I pay good money to avoid this kind of temperature. You know it’s hot because the direct sunlight is searing, but there’s fog over the western mountains (clearly visible from in front of the hospital today). Unfortunately the cloud cover and occasional rain means it is also abnormally muggy for this place and time of year, and I got enough of that in the old country.
Speaking of the old country, on top of the trip this weekend, one of my best friends ever is on Pastebook now, where apparently a good chunk of my high school has reunited. Jury’s still out on this. Coming all slam-bang at once, it makes for quite the temporal fugue, aggravated by the fact that it’s twenty years since the Big Spring – let’s see, by this time 20 years ago, I think we were through most of the big travel and I had the fourth ace in my hat (district, county, regional, and finally state championship) but prom had not yet happened, which meant that things were still more or less normal between me and my common-law girlfriend. (Long story.) Trying real hard not to think about how most of the kids I see on campus were not born yet by then.
It’s a weird thing for me because I didn’t exactly part on the best of terms with my high school. Most of my friends – certainly my two best ones – were a year ahead of me, and I didn’t quite get on with my fellow seniors (to the point where six weeks into my senior year, I was dating a pageant girl from a much more rural high school). In fact, I was kind of a headcase – I wasn’t the Terrell Owens of Scholar’s Bowl, but you wouldn’t want to live on the difference. At least I wasn’t a cancer on the team. Much. (My insistence on keeping score in practice as me vs. everyone else might have been a detriment to team unity.) And of course, everyone went to college, and most folks at least got out of town – I ended up closer to my house in college than I was in high school. I think the souring experience of undergrad more or less permanently put me off the old home patch, which meant that I never really got into the alumni circles after my closest fellows left town for good themselves.
And yet…all in all, it was a good time. I had a much more collegiate experience from high school than I ever got from undergrad – hell, I was wearing my high school ring on the day I was married and I will claim RLC ’til the day I die in the same way that I won’t even acknowledge where my BA came from. I lived hell and gone from everyone, and my social circles might not have been as broad or numerous as others, and a lot of it had to be done over the phone, but fuck it – I was a starter on the closest thing we had to a flagship varsity team, I took at least half a dozen out of town trips competing in one thing or another, we had Led Zep and the Who and damn near a secret handshake in “Magic Bus”, and I drank Dr Pepper a 3-liter at a time and stuck cards in my hat like a fighter pilot’s kills and opened class with TWO verses of “Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog” daily and bribed the German teacher with lunch if he’d let us skive off class to go to the Bangkok House for curry and covered lockers in Post-It notes, and it may not have been perfect, but I can look back at high school and say in confidence that I was cheated out of nothing. There’s a black-hole void in my life, sure, but it’s nothing to do with the mustard-ugly blockhouse on the back side of Red Mountain.
I still like reading your stories even though I’ve heard them over and over again. I love you.