Thirty Years Gone
Back at the Bicentennial I left behind that supposedly experientially iconic condition: High School. “Supposedly,” because it’s really only in certain boys’ lit and Hollywood output that it marks some magical coming-of-age transition, whereas real life isn’t often like that at all. Sure, some – and no small number – have high school as the end of schooling and thus their entry into adult life, but it’s reasonable to say that their passage will be more often fraught than not and of no less duration than for those going on to university and then moving into family and jobs and all such responsibility therein entailed. What’s still remarkable to me, however, is that anyone would bother me with an invitation to attend a reunion. The fact that I live now in Australia has nothing to do with my surprise, but that I had only a few friends, none of whom appear on the reunion committee list, and, if generally regarded at all, was probably generally regarded as a social waste of time, much as I saw my classmates, for that matter. Sure, they’re all “different” now, as am I, as the Counsellor pointed out in our email correspondence on the matter, but I’d contend that we’re also still likely to be very much the same people, carrying some of the same attitudes and behaviors we were forming then. High school was a trial, mostly, a torturous endurance test with just enough educational benefit to keep me from losing interest altogether. Once I left, I pretty much never saw or heard from any of the other 400+ classmates again, and have only ever occasionally wondered as to the fate of any of them. I’m certainly even less interested now. I have nothing in particular against the school I attended, the students, or even any of the teachers, or at least not much in that last category –some of them were at least trying to keep me and everyone else interested and were themselves fairly passionate about what they were teaching. Yes, there were some I’d rather not have had to contend with, but that’s true of people in my adult life since, so maybe it was good training. If nothing else, none of them left any scars as such, and the others left some worthwhile datum or another. And although I was graduated from one high school, my secondary education started at another institution, a boarding school I was asked to leave after one year, and they’re the ones with whom I credit the skills that carried me through a post-graduate tertiary degree. The study habits inculcated in me there, whether in rote-learning exercises or for more analytical applications, were trialled through more intensive testing than I’d spend the next three years having to contend with, and both the habits and the test-taking skills have proven their worth ever since. And while I never later met or even much thought of any of those classmates either, it’s less of a surprise, since they were drawn from a much broader geographic area than my graduating high school class, and if any of them successfully made it through the four years and the intended tertiary program thereafter, would have likely been spread even further yet (although not as far as this end of the earth). Few of them would have, and many would not be looking back there now, but whether the one school or the other, they can keep it.