Memory Lapse (High School)

I found myself in one of those situations where I was feeling disgruntled and simultaneously appalled that I was feeling that way. Does that happen to you?

A high school buddy "friended" me on FaceBook and his profile picture showed someone I didn't really recognize. I was vaguely offended that this person had "gone on" with his life and visibly aged – that they didn't fit into the mold or the image I still held of him. At the same time, it was cool to see that he'd turned out totally different than I expected and that he seemed super happy. Really, this was a minor player in my high school life (and never a romantic interest). It's akin to the feeling I have when my cousins (who were 2 when I met them) started driving, or graduated high school or (gasp) got married. It's jarring and elating all at once.

So it got me thinking specifically about high school. I HATED high school. Or, more specifically I HATED Greeley. I've basically blocked a lot of that experience from my mind, I think. For example, in the last few months the following events came up:

• A friend says I wrote letters to him one summer that he spent out of state. While writing letters to an acquaintance that is out of state is definitely something I would've done as a teenager, I had no recollection of this until he produced the letters.
  
• Another friend emailed me that "every time I hear Pour Some Sugar On Me by Def Leppard, I think of sitting on your kitchen floor and singing that at the top of our lungs". I can totally see us doing this – because we were
  HOT (so hot), Sticky Sweet! From [our] heads to [our] feet! Yeah!
  But again, I have absolutely no recollection of it.
  
• I found this picture of me on FaceBook:
  

  
  
  

Don't I look like I'm happy and carefree and obnoxious? Even though they seem totally in character with how I remember myself during that time, I just don't remember those moments. I do, however, remember just about everything since the minute I left Greeley.

There were certainly some good things that came of my time in Greeley (my best friend to this day, my brother and I learned to drive, my parents were the happiest I'd seen them in a while, I learned how to survive in "typical America", etc.) but I counted the minutes until I could leave.

I moved to college in the fall of 1988 and spent the next year coming back to Greeley on the occasional weekend to visit my mom and brother. When my dad came back from his remote tour and the family moved to New York State, I gave Greeley the double-bird in the rearview mirror and avoided it for the next several years.

I remember the first time I was asked to go back and do something fun with a friend. I really didn't want to, but it was important to her so eventually I said I'd go. She drove. When we got to the old section of town, my body had a physical reaction – my throat closed up, I gulped for air and hyper ventilated. But it largely turned out to be anticlimactic. So I got to thinking maybe it was really just my issue. In fact many of my high school buddies still lived there – and were raising their families there.

There are some obvious superficial reasons that I disliked Greeley almost immediately when we moved there:

• I was in High School in Las Vegas. But in Greeley, 9^th grade was still Jr. High. (Huge insult at 14!)
  
• In Las Vegas I had 6 classes – including computers!!!
  
• In Greeley I had to take 7 classes AND they didn't have a computer class (what sort of backwards place was this to not have computers in the mid-1980s?!?). So I had to pick 2 classes to join mid-semester that I didn't think I would fail. So I took Home Ec (my male counselor seemed to think I could handle that) and French 2 (since I was in French 3 by the time we left Germany, I figured this was safe, plus the counselor wouldn't let me go higher than that without some sort of testing despite what my transcript said).
  
• Everyone in Greeley had lived there for a lifetime. This was unfathomable to me. I actually had someone tell me "don't talk to him; he wet his pants in the 3^rd grade". So, apparently a single mistake in an entire lifetime would never be forgiven AND I was lacking a lifetime of history which would tell them who I "really" was. This was completely foreign to a kid that moved every 2 years on average.
  

And a couple reasons I was slow to let go of my prejudice:

• I got to read Romeo and Juliet for the 3^rd time (and in my third school).  Lucky me - but my essay was easy to "write"...
  
• I took all the math (my favorite subject) my school even offered by the end of my junior year, but if I'd lived on the "better" side of town I could've gone to a high school that offered Calculus.
  
• My Speech/Semantics teacher thought it was appropriate to let 2 students use the PA-system for their project. These two students had the principal announce that there had just been a shooting in the front drive and that the school was on lock-down. They used the next 10 minutes to observe our communication and then presented on "the language of duress" or some nonsense. Note that this is a good decade+ before Columbine. Nevermind that I'd actually lived through something similar when we were overseas (but with unknown foreign terrorists to blame, not American teenagers). After class I told the teacher about that incident and that I sincerely hoped she lost her job. I didn't follow through on going to the principal though – after a little reflection he was also without the ability to judge appropriateness (since he was a participant).
  

There were some other less obvious reasons:

• A girlfriend of mine was raped by one of her sister's friends at a party her older sister threw when the parents were out of town.
  
• Another girlfriend was raped while walking home from cheerleading practice.
  
• Another friend's mom got a restraining order against her dad when they moved out. Eventually my friend and her mom just left town in the middle of the night with no forwarding address. We did hear from them later…but several months later.
  
• One of my girlfriends had her mom and dad start charging her rent the day she turned 18. This was mid-way through our senior year. Who does that?
  

I'm not saying these things don't happen. I think one of my biggest issues with Greeley is that it was billed as "an all-American town – the perfect place to raise a family". It's not like a "big city" where everyone universally accepts that "bad things" happen.

Beneath the lovely veneer Greeley was insidious and creepy. I always get the image of the witch in Snow White when I think about this… At this point, Greeley's grown enough that its creepiness would be expected, in my unsolicited opinion. Or maybe it's just me – and my trite coming-of-age experience.