Twenty

Recently a friend reminded me that our 20-year high-school reunion is coming up. My reaction was: Hmmm. Twenty years? It seems like just yesterday I was experiencing a lack of confidence when talking to girls and coming up with creative excuses for not doing what I was supposed to be doing. Wait. That was yesterday. Some things never change.

Anyway, it got me thinking about those old times. A faint memory will pop into my head and I'll spend a few minutes wondering what a certain person's name was, or what year it might have happened, who I was dating at the time, etc. Many of those questions go unanswered, probably due to the fact that I've spent the better part of the last twenty years trying to forget everything that happened in high school.

OK, maybe not everything. I'll never forget the time my locker-mate brought a pistol to school with the intention of shooting his girlfriend. After he was caught walking around with the gun (before he could shoot anyone) the police wanted to search our locker for more evidence.

I didn't have anything to worry about, other than the possibility of them finding some cheesy notes I was writing to a girl I liked. I guess my biggest fear would have been going to get some books and finding the cops hanging around the locker, passing the notes among themselves and laughing, and maybe the principal calling an assembly to read them aloud to the entire student body. (There's a high-school teen-crush movie scene in there somewhere, I'm sure.)

I'll also remember high-school as the time when I realized that money is relative. If you're at the mall with friends and one of them is buying a pair of shoes but comes up two dollars short, you're happy to help them make up the difference. However, if you're eating in the school cafeteria, where you could get a healthy lunch consisting of a Dr. Pepper and a bag of Funyuns for $1.50, someone asking to borrow two dollars was a preposterous request, usually met with a much deserved laugh in the face.

I went to high school in the mid to late 1980s so this was the time period in which most of the girls wore their bangs high, sticking straight up, a virtual wall of hair and hair-spray. The good news is that Britney Spears wasn't around yet so there was no chance of idolizing an eccentric blonde female pop star with a questionable private life. Well, other than Madonna.

Many of the guys I hung out with were, for a while anyway, trying to pull off the Don Johnson Miami Vice look—Ray-Ban sunglasses (or at least cheap knock-offs) and extremely macho pastel colored clothing. Like the girls, we had our own hair fixation: slicked back or spiked up, with several pounds of gel, creating a type of hairstyle that is best described as "crunchy." I eventually abandoned this effort and thought it would be more "original" if I tried to be like Sting. I already had the blond spiked hair, so why not?

That's the way I see those years. I realize there were many other groups of people and they had different styles, but they're not easy to notice when you're always looking in the mirror. And, perspective and selective memory being what they are, others will surely remember those years differently. If you don't believe that, I would respond with this lyric from the 1989 song by The Replacements: "I'll tell you what we could do / You be me for a while / I'll be you."

Speaking of music, it turns out that our senior class song was "Good Times Bad Times" by Led Zeppelin. I had to ask around for this information. This was something else I had blocked out, and with good reason. First, it wasn't a very timely song; it was released in 1969, twenty years before our graduation. Second, I have no idea what the following lyric has to do with high school: "When my woman left home / With a brown eyed man / Well, I still don't seem to care."

Maybe I'm being too critical (Who, me?) but I think a better song would have been Howard Jones's "Things Can Only Get Better," even if that wasn't true. But I would have picked it not only for great lines like "We're not scared to lose it all," "A thousand skeptic hands / Won't keep us from the things we plan," and "Do you feel scared, I do / But I won't stop and falter," but also because the song contains this powerful message: "Whoa whoa whoa oh oh oh whoa oh oh." Or something like that, anyway.

I'll also remember all the times I was told that I daydreamed too much. "Daydreaming" is pejorative for "thinking," and very few teachers wanted any of that going on in the classroom. Much of that "daydreaming" led to quite a bit of writing, which I never shared with anyone. I was told on many occasions that because I was looking out the window or writing in a notebook that had nothing to do with the class, I was wasting time.

I now know they were wrong. It was the beginning of a discovery: I wanted to write. Whether or not I did it well was beside the point. It was the one thing that made me happy; the one thing I wanted to do; the one thing I was meant to do. And that discovery is really what I'll remember about high school.