LIfe’s sticky note
Almost a week since the big closing. You remember; I mentioned this several times over the last while. No? It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t there for the show, but I have enjoyed every minute, vicariously. Maybe not the basketball game (that never actually took place), but the rest. No fries from the cafeteria, what with the change to a healthier lifestyle, but there was cake.
There’s the thing. Although I’m four decades removed from the treadmill of class, locker, class, locker, bus (some days), I remember so much of what happened. Not in a coherent “this and then that” way, but I was there. And I spent five very impressionable years. As did so many others. We all seem to have memories of high school. Our own version of the “foreign wars”. The “us vs them”, the “me against the world” existence.
After checking with a number of colleagues (who really wondered what I really wanted to know), it turns out that elementary school has been wiped from the collective memory. Most remember the name of the school. Some remember the teacher in a particular grade. But on the big scale, even deep hypnosis can’t recover what happened in Grade Four. Contrast that with the next chapter.
Be it as a Grade Niner, or whatever your jurisdiction used as the name of your particular herd, the memories of that locker, that desk, that particular person in the next row all get carried forward. Baggage or character shaping. Four years or longer. The only part of life that seems to mark more deeply is military service (the real foreign wars). I never wore khaki, but I can imagine.
To sum up, high school is like a “sticky” post on a website.
