With it open to all classes, I might actually see a couple of Velt's ex-students who are willing to let "by-gones be by-gones"
Contributed By:Dorothy Nevils
Those were the days!
This weekend Gary will be swarming with Roosevelt alumni coming in for the all-class reunion, kind of like the halls a few years back, but the teachers won’t be yelling at them, beckoning to them, or pulling their classrooms shut just before they scurry into their classes. No, it’ll be a different scene this time, and teachers will be a bit scarce.
I spent a large part of yesterday messaging one of my former students, and let him talk … Can you really call it “talk” if neither of us actually said a word? Messaging as a verb still seems a bit off, as does so much of today’s speech. Anyway, I let him talk me into halfway promising I’d show up at the picnic. With it open to all classes, I might actually see a couple of ex-students who are willing to let “by-gones be by-gones.”
I just attended my high school reunion over the Labor Day weekend, it, too, an all-school affair; but this one included the grade school, too. Unlike the Velt, Douglass was a “tee-niny” school with 27 students in the graduating class. However, some experiences are carbon copies. After all, teens are teens; and although each generation of teens know that no other generation was anything like theirs, that’s a proverbial lie that makes its rounds as many time as teen are teens.
Everybody that went to high school knows what it was like. High school was the time when you just wanted to die… at least twice a semester, but you never could get up the nerve to do it. Something happened that you just knew would follow you to the grave. Maybe that’s why you couldn’t die – Kids would be talking about that day, on that day… and you’d just have to lie there powerless.
For instance, you go to your locker after school. Your friends are there. You’re laughing and joking, and you discover that the one person that everyone avoids, that nobody wants to be seen with has a locker next to yours! That’s bad enough… but the door swings open, and your picture – blown up, of course – is smiling at everyone!
Something almost as humiliating happened to me. I’d practically drool when a brainiac a grade above me just walked… anywhere! I managed to get enough money to buy a dozen pencils that proclaimed my love: Dorothy loves John. I secreted them for the longest… until one of my “friends” “bust me out!”
Girls are maternal, beginning, probably, in high school. They have the urge to rescue that “poor little foundling. Mine was a “dreamy-eyed” boy on the basketball team who never managed to keep up. I guess I took that verse, “Feed my sheep,” too seriously, and I did everything possible to tug him along, even letting my test paper hang a bit over my desk.
This weekend will involve a lot of “looking back.” Kids who swore that, once they got away from particular teachers, they’d never look back actually hug those “witches”…when their hair has turned the same color as theirs was when they spat the word “old.
So, if you show up for your reunion, keep this in mind: If you’ve ever sliced your eyes in the direction of a teacher and seethed, your lower lip as flat and venomous as a rattlesnake’s fang, and hissed, “Oooo… I cain’ stand her!” know this: Some testosterone-high kid is saying the same thing about you!
Story Posted:09/17/2016
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