When I first started getting back in touch with my schoolmates a few years ago, my two dear friends Andrea Lingenfelter and Davi Grossman were two of the first to pop up. I literally do not recall seeing or talking to them since high school, yet I think I would have recognized them anywhere. These two girls were part of my main circle. Well, actually, I didn’t have a main circle; like a lot of us, I had a several circles that didn’t overlap much… the girls I met in junior high, the people from drama, the writers, the girls from drill team, the neighborhood kids, the kids you got stuck with alphabetically. And so it goes.Anyway, Davi, bless her heart, gives me an order. “Tell me everything that’s been going on with you,” she says right away in our Yahoo group. She gives me a topic: “Start with: After graduation….”
Oh boy. Well, if I’m not slow, I’m nothing; here it is.
After graduation, I was one of the last ones to walk over to the gym and exchange my cap and gown for my real diploma. No, folks, they didn’t make us strip for our final credits. Back in 1977, high school graduation gowns were actually lined, pleated, and hemmed; and our caps were made of something sturdier than cardboard. They weren’t the just-barely-basted-together-in-a-third-world-sweatshop things you younger grads have to actually purchase and attempt to iron. Oh and then, your mom carefully stows it all away after the ceremony, only later to find that flimsy costume had been reduced to a moth-bitten wad of tissue-like textile gathering dust in the back of your old closet since you moved out to follow Depeche Mode around the world with a pharmaceutical rep you met in the lobby of your podiatrist.
Um, where was I? Oh yeah, our graduation get-ups were saved by the school year after year and sanitized (or so they told us) for the next graduating class, gold for the girls, green for the boys. To make sure that we returned our gear, we were handed an empty diploma binder during the graduation ceremony; and did not receive our actual diplomas until we had checked in our borrowed outfits away from the public eye. So, like I said, I was one of the last to make my way over to the gym and after I made my exchange I ran into the Dean of Students, I think his name was Bill Cooper; I could be wrong, but let’s pretend that’s right. Mr. Cooper was about to make me cry for the second time.
The first time was earlier our senior year. You see, I didn’t know it, but I had a perfect storm of sleep disorders; and I was late to school a lot. By “a lot,” I mean “nearly every day”; and I had racked up quite a few detention hours. So, I got a slip to report to Mr. Cooper’s office and he starts talking to me about how much detention I’ve got and how I wasn’t getting it done and thought for sure he was going to suspend me and so I just started to cry like only a teenage girl can. This really threw him for a loop. He stood up and patted me on the shoulder; then he went back behind his desk and opened the drawer and offered me a Lifesaver. “Come on,” he pleaded, “I was just going to tell you that you need to start doing it or you’ll run out of time.” I was relieved, but was still crying when he pushed me out the door into the hallway. I was mortified, but he whispered to me that it was good for his reputation, to be seen making students cry.
So anyway, after graduation, I saw Mr. Cooper in the gym and walked over to give him a hug goodbye. After all, later he had told me that he didn’t care about the detention, to just make sure I got enough credits to graduate. Well, there I went crying again. In that moment, I realized how much everything was about to change. I mean, it’s not like my life had been all happy-go-lucky up until that point, but it was definitely about to change.
But not quite yet.
