the last day of school
now playing: sarah harmer, "capsized"
so something odd is definitely in the air around me right now.
in the past 24 hours or so, i've had three different people from drastically different parts of my life hunt me down and tell me that they've been thinking about me lately for reasons that they can't explain and that they were wondering how i was doing....one an old friend from an old job, one a former music industry friend, and one a buddy of mine from high school that i thought i'd never hear from again...
all people that i'm happy to have thinking about me, to be certain - although i wonder if i'm giving off some sort of pity signal that's coming up on the radar of people whom i've been estranged from...what with circumstances being what they are and all.
wendy was quick to point out that it's possibly a result of doing some repair work on my karma...maybe. i don't know.
what i do know is that i haven't been this happy to see a friday show up in a long time.
i've been having these "last day of school" flashbacks today...it's starting to freak me out a little bit, in fact. i walked across the street to get a salad for lunch and everything about this day feels like the last day of school...the breeze, the temperature, the sunshine - i feel like i did when i was fifteen, sixteen years old, walking down the hallways of the high school with all the locker doors thrown open, waiting for the buses to show up to take us all home for the last time for a while.
i have one very vivid memory that has the last day of school attached to it...i was on the bus, on the way home, and while i don't remember who i was sitting with, i remember that william ayers (the oldest of the infamous ayers clan) was sitting across the aisle. the ayers kids came from a family that would've made loretta lynn look like paris hilton by contrast - they had about as little as a family can have and still continue to exist. i mean dirt poor. they got on the school bus after me, and i can still remember seeing them lined up next to the road, waiting for the bus...they used to line up by height, and every time i see those wooden, hand painted figures that fit inside one another in descending height order, i think of the ayers kids. there was william (the oldest), jerry, alton (whose hair was always meticulously combed in the front, but descended into chaos from the back of his head all the way forward to the precise point on the top of his head where the mirror ceased to work), rosanna and theresa (who became pregnant early in high school - seriously, early, and was rumored to have slept with her brother jerry to have ended up in that position).
anyway, it was williams' senior year, and he was taking his last bus ride home, and the kid sitting next to me said to him that he was lucky, because he never had to go back to school again.
william looked at the kid and said, "lucky my ass. just wait 'til you're a senior. you'll wish you were back in first grade."
those words hit me like a ton of bricks...he was right. and i completely understood why.
in junior high, my social studies teacher, mr. murphy, went around the classroom once and asked everyone in the room what they were going to do when they grew up. he got what was probably the average litany of answers from most of the kids...all but one, anyway. when he got to ricky moore, ricky skipped all the hyperbole and innuendo and cut straight to the chase: "i'm gonna hang sheetrock."
the whole classroom laughed when he said that, but i'll bet - in retrospect - he very well might be the only student in that classroom who called it right.
so....i guess to convey how it was that i understood what william ayers was telling me, you'd have to have some degree of familiarity with where i come from, i guess...and what graduating from high school means to most kids in savannah, tennessee. see, for most of the kids i went to school with, college wasn't an option. it just wasn't part of their reality. kids where i'm from get out of high school and go to work. there's no putting off reality for four years while they head off to party at college - it's just not in the cards for them. and william ayers knew that better than any of us did, because he was staring his inevitable fate right in the face.
that twenty seconds or so of conversation cast a bittersweet pall over my entire senior year. everything i did that year was colored by the knowledge that my academic career there would be over before i knew it.
rickey daniels, the soundman for the band i played in through high school, dropped me off at school one morning in his little yellow MG convertible, and looked at me wistfully and said, "damn, tom....you know you'll never be around this much pussy again in your life, right?"
it was 1983...and i was riding to school with my very own, personal Uncle Rico.
everything i did that year carried a sense of melancholy with it...i decided that i was going to involve myself in things, so i signed up for chorus and sang in the chorus for the first time. i would have written for the school newspaper, but my average in english wasn't high enough (which disappointed mrs. roe a great deal...she really wanted me on the paper, for some reason), and i did a lot of other things that i probably never would have done if it weren't for that one sentence, uttered by a poverty-stricken kid on a bus i happened to be on some years before.
