A lot of things are still the same. There are the same old lockers, blue for freshmen and juniors and red for sophomores and seniors, the same random purple overflow lockers, even most of the same teachers. There are some new teachers, however, and now two full years of students I've never in my life met. These freshmen and sophomores, entirely foreign to me, sparked some vague memories of those years in my own life, years of thinking that an hour of homework a night was "so much work" and years where the future was only a vague and nebulous thing, where I couldn't tell you where I wanted to go to college because I'd never honestly never even thought about it. Now I'm a third of the way through college, still looking at the future with vague eyes, but no longer unable to imagine how things could go.
Yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I read the journals I kept in fits and starts from the middle of fifth grade through my freshman year of high school. In fifth grade I was consumed with my horrible teachers, and then the journal skips ahead to the end of sixth grade, where exactly the opposite had occurred and I had found myself in a deliriously happy state of actually enjoying a lot about school. In seventh grade the tone changed again, became brooding and uncertain and deeply insecure about what I considered weird, namely the fact that I actually enjoyed many things about school, which was not a cool thing to do in seventh grade. By eighth grade the brooding and self-instigated angst was gone, but the insecurity and confusion was back. Freshman year was just a long stream of disappointments with school and struggling to find my place in the chaos of high school, a new social and academic scene.
I would write pages in middle school detailing the funny things that had happened, the witty banter I had observed, how so-and-so had said such-and-such in this-or-that class and it had made everyone, including teachers, laugh. I also would note the times my middle school French teacher or my seventh grade math teacher had said something dumb, had tried to rat the class out without success, etc. Always my desire, as I wrote again and again, was to record these random anecdotes, which came in great bursts followed by weeks of no writing, so that I would "never, ever forget them." What's funny is that when I reread these journals yesterday, I remembered so many things so clearly, and many of the funny things recorded still made me laugh, remembering perhaps the sheer joy I had experienced laughing at them when they originally occurred.
For instance, one of the times I detailed during my eighth grade year (probably the year with the most journal pages devoted to it, the year when everything was the headiest and most palpably entertaining and frightening all at once) involved the first snowfall and a bizarre occurrence where the chairs in the classroom would make a godawful squelching noise every time anyone so much as shifted in them. I wrote the following, word for word:
"Snow!" I cried gleefully when I entered literature. "It's SNOWING!" And I laughed and twirled in a circle. "Can we please go outside in it?"
"No," [my teacher] laughed. "Besides, you already were in it." People continued to beg and beg, and yet she remained as adamant as [my homeroom teacher].
We had to take spelling and vocab tests as well, and there was a slight problem with the chairs. Everytime anyone so much as shifted his/her weight in a chair, it would give a great squeaking sound. [Troublemaking kid] and that crew soon were moving on purpose, causing [teacher] to grumble that the next person to squeak in his or her chair would get a detention.
Moments later, I sighed and shifted my weight--causing my chair to squeak. "Oh my gosh!" I said frantically as [teacher] whirled around to glare at me. "That was accidental, I swear." She rolled her eyes at me, but thankfully did not fill out a detention slip.
It was very amusing, therefore, to watch [teacher] wince every time a chair squeaked "on accident." She was walking behind me when my own chair squeaked, and when I looked up at her to see her reaction, she just started laughing.
It goes on for several more pages, detailing the troublemaking kid being forced to sit in the corner (an extremely common and entertaining occurrence in this class) and a highly entertaining episode from my science class the next period when a student teacher accidentally set off a model volcano, spraying baking soda and vinegar everywhere. Why I journaled such random things at that time in my life remains a mystery to me, but it does detail the depth to which I engaged with even mundane things then. It also shows the depth to which I was willing to subconsciously alter these events; I'm quite sure that I never ran into class and twirled around in a circle, as I wrote that I did, but my natural tendency to over-elaborate, to need to tell entertaining things, led me to include that (probably fictitious) detail. Similarly, I'm sure the dialogue had that flavor, maybe even most of those phrases, but probably not that exact wording (although my memory for things that entertain me was then, and is still now, very exact).
Nonetheless, when reading, I remembered all these anecdotes, as though from a good book I had once read and forgotten that I had done so. I laughed, a lot. They are good stories, even entertaining ones, genuinely funny and well-captured in places, and I'm glad I wrote them down. I also remember, however, rereading them in the depths of my freshman year, when nothing seemed that right, that natural, that funny anymore and wishing, so deeply, to relive that happiness, again and again. I have not journaled with that intensity, that verve and flair for capturing all the nuances of a scene, since my eighth grade year, and even in the happiest times of high school I never felt that simply happy, that entertained by the goings-on of classrooms, again. Many foolish things bothered my thirteen-year-old mind alongside these anecdotes of teachers and classmates, but I was always so glad to be alive, joyously involved in even the miserable parts of life.
When I was driving up to the high school today, I passed the skating rink that's situated sort of in the middle of the mass of buildings that is the high school, the athletic fields, the intermediate (grades 3-5) school, a playground, and the middle school. It's been in the 50s lately here, I guess, and the rink was full of water, waiting to freeze but at that moment still as liquid as the ocean. I remembered ice skating there many, many times throughout my youth, everything from skating lessons in 3rd or 4th grade to skating that one time right before midterms with my gym class my senior year of high school. And almost simultaneously, if such a thing is possible, I remembered ice skating on the Midway Plaisance at school, not even two weeks ago, with our house's four-year-old and her father, one of our resident heads (house parents, basically) and then ice-skating with the same bunch of people downtown a few days later at Millennium Park as the snow fell, light and easy, as pretty as a postcard. My New England hometown has not a drop of snow, but my industrialized adoptive city was as beautiful as anything I've ever seen that evening, swirling in the snow to swing music as city lights winked all around.
I remember these scenes, these Chicago scenes, clearly, remember the swoosh of skates and the laughter of my companions and the way I pictured myself, so suddenly, too easily, doing all that wrapped in long skirts or something, a silly antebellum Southern belle or maybe like some rich man's daughter in Little Women. Utterly unrelated to any other thought out there, of course, but a leap of associative imagination and happiness not felt in a long, long time, not felt since the days when I wanted to "never, ever forget" how happy my literature teacher's loving snark or my homeroom teacher's silly reminiscences made me. I'm not thirteen again, thankfully, but I think some of that lust for life, that joy just in the present moment, has come back to me in the past few months.
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