementary school; I just had to jog them. Now that I’ve applied my brain a bit, I’m remembering names, faces, events… Yeah, OK, maybe I blocked it out just because it was unpleasant!
But Junior High held some special moments for me. I cursed for the first time. As a matter of fact, Sammy G was there the time that I started randomly shouting “f— you” to every passer-by, until one particularly large bruiser-stoner in our class walked up, casually grabbed me by the throat, and throttled me while saying “you shouldn’t say that to me”. I immediately decided that maybe I didn’t want to do that again. Or the time I walked up behind Danny, the “I have an attitude problem” kid from the class, and he turned around and slugged me in the face without provocation. I still have a fake half-tooth from that encounter, and remember the cluelessness of the approaching teacher who insisted I let him go from the headlock that I had him in. “If I let him go, he’s just going to hit me again.” “Let him go this instant!” “OK, lady, but I told you… (release) (SMACK!) See, I told you he was going to hit me again.” He was expelled from the school for that incident.
I was in a car accident, without a seat belt, which made me a little bit shorter for the rest of my life, with recurring neck pain and a constant ringing in my left ear. Those mild inconveniences beat being dead, I think. I tried cigarettes, and after two days of puffing away madly on a stolen pack of cigs, I decided I didn’t like them and never tried another one. I built my first model airplane, a control-line deal with a Cox .046 motor that I saved for months to buy, and destroyed it after only a few flights.
I met Laurie McDermott in seventh grade, and even though we have gone years between seeing one another, I miss hanging out with her. I met Sammy G, the short, fat, Jewish kid in the class, and we used to play “football” — with a little folded-up triangle of paper and made-up rules — every day at lunch. Boy, what a transformation he underwent, and today he’s probably the tallest, fittest one out of the bunch I used to hang out with. In eighth grade, I mooched a piece of candy from a seventh grader and gained a life-long friend in Jon Brusco. He’s let me mooch his candy and sleep over ever since 😉
I can’t help but think that my daughter is going to establish some of the same life-long relationships in the coming two years. And I look back to some of the truly stupid things I did, and wonder what her mistakes are going to be.
Good luck, Sara. You’re going to need it.