Month: July 2007

Looking at the grade six class photo that I posted last week is making me remember all sorts of stories from back then. For example, one day in grade seven, a kid named Paul and I were sitting together in the school library flipping through National Geographic magazines. Lesser memoirists would take pains to describe how we were far less interested in geography than in the schmorgasbord of bronze-skinned topless ladies that the magazine so generously provided. I will spare you that notation, even though it is entirely true.

At one point I turned the page and found an ad for the latest model of Saab, which to me was the most ridiculous looking car I’d ever seen. Paul, however, launched into a long oration about his love of the Saab, and how he had always known that one day he would own one.

I thought that was odd for a few different reasons. First of all, where we lived people didn’t have cars like that. All we had were beat up Chevrolets and Pontiacs and the occasional dented Datsun. I had seen a Lincoln Continental one time, and that was quite an occasion as it had hardly any rust. So how and why would Paul end up with a Saab?

The other problem was that we were only 12 years old. In order to own a car – especially an odd foreign car that was likely very expensive – you had to be old. Like at least 25 or something. And it was going to be 20 or 30 years before any of us turned 25. By then there wouldn’t even be Saabs. Heck, there wouldn’t even be cars. People would move around in personal helicopters and space ships and stuff like that. (No, really. I really thought like that.)

A year or so later, Paul developed a crush on a girl. We’ll call her S. I had a crush on S. too, but it never occured to me that Paul and I were now rivals. After all, I had crushes on dozens of girls by then, and given the shame-based upbringing I mentioned earlier, that kept me mighty busy avoiding those girls. I assumed Paul would be busy avoiding them too.

But one day Paul got our mutual friend George to ask S. out on a date on his behalf. Yes, you read that right – Paul asked George to ask S. to go on a date with Paul. That’s a bit unusual, and it’s not the way to go about asking a girl for a date. I know that now, and I knew it then. But I only knew it then because the topic had recently been covered in an Archie comic. So I made it a point to laugh at Paul and to make fun of him, especially when S. turned down his George-brokered request.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that Paul, even with his dubious methods, was way ahead of me. After all, at least he had the cajones to ask her out, regardless of the method. In the meantime I just scowled and refused to say anything to her. You can imagine how far that got me.

I don’t know if Paul ever got his Saab, but I know that I never got my helicopter nor my spaceship. Fortunately, I eventually learned to stop scowling at the girls I liked and sometimes even managed to talk to them.

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.