In the back of The Return Of The King, Tolkien had a chronology of the Third Age. Most of it was demarcated by year, up until the events of the actual trilogy, when he began a much more specific enumeration of events, headed “THE GREAT YEARS.” For a big chunk of my life, this would have started in January of 1989, when first we won County and I started sending off applications for things like Governor’s School. But upon further review – and upon cutting up tracks for background music at my birthday party* – I think if you were going to do the breakdown, you have to start in 1988…
…or to be precise, New Years’ Eve 1987-88. It began, as so many things do, with a party – specifically the party of a young lady from my high school with well-to-do divorced parents who thought nothing of letting a couple hundred of her daughter’s friends have the run of the place. I spent the bulk of the evening hammering out tunes on the piano, while a young lady kept me supplied with Dr. Pepper. (Her name was Rachel, a.k.a. Rachel the Darling Drink Dryad, and I only remember this because I would get a good zinger out of it almost two years later** – I’m certainly not going to perpetrate that she was interested in me in any way, not that I would have noticed.) My only real contribution to the party was outside afterward, when I advised some folks that if they really wanted to pull that car out of the ditch, they probably shouldn’t tie the tow rope to the axle.
It was at this party that one of my classmates and I wore our MIT garb. See, we had decided that we were going to go to MIT for college, save money by living in a cardboard box outside the freshman women’s dorm, and eventually build space stations for a living. What? I was just over three years removed from Space Camp and hadn’t yet demonstrably crapped out on science. Anyway, my parents somehow got through to the MIT co-op and I got the T-shirt and sweatshirt both for Christmas. I say that now because despite having been on the college track since just before kindergarten, this was the very first time I’d given concrete thought to it.
Most of the winter and early spring passed without incident. I remember long nights holed up in my room, poring over the projections for Iowa or New Hampshire, wondering whether any of the thirteen or so candidates had a remote prayer at being President (I was pulling hard for Bob Dole or Bruce Babbitt – I would have said Al Gore but I wasn’t crazy about his wife). Or watching the Winter Olympics. Or marking off days to my driver’s license. I distinctly remember being irked that my folks bought a brand new Monte Carlo just in time to let me have the use of the one that was 5 years old and already had 125,000 miles on it. This was the age of Love and Rockets, of the Smiths and the Damned and Gene Loves Jezebel and Ziggy Marley, sitting in my room starting to wonder what it would really be like to go off to school someday.
The second stage kicked off around mid-spring. I went to Jacksonville with the Scholar’s Bowl team for the first time, had my first exposure to amazing things like free drink refills in the nicer restaurants. I got entangled in some weird student interpersonal issues that, to this day, I don’t know if I resolved brilliantly or if I almost got myself thrown out of school. (Haven’t given it much thought, to be honest.) It was capped off with a win in the Auburn Invitational, which at the time was the closest thing to a state scholar’s bowl championship, and the run I had that day led my coach to predict huge things ahead for me.
Then the summer. Lost in the produce cooler for three months, interrupted by a three-week, 9000-mile trip through three countries and my first conscious trip to California. (I actually took my first steps in California, across my aunt’s floor at Christmas 1972, but I wouldn’t know it if we didn’t have the Super-8s somewhere.) I distinctly remember periods of acute depression which I dealt with by forcibly depressing myself even more, telling myself it was breakup training in case I ever got another girlfriend (bear in mind this is almost a year after the actual breakup, God I was pitiful). The summer passed by, measured out in cans of Mountain Dew Red and readings for English 11 (took it over the summer to free up a spot for AP English later) and 20-hour paychecks at $3.35 an hour, and I remember how badly one’s glasses fog up when going from the inside of a 36-degree produce cooler to the inside of a 130-degree car with a glass roof.
Fourth stage: September. Working Oktoberfest with my classmates as some sort of fundraising project. Summer Olympics. Introducing the exchange student to Dr Pepper. Employing my first girlfriend’s younger sister on a clandestine mission to determine whether she had actually liked me all those long…erm, months…ago. Taking up the mantle of lieutenant captain for a Scholar’s Bowl team whose coach had defected to one of our arch-rival schools over the summer…and discovering that I was incredibly superstitious, ruthlessly competitive, and possessed of enough esprit de corps to drive the whole French Foreign Legion. Driving to school, and driving to work-study on Wednesdays, where I started off with an actual office, a chair that leaned WAY back, and a whole ginormous photocopier in my office. (We moved buildings shortly thereafter, I got a table in the copy room, and it would be eighteen years before I got my own office again.)
As the autumn wore on, I realized that I was spending a whole lot of time with the same people – namely my teammates, the ones I’d gone to Florida with in the spring and gone bowling with in the summer and gone hell-driving around with in August to go tell our former coach just how badly we were going to destroy her new team. Not that our previous year had been “six guys six cabs” or anything, but for whatever reason, the chemical balance of this lineup (two seniors, two juniors, two sophs) was just right to stay intense yet loose, whether it was croaking out U2 lyrics three octaves below normal or practicing skeet shooting with pencils hurled at crushed soda cans…in the middle of class. This time, rolling over regional foes wasn’t an occasion for swaggering commemoratives made with an undershirt and a big black marker in DIY punk fashion – those kinds of kills were to be expected. We had bigger things in sight.
And then, I got the ring. And on the last day of school before Christmas break, crushed my last bout of the black cloud under the weight of a student body howling at our holiday-show parody of David Letterman doing a new bit called “Having Sex With A Member Of The Audience.”*** And that night, out somewhere in Hoover with the gang, set our sights on the goal of goals: the first officially-sanctioned state championship and another free trip to Florida.
I look back now and think that I’m not the same person I was ten years ago. In 1988, I could look back and say with some regularity that I wasn’t the same person I’d been ten weeks ago.
* Could’ve been the whiskey, could’ve been the gin/Might’ve been three or four six-packs, I don’t know, look at the mess I’m in/My head is like a football, I think I’m gonna die/Tell me me oh me oh my, wasn’t that a party…with apologies to the MacTeggarts.
** Okay, because it doesn’t rate a full post: the same person who hosted that party hosted another one a week into my senior year, which was the only time in our lives that my brother and I went to the same party. I was in AP Physics with one of my teammates, our 7th-man alternate, and we were discussing attending this thing in front of a girl who looked very familiar – and she said “Is this Stephanie’s party? You know Steph?” And something clicked in my head and I half-turned and said “I know you, Rachel.” And if I live to be three hundred fifty-seven years old, I will never forget the look on her face.
*** I played the part of Paul Shaffer. I didn’t realize I would end up with his hairline two decades later. Sheeeeeit.