The Blork Blog

I haven’t seen or spoken to anyone from my elementary school in over 25 years. Even high school seems more like a genetic memory than something from real life. Time and distance, when mixed, make a potent elixir that soothes raw wounds and rounds off sharp edges. It can also dilute and drain off the pleasant memories, in effect creating a deep and seemingly uncrossable chasm between then and now.

Then along comes Facebook, and somebody throws your grade six class photo up there. In a matter of seconds it all comes back, or at least some of it. Happily, it’s all pretty much good, because life was ignorantly blissful when I was eleven years old.

Although most of the kids were already tagged with their names when I saw the photo, I barely needed the help. Very distinct and clear memories of all but maybe three of those kids quickly rushed out of the vault and bored their way to the front of my consciousness.

I can tell you at least three anecdotes about just about every kid in this photo. For example, that’s Jimmy R. in the blue shirt, second from the left in the front row. One evening a couple of years after this picture was taken, Jimmy was at home laying on the sofa watching television when a car came crashing through the wall. Fortunately he wasn’t hurt, but the impact knocked the sofa – with him on it – into the middle of the room. Then there’s Gordie M., also in the front row. Gordie loved to stick pencils in his mouth and nibble on the pink erasers. I remember staring at him in grade five as he nibbled away like a squirrel with a peanut.

Third from the left in the third row is Dawn S., who I think is the first girl to invite me to her house for a birthday party. That was probably in grade five. On the wall in her kitchen was the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes rooster, as if it had been carefully cut out and re-assembled, piece by piece. It was a revelation to me – it was the first time I had ever noticed how separate two-dimensional solid colored pieces can come together to form an image (terrible art class mosaics notwithstanding). I spent the next fifteen years searching for a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in which the rooster was fully visible and not partially obscured behind the cereal bowl or a flash advertising something free inside. I never found one, and my walls remained rooster free. Only much later did it occur to me that perhaps the rooster hadn’t been cut from the box, that maybe it was made up of stickers or pre-cut pieces given away as some kind of promotion.

In the middle of the second row is Shirley M., who lived right next door to the school. As in, right next door. You could stand in a certain part of the schoolyard and be closer to Shirley’s kitchen than to the school itself. On a warm day when the windows were open you could turn your head and talk to Shirley’s mother without even raising your voice. That just wasn’t right. I couldn’t wrap my little head around the idea that anyone could live so close to school. This was even worse than Kevin M. (front row, middle), who lived across the street. Shirley lived so close it was as if she lived in the school. That, to me, was as weird as living in the mall, or in the parking lot of the KFC.

Then there were the crushes. I had unbearable crushes on at least six of these girls, although most of them didn’t kick in until a couple of years after this photo was taken. (Boy, do things change when girls start to sprout.) But my first ever crush is here in this picture. As this is grade six, that means I’d already been tortured by that crush for a full year already. (It lasted until about grade ten.) To this day I have not said one word to that girl, nor has she ever spoken to me. That’s the way things were in my shame-based upbringing – the more you liked a girl the more you avoided her and pretended to hate her. Fortunately I outgrew that phase, but I think I was in my late 30s by then.