School's Out, Forever

I kept a journal in 7th grade, in a series of blue books. It was an assignment given by my English teacher, who felt that journal-keeping was a virtue--that it was the key to a fully examined life. We were supposed to write in it each day, not simply recording our activities but exploring what we thought about each day's events.

In one entry, I wrote about my parents attending their parent/teacher conference at school: "They are going to this school at night to see how we have decorated the room and talk to the teacher about how I'm doing. I don't understand why we kids don't get to go, I am staying home and its not fair (sic)." Common themes of this journal:  "everything is unfair" and "everything is boring."

My first mistake was being honest. She graded for grammar, but my teacher was known for her snarky comments in the margins (comments like "you think your parents are the worst in the world?" or "What a tragedy!")When my teacher responded, she wrote in the margin: "Unfair? But you get to go to school EVERY day!"

What she didn't understand, and what I still do, is that school is more interesting, more exotic, and more desirable when you are not in it. The idea of the school at night, with the hallways lit up and the hall monitors (all of the rules, really) nowhere to be seen--well, it was irresistible. I tried every possible way each morning to get out of going, but being left out of parent/teacher night seemed like punishment.

Going to a reunion is like finally getting the chance to attend that parent/teacher night. It's festive, it's evening, and it's like school without the actual school. You feel like a kid in a sea of adults (when did everyone grow up?And why don't I feel grown up even now?--but of course it didn't help if you were staying with your parents while in the area), you wait for affirmation that you look good, that you are successful, that you are smart (whether it comes or not) and you realize that without the structure of school you are all really just people in a room with other people (some friends, some strangers) who are roughly the same age. For a moment, this idea is unbearably sad.

But then there's music playing and someone found a hilarious picture of you in an old yearbook,and you wonder, after several conversations, was she always this nice, and was he always this funny? and maybe people are going out afterwards, and the July night is warm, and you remember--with relief bordering on joy-- that you are not going to be graded on any of it.

Regrets? I have a few...

Peggy Sue Got Married was released in 1986, and it was a baby boomer’s movie if I ever saw one—the main character, played by Kathleen Turner, is a married woman who, at her 2^5th reunion, hits her head and is suddenly transported back to high school. Now, the film, which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is no Apocalypse Now: it has many flaws (not the least being Nicolas Cage and Kathleen Turner trying, painfully, to portray high school students) but the scene that I still remember was the one when Kathleen Turner goes downstairs and sees her mother (who was, in her “real” life, now dead) and tears up at the tableau:  the old kitchen table, her parents, her bratty little sister, a regular morning from her youth to live all over again. She just chokes up, and I did, watching this—even though I was just out of high school myself.

Peggy Sue also asks the question, what would you do over again if you could? It's an enduring theme in pop culture, one approached most cleverly in Lost when Hurley “writes” The Empire Strikes Back.  As much as we want (and need) to live and be in the present, from time to time, this idea appeals to us. Reunions, I think, are one of those times. 

Yet the movies focus almost solely on romantic regrets. Peggy Sue becomes involved with a beatnik who, as you might guess, wears all black, is rebellious, and writes bad poetry that we are supposed to find brilliant. Then, of course, she realizes that an insensitive lout of a husband is still better than a Kerouac-spouting beatnik-- an important lesson to us all. The problem with all of this is not just the predictability of this plot, but that romantic regrets are probably not at the top of most people’s lists of what they would change about their pasts.

So here is my list of what I would change, if I get hit on the head at the reunion and find myself back at Gilford in 1986. Feel free to add your own.

• I would take an art class and not be so worried about my art not being as good as everyone else’s.
• I would have paid attention when my father, and then my driver’s ed teacher, showed me how to change a flat tire. 
• I would have made more of an effort in math class. No, a “C” is not OK. No, “I’m bad at math” is not a good excuse. Math is actually pretty important in everyday life—Mr. Stephenson was right. 
• I would not have gotten up at 5:30 AM to blow dry and curl my hair, then spray it with Aqua Net until it didn’t move. 
• (and this one is impossible) I would not have seen every slight, every rejection, every bad grade or bad day—perceived and real—as evidence that Janis Ian was right, and that it would never get any better.

One of my colleagues has a young daughter, and when her daughter was in the toddler room at day care, she thought that all of the toddlers would simply turn into babies again and cycle back through the infant room, ad infinitum. When told that this didn’t happen, she was both sad and relieved, a response I can understand completely.

Questionnaire Questions for the Gilford High Class of 1986

This information is for the reunion book we are putting together--it's something that Kate and Patty created for the 20-year, and a tradition we want to continue. Sort of like a yearbook, but even better, since we've done some pretty interesting things by this point in our lives. I have included the questions here in case you didn't get the e-mail attachment, or you don't want to go searching through old messages for it (I don't blame you. When I was out of town once I came back to something like 150 work messages, which makes you just want to pull the plug on the computer.)

The more responses we get, the better the book will be. I can't speak for others, but it has been really fun for me to read about what all of you have been up to--and to marvel over how great everyone looks. Thank you!!

