I Am Not Over High School

My high school’s class of 1965 is planning a 50-year reunion. Every day or two I receive an email that says there are new pictures on the web page, new classmates signed up, or there is new information about the reunion, which is a year away.

The page encourages us to contact other classmates and have them sign in to the page, so they can be kept updated, too. Bill, the webpage designer, wrote me a personal email asking me to get in touch with the people I listed as my closest friends when I was in school.

I have only one friend I’ve kept since high school, my dear friend Shane. Shane is an all-around wonderful person, and we’ve known each other through a lifetime of joys and woes.

I saw my high school friend Susan at our 10-year reunion. She sat next to me at dinner drinking wine and when her glass was empty she reached over and grabbed my glass of wine and drained it. I am a non-drinker, but that isn’t the point, is it? Haven’t seen her since.

Another friend, Jane, dropped me after she went to Stanford. Her parents had always discouraged her friendship with me. They thought farmers were stupid. They ran a large nursery operation and did not like to be classed with people who grew fruits and vegetables. I was the daughter of farmers and was going to a state college. After Jane got to Stanford, she dispensed with our friendship. I have to think that, as they say, she was not that into me, and it isn’t as if she was any more shallow than I was. I had ditched friends during the cut and thrust of the high school years.

Jane was dating another Stanford student that fall after high school graduation, a guy she told me was predicted to be “the next John Steinbeck.” I never heard from her again, and I’m still waiting to hear about that Steinbeck guy.
The people who are planning the reunion are the same people who were top of the heap in high school – you know, the popular kids. You always want to think those kids peaked in high school, but they didn’t. They went on to have fairly successful lives and don’t seem to be any more than conventionally unhappy.

Dang.

Looking back, I realize I was one of the choir nerds, and I hung out with the choir singers and the band members, and (I realize now) the gay boys. Musicians, writers, artists, and oddballs, those were my people.

My friends had pretensions to intellectualism. It’s hard to be an intellectual in high school. You don’t have the life experience to develop a truly jaded, sardonic point of view. A high school cynic is a relatively shallow vessel, or was in those days, but I listened to them with awe. I thought they were so smart.

One thing where we were all on the same page: we all loved to read “Peanuts” cartoon collections. That was cool for some reason.

I had crushes on unattainable boys. There was a boy I followed around like a puppy the first two years of high school, and he told me I was his best friend and he told me all about his many, many girlfriends. I was hoping to get moved into the rotation, but it never happened. Once he asked me to knit him an emerald green fuzzy sweater, and looking back, that should have tipped me off, but it didn’t.

He died in 1994. May he, and all the others who passed in those plague years, and all the other classmates who died in various ways – Vietnam, car wrecks, cancer, the general attrition of life - rest in peace.

I’m older and wiser now, with a longer perspective and the accumulated knowledge from years of hard knocks. I have a lot of compassion for all those kids, the in crowd and jocks and nerds and outcasts and regular kids alike. We were trying on adult life, and it didn’t fit too well yet. It was an exciting, tender time.

Don’t imagine I think I’m above it all. Roaming over my memories, the failures, mistakes, rejections, and awkwardness rise to hurt again. Ugh. I am not over high school. Those feelings ache like a bone that was broken long ago, and never healed quite right. But at least I got Shane out of it.