so something odd is definitely in the air around me right now.
in the past 24 hours or so, i've had three different people from drastically different parts of my life hunt me down and tell me that they've been thinking about me lately for reasons that they can't explain and that they were wondering how i was doing....one an old friend from an old job, one a former music industry friend, and one a buddy of mine from high school that i thought i'd never hear from again...
all people that i'm happy to have thinking about me, to be certain - although i wonder if i'm giving off some sort of pity signal that's coming up on the radar of people whom i've been estranged from...what with circumstances being what they are and all.
wendy was quick to point out that it's possibly a result of doing some repair work on my karma...maybe. i don't know.
what i do know is that i haven't been this happy to see a friday show up in a long time.
i've been having these "last day of school" flashbacks today...it's starting to freak me out a little bit, in fact. i walked across the street to get a salad for lunch and everything about this day feels like the last day of school...the breeze, the temperature, the sunshine - i feel like i did when i was fifteen, sixteen years old, walking down the hallways of the high school with all the locker doors thrown open, waiting for the buses to show up to take us all home for the last time for a while.
i have one very vivid memory that has the last day of school attached to it...i was on the bus, on the way home, and while i don't remember who i was sitting with, i remember that william ayers (the oldest of the infamous ayers clan) was sitting across the aisle. the ayers kids came from a family that would've made loretta lynn look like paris hilton by contrast - they had about as little as a family can have and still continue to exist. i mean dirt poor. they got on the school bus after me, and i can still remember seeing them lined up next to the road, waiting for the bus...they used to line up by height, and every time i see those wooden, hand painted figures that fit inside one another in descending height order, i think of the ayers kids. there was william (the oldest), jerry, alton (whose hair was always meticulously combed in the front, but descended into chaos from the back of his head all the way forward to the precise point on the top of his head where the mirror ceased to work), rosanna and theresa (who became pregnant early in high school - seriously, early, and was rumored to have slept with her brother jerry to have ended up in that position).
anyway, it was williams' senior year, and he was taking his last bus ride home, and the kid sitting next to me said to him that he was lucky, because he never had to go back to school again.
william looked at the kid and said, "lucky my ass. just wait 'til you're a senior. you'll wish you were back in first grade."
those words hit me like a ton of bricks...he was right. and i completely understood why.
in junior high, my social studies teacher, mr. murphy, went around the classroom once and asked everyone in the room what they were going to do when they grew up. he got what was probably the average litany of answers from most of the kids...all but one, anyway. when he got to ricky moore, ricky skipped all the hyperbole and innuendo and cut straight to the chase: "i'm gonna hang sheetrock."
the whole classroom laughed when he said that, but i'll bet - in retrospect - he very well might be the only student in that classroom who called it right.
so....i guess to convey how it was that i understood what william ayers was telling me, you'd have to have some degree of familiarity with where i come from, i guess...and what graduating from high school means to most kids in savannah, tennessee. see, for most of the kids i went to school with, college wasn't an option. it just wasn't part of their reality. kids where i'm from get out of high school and go to work. there's no putting off reality for four years while they head off to party at college - it's just not in the cards for them. and william ayers knew that better than any of us did, because he was staring his inevitable fate right in the face.
that twenty seconds or so of conversation cast a bittersweet pall over my entire senior year. everything i did that year was colored by the knowledge that my academic career there would be over before i knew it.
rickey daniels, the soundman for the band i played in through high school, dropped me off at school one morning in his little yellow MG convertible, and looked at me wistfully and said, "damn, tom....you know you'll never be around this much pussy again in your life, right?"
it was 1983...and i was riding to school with my very own, personal Uncle Rico.
everything i did that year carried a sense of melancholy with it...i decided that i was going to involve myself in things, so i signed up for chorus and sang in the chorus for the first time. i would have written for the school newspaper, but my average in english wasn't high enough (which disappointed mrs. roe a great deal...she really wanted me on the paper, for some reason), and i did a lot of other things that i probably never would have done if it weren't for that one sentence, uttered by a poverty-stricken kid on a bus i happened to be on some years before.
posted by tom at 13:21
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