Name Then

Name Now

Significant Other

Married? Together how many years?

Eaglets: (names and ages)

Grand-Eaglets:

Pets (name and type of pet):

Post-GHS Education:

Employer:

Type of Work:

What is one thing you have learned (a life lesson) since graduating from high school?

Will you be attending the reunion? YES   MAYBE    NO

Do we have your permission to publish the information you have included here in a reunion book?  YES   NO

Please tell the story of your life since graduating from high school (please include a current picture of you and your loved ones.) 


E-mail to Kirsti at ksandy@keene.edu. Thank you!

Career Day

Sometime before career day in our senior year, the guidance counselors administered a test to supposedly help us choose a possible career direction. This was a little daunting, because although I knew I was going to college, I had no idea what for. What this test was supposed to show us was what we were interested in and suited for. It had questions like "Do you enjoy working with color?" and "Are you interested in helping people?"  I was hoping to get "psychologist" in my list of potential careers, but instead got "interior designer," "homemaker," and "teacher." To be fair, the guidance counselor, Mr. Fox, did not see these test results as my fate, but it's hard to persuade a 17-year-old girl of this--after all, tests had determined pretty much everything in my life at that point.

I was used to getting the "So, do you want to be a teacher, too?" question. My mother is a teacher, and my father is a college professor, so it was assumed I also wanted to teach. The only problem was that I did not want to teach--at all. Having parents who teach does not necessarily make you want to teach. On the outside, the summers off look great, but I saw first hand the crap that my mother, in particular, had to deal with on a day-to-day basis--annoying parents, meddling and inflexible administrators, long days (yes, the school days end at three, but add to that two hours or more of grading and planning at the end of the day, plus meetings with parents.)

I had imagined myself as a psychiatrist or psychologist--sort of like the ones in the old Alfred Hitchcock episodes, with the leather couch and the office on a tree-lined street. I would get to the bottom of people's problems, like a detective, and they would say "thank you, doctor" and set up another appointment with my smartly dressed secretary.

And yet, here I am, a teacher--a teacher who, for the most part, loves her job.

So was the test right? I am also a mother, and I am in the process of redesigning my office, so maybe it was partly right, or maybe subliminally persuasive. But the immediate result was my sense of a predetermined destiny--the test said I had three options, so why fight it? When career day came, Cathy Quinn, Tammy Buswell and I ducked out of the presentations taking place in most of the classroom and did a mock session--on how to be a prostitute. We drew a picture of a hooker on the markerboard and instructed  our charges (mostly their friends--sophomore and junior girls). But, when you think about it, it makes just as much sense as the sessions on becoming a dental hygenist or a veterinarian. It's a rare high school student who can pick a career and stick with it, no matter what the career aptititude test might indicate.

Superimposition

One of my friends, who is in her fifties, recently went to her middle-school reunion. Frankly, I would prefer to forget middle school, but she was excited about it and had kept in touch with her classmates, including Didi Conn, who played Frenchie (with the pink hair) in the movie Grease. The reunion was held at her former classmate’s Manhattan apartment, on Central Park West. As my friend stood outside smoking one last cigarette in the cold before heading up to the party, she saw a beautiful brunette woman who looked familiar. My friend greeted her warmly.

The woman seemed slightly nervous, but was friendly. They chatted about the impending snow, the economy, the neighborhood. “Are you excited about the reunion?” my friend asked. It soon became clear that the woman had no idea what my friend was talking about. My friend apologized, and the woman went on her way. One of my friend’s former classmates got out of a cab and said, “How do you know Julianna Margulies?”

Would I be able to tell Julianna Margulies from my middle school classmates? Probably not. I think, though, that like our relationships with celebrities, the connections we have after many years are much more imagined than real. I remember seeing Christie Brinkley in the FAO Schwartz in Manhattan and thinking, “Where do I know her from?” but of course, I didn’t know her at all. Our classmates—and mostly I mean the ones we haven’t kept in touch with--are recognizable the way that celebrities are in real life:  vaguely familiar, taller or shorter or blonder than we remember, and hard to place right away. Perhaps it’s impossible to see them exactly as they are. It reminds me of those awful “reflection” pictures that were popular back in the early 1980s, in which your own misty profile hovered above your smiling face—only the present you is the smiling face, and the ghostly profile is you then. Or maybe it's the other way around--at least, whenever I meet up with someone I knew a long time ago, it's almost as if the person I knew a long time ago is superimposed on their present self. 


Which, I guess, means that even if you look spectacular, everyone is going to remember the you with acne and coke bottle glasses anyhow. No matter what your Facebook profile photo looks like.  

Now, what one might talk about at a middle school reunion, I have no idea. Do you still have that Loverboy album? Do you choose Truth or Dare? Isn't (insert person, place or thing) gross? No, dare, and definitely, yes.

The Great White Pants

Before I went to Gilford High, I had to wear a uniform every day. This was no hardship. Yes, it was ugly (blue/green plaid, green vest, white or navy shirt, blue or white knee socks) and by no means sexy, despite what music videos ten years later would lead some to believe.  The uniform meant one less social gaffe I could potentially make—with the uniform, it was next to impossible to wear the wrong thing. I say “next to” because the girls at my school were great at finding ways to bend or stretch whatever rules were imposed. We were allowed to shorten our skirts if they were too long, and I soon found out that “too long” was, by popular opinion, four inches above the knee. Once again, this was not to look more attractive, but to facilitate writing test answers on one’s thigh, particularly in history class, where we had a male teacher who, rumor had it, would be too timid to check. I never went through the trouble—it seemed easier just to study, and the courses at that school were laughably easy—but I did shorten my skirt. 

I had not attended secular school since seventh grade, when plaid culottes with Izod shirts and suspenders were the rage, so I had to get up to speed, and I had only two months to do it. That summer I read up on the fashion magazines: Glamour, and Mademoiselle, and--a gift subscription from my mother-- the now defunct Young Miss (shortened to YM soon after, for obvious reasons), and saved up a little money. Before school started, I took a trip down to the new “Limited” store at the Manchester mall and bought what I thought would be sure to propel me into the high school fashion elite:  two pairs of cotton harem pants. One was white and one was black (to go with everything, I reasoned.) The waist was wide-band elastic and the pants billowed out in the hips and legs only to taper back in at the cropped ankle What girl doesn’t want to wear a pair of giant, short pants on her first day at a new high school? 

I loved those pants so much. I don’t remember which shirt I wore the first day of high school, but I do remember that I wore the white pants, with a pair of white jazz shoes. Maybe I even wore a hat. Walking down the halls, I saw that most of the other kids wore jeans—just regular Levi’s, with t-shirts or sweatshirts. A few of the girls wore skirts and dresses, and there were some flashy shirts, but my white parachute pants stood out in a sea of denim.

My comment to my mother when I got home:  “I need jeans.”

I would like to say that I never wore the white harem pants again, but I am pretty sure they remained in regular rotation until college (I recall that they actually wore out).  I would also like to say that the white pants were my last fashion mistake, but then there were the floral granny dresses that made me look like an escapee from a polygamist compound, and the hot pink suede jacket with the shoulder pads. And the Doc Martens with plaid shirts (grunge was never intended for pear-shaped girls) and the bodysuits as tops. And (in college) black velvet hot pants. I am now slowly realizing that shopping at Forever 21 when you are 21 times 2 might not be the best idea, but I wore harem pants on my first day at a new high school, probably with jazz shoes and a fedora--the only place to go from there is up.

Physically Unfit

The first thing I tried to do the summer after my sophomore year, when I registered for Gilford High, was to try to get out of taking gym. I had heard that students at Gilford were athletic, and this thought terrified me. It wasn't that I was against taking gym, or so out of shape I couldn't run laps or do jumping jacks (sadly, I now know what out-of-shape really is) but that I cannot play any kind of competitive sport, even for fun, because I can't keep track of the score or remember the rules. When I'm called upon to step in and play my part, I can't do it--I freeze. This may be, in part, genetic--I remember back in middle school, watching my father in a for-charity basketball game:  someone passed him the ball and he ran with it, under his arm, like a football, to the other side of the court. We're not total clutzes--my dad can ride a horse bareback and Latin dance with the best of them--but as far as competitive sports are concerned, we are as bad as it gets.

How bad? When I was in seventh grade, in Andover, Massachusetts, I was placed in a "remedial" gym class. Only, to make it even more humiliating, they called it "special gym." We had to run something like a 40-minute mile as a requirement, for example, which seemed perfectly reasonable for the kids on crutches, but not for an able-bodied twelve-year-old girl. Then, at the  Catholic Girls' school I attended before Gilford, where my classmates were pregnant or heavy smokers or would rather stab you with a nail file than play softball, I was by default no longer picked last for any teams.

But Gilford students were athletic, and I could no longer rely on the delinquency or morning sickness of my peers to save me.  I had this great proposal for Dick Ayers, the principal (that was his real name, those of you who did not go to Gilford):  I would go to Gilford Hills three times a week and work out with a trainer--and there happened to be two hunky new trainers there, named Adam and Clay, which would make the whole deal that much more appealing (I didn't tell Mr. Ayers this part, though). It seemed an ideal solution--I would avoid any team activities, and I could get my gym credits at the same time. My parents were even willing to pay for it.  But no, Mr. Ayers didn't go for it, and I was stuck doing one more year of gym.

I don't remember much of this experience, except that I was glad when it was over. One vivid memory endures:  Playing badminton in a gym rigged with multiple nets, against a sophomore girl. Neither of us knew how to keep score, so we just kept hitting the birdie back and forth (not to each other--I'd hit it, she'd pick it up off the ground, and over and over like that.) Then Mr. Pinkham, who was making his rounds, blew our cover. "What's the score?" He asked. We looked at each other, the sophomore girl and I. "What's the score?" he repeated.

We made up something completely random,  like "40 to 32." He just looked at us, a look that said "Who are you and what are you doing in my gym?" and shook his head. But he didn't say it, and he moved on to the next pair while I triumphantly scored my 33rd point of the